Would Mr. Science Eat the Chinese Diet?

Abstract

Although science has been central to the history and historiography of the May Fourth Movement, our understanding of how May Fourth concerns influenced scientific discourses of food and eating remain undeveloped. What and how Mr. Science could and should eat were topics of genuine and thorough-going debate among the Chinese public, for whom food was as much a practical necessity for survival as an intellectual vehicle for understanding and grappling with the social, cultural, and economic crisis they perceived in the present.

This essay analyzes two episodes, whose combination reveals the hidden logics of how efforts to historicize Chinese food in the 1930s informed the production of a scientific nutritional policy. First, we unpack these “histories” of Chinese food and its role in the degeneration of the Chinese people. Next, we follow the strands of this scientific storytelling into the thickets of science policy. In this way, we can see the interplay of May Fourth thinking and the practice of science as acts of negotiation between cultural narratives and scientific knowledge. The critical, connective figure was the biochemist Wu Hsien whose scientific credentials and professional standing made it possible for him to speak authoritatively to lay, scientific, and political audiences.

Keywords:

• Nutrition
• diet
• China
• May Fourth
• science

1 Introduction

Science has been central to the history and historiography of the May Fourth Movement, but for the most part, the scholarship on science and the May Fourth movements has focused primarily on the views, attitudes, and debates about science, or what can otherwise be described as “scientism”. While this scholastic focus on the ideology of science has shifted, as more and more scholars have deepened our understanding of both scientists and scientific research during the Republican period (Wu and Fan 2020), the importance of the science of food and eating to China remains an underdeveloped topic (for more on Republican discourses on food, eating, and health, see, eg Fu 2018; Lee 2011; Lee 2015; Lee 2019; Leung and Caldwell 2019; Smith 2018; and Swislocki 2009 and 2011). This scholastic lacuna is curious, because food and eating were clearly understood by Chinese as deeply intertwined with traditional social and political values. It may have been the blood of Lu Xun's blood mantou that evoked all the pernicious, cannibalistic ways in which traditional Chinese culture trapped Chinese people in vicious cycles of ignorance and superstition, but without the mantou, would we have noticed the blood?

What and how Mr. Science could and should eat were topics of genuine and thorough-going debate among the Chinese literate public, for whom food was as much a practical necessity for survival as an intellectual vehicle for understanding and grappling with the social, cultural, and economic crisis they perceived in the present. Talking about food forced a direct confrontation with the integrity and value of pre-existing ideas and practices of Chinese culture and tradition and in the process articulated new imaginaries of change through science by which to understand China's position within increasingly multicultural dimensions of space and time. Longstanding practices such as meat avoidance and “life-nourishing” (yangsheng) practices became prime sites for reflection and contestation, not just about individual health and well-being, but China's place temporally and geographically within world civilization.

This essay will examine two episodes that highlight how Chinese scientists and intellectuals in the 1930s, as heirs of to the May Fourth tradition, sought to historicize Chinese food and how such ruminations informed the production of a scientific nutrition policy. The scientists and intellectuals I follow here were not writing against the immediate backdrop of the events of May 1919, nor were they necessarily eager to foreground politics above their scientific credentials. And yet, the political implications of temporalizing and periodizing Chinese food through the medium of science meant that they too played a role in how May Fourth ideals extended beyond traditional intellectual circles and into everyday embodied practices (Fu 2018: chapters 5 and 7).¹ Indeed, it is by unpacking their “histories” of Chinese food and its role in the degeneration of the Chinese people and then following the strands of this scientific storytelling into the thickets of science policy making that we can begin to see the long-term interplay of May Fourth thinking and the practice of science. The critical figure linking these two episodes was the biochemist and generally acknowledge “founder” of Chinese biochemistry and nutriology, Wu Hsien, whose scientific credentials and professional standing made it possible for him to speak authoritatively to lay, scientific, and political audiences.

The first episode will focus on how Wu Hsien and other Chinese intellectuals used certain forms of historical understanding not just to mark cultural differences, but as “something that itself gives rise to, and bears traces of, diverse civilizational development” (Jenco 2013: 40). Casting Chinese food and eating practices into a world history encompassing a plurality of high civilizations in dynamic interaction deprived and relativized China as the sole source of world civilization. But it also shifted greater stress upon what Charlotte Furth (1983, 12: 325–26) has called “the moral teleology of the historical process and its relative incompleteness at any given temporal stage.” Human moral action could be directed toward food and eating, which were things with a history. Their accounts of Chinese food and eating practices interwove strands of naturalistic scientific language with a new faith in science as a positivistic method of verification-controlling standards of truth about nature and society.

The second episode takes us into the thickets of scientific discourse and its attempt to construct an authoritative idiom by examining how a historicist approach to food was translated into scientific policy. With a focus on the Chinese Medical Association's (CMA) 1938 nutritional guidelines, we see Wu Hsien leading a committee of some of the country's most eminent physicians and scientists who have been tasked with the responsibility of studying mass nutrition and devising dietary recommendations. Their report sought to establish scientific baselines by which to ensure the minimum nutritional health of the Chinese people. Probing its logic and its language demonstrates the complex ways in which the cultural narratives Chinese scientists told about Chinese food and diet shaped scientific knowledge and vice versa. Historicizing Chinese food and eating practices were not merely acts of armchair theorizations. By deliberately creating a dialogue between national and transnational interpretations of dietary fundamentals, they articulated a vision of Chinese particularity within a universal body and thereby evoked distinctively national and salvationist dimensions to the operation of scientific universalism. Theirs was an imperfect attempt to navigate the tensions between a universal body and a Chinese body, but it was also an episode reflecting the entangled and uneasy relations that shaped scientific universalism and scientific nationalism during the Republican period.

2 A Civilizational Model of Food

Theoretical speculation about the history of food and local eating practices could hardly be described as a new topic of investigation in the early twentieth century—there is a long tradition of literati writers ruminating about food—but within the context of Republican China, Chinese food was not necessarily a target of intellectual opprobrium by reform-minded intellectuals (King 2020). Figures such as Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 (1866–1925), Lin Yutang 林語堂 (1895–1976), Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967), Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋 (1903–1987), and Qian Zhongshu 錢鐘書(1910–1998) saw in the long past of Chinese culinary practices a tradition worthy of celebrating and a foundation for a modern China. Sun Yatsen drew upon Chinese dietetics as one of his ten examples illustrating his conviction that China could modernize. China's past had experientially identified nutritious foods and practices that, when properly re-contextualized and explicated by science, could prepare citizens for the work of state-building. Cheap, but excellent health foods, such as orange day lily (Hemerocallis fulva), agaric (Auricularia aruicula (Lex Hook.) Underwood), bean curd, soya sprouts, animal tripe, and pig's blood, were foods known to be nutritious by the Chinese, even if scorned and or ignored by Westerners (Leung 2019). Lin Yutang praised Chinese culinary tradition as evidence of Chinese civilizational advancement. Even less well-known figures such as educator and textbook editor of The Commercial Press Jiang Weiqiao found creative ways in which to engage with nutritional science without abandoning or rejecting out of hand older medical and dietetic ideas (Smith 2018). Indeed, amidst the May Fourth calls for the emancipation of the individual and social equality and their virulent criticism of familism, some lingering sense of awe and appreciation remained for the richness and social value of Chinese food and eating practices (Chen 2005).

This prevailing sense of esteem was nonetheless punctured by currents of criticism that appeared early in the Republic and continued through the 1930s. In 1912, a local Shanghai reformist group, the Association for People's Livelihood and National Plan (Minsheng guoji hui), petitioned local authorities to encourage the consumption of wheat-based noodles, partly to prevent increasing rice shortages, but also to improve the general health and physique of the local populace. As the association pointed out, both Northerners and Westerners ate wheat and possessed strong and healthy bodies (Lee 2015).

The most vocal critic was perhaps the biochemist Wu Hsien 吳憲 (1893–1959), although he was certainly not alone in suggesting the social, if not existential, imperative of improving and reforming the Chinese diet (Fu 2018: 41–68). As one of the foremost scientific minds of his generation, Wu Hsien had been among the first class of 62 Boxer Fellows who sailed to the United States in 1911 for academic study.² A quiet, serious scholar, he graduated from MIT in 1917 and then obtained his PhD in biochemistry under the direction of Otto Folin at Harvard Medical School in 1919. When he returned to China a year later, he established his institutional standing by joining the faculty of the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), one of the leading research and medical educational institutions in Republican China, and becoming its youngest faculty member appointed to full professorship in 1928 and later the PUMC's director from 1935 to 1937. He helped organize as well served as the president of the Chinese Physiological Society and was on the editorial board of the Chinese Journal of Physiology. During the early years of the Japanese occupation, he, in the words of his wife, was “successful in politely warding off several overtures made by the Japanese” and effectively retired from public life (Wu 1959: 6). His intellectual and research interests continued, however, and in 1944, he was tapped by the Nationalist government to organize and lead the country's first national Nutrition Institute, as well as serve as a senior nutrition expert for the UNRRA-led relief and reconstruction effort.

Although best known internationally for his work on protein denaturation, after his return to China, he also became increasingly involved in nutritional research and writing for more general audiences. Although not the first name one might associate with New Culture and May Fourth intellectual life, he was close with several of the leading intellectual figures of the time, and after the Mukden Incident of 1931, he and several others (Hu Shih, Jiang Tingfu, Hu Shi, Ding Wenjiang, Fu Sinian, Weng Wenhao, Tao Menghe, and Ren Hongjun) established the journal Duli pinglun (Independent Critique) in 1932.³ In his first essay for the journal, Wu presented an argument for why the Chinese diet needed to be reformed and how its present deficiencies were imperiling the health and well-being of the Chinese people.⁴

Wu Hsien began his account by situating Chinese experiences within a universal story of the origins of mankind and its perennial quest for sustenance. In the early history of mankind, humans depended upon hunting for obtaining nourishment. The discovery of fire and cooking transformed life by making even the hardest of grains edible. This common origin story segmented into different historical trajectories that were shaped by different social and material environments. “In China,” Wu (1932: 15) wrote, “agriculture developed early, and by the third century, the people's diet already emphasized the five grains. A leisurely survey of the classics shows several references to hunting during this period as well. The land was plentiful and population light such that the people did not suffer from economic pressures, and they could freely choose their food” (ziyou xuanze 自由選擇).

Wu's characterization of ancient times borders on idyllic with their ample land, generous eats, and sparse population, and yet in a curious twist, it wafts like a presentiment of contemporary arguments about the nature of hunter-gatherer societies in recent scholarship in evolutionary biology (Lieberman 2013: 180–208).⁵ Over time, agriculture gradually eclipsed hunting, and Chinese society became increasingly sedentary. Population grew tremendously. Wu neither celebrated nor disparaged this growth, but rather emphasized that with the decline in hunting during the Qin (221–206 BCE) and the Han (206 BCE–220 CE) dynasties, the Chinese diet assumed a more vegetarian cast. The factors facilitating the growth of a major civilization were the same factors leading to a depreciation of the people's standard of living and greater competition for limited resources. Agriculture became the foundation of the country (nong wei bang ben 農為邦本), and as eating grains constituted a lesser financial burden than eating meat, the people's diet gradually became thoroughly vegetarian. The economic motivations justifying a more vegetarian diet were further reinforced by religious sentiments. Mixing socio-cultural and economic influences in his evolutionary model of the Chinese diet, Wu (1932: 15) explained,

[W]ith the introduction of Buddhism to Chinese society [during the Six Dynasties period, 220–589 CE], its devotees (lit. “superstitious followers,” mixin zhi tu 迷信之徒) believed that killing animals was immoral (yi sha sheng wei zui e 以殺生為罪惡). Although the number of people adhering to the Buddhist practice of abstaining from meat and fish was not great, the idea that vegetarianism was a moral good permeated people's consciousness and definitely influenced the Chinese people's diet.

Whereas Chinese had shifted away from hunting and meat-predominant diets to agriculture and grain-intensive diets earlier, Europeans followed a different historical trajectory. “European nations,” Wu (1932: 15-16) wrote, “developed later than China, and as land was limited, more than ten separate states had to contend with each other for hegemony.” Territorial competition and political acrimony accounted for the mutually reinforcing rise of both civilized and martial cultures. Rather than disappearing, hunting remained an integral part of social life and was culturally redefined as a pastime. The complex struggle for political survival transmuted itself into a competitive spirit that fueled the hearts and minds of national peoples while also contributing to the florescence of science and technology.

If these distinctions sound familiar, it is because in tracing the evolutionary development of the Chinese diet, Wu Hsien has invoked many of the same “activist” and “quietistic” features that dominated the earlier and broader May Fourth conversation over Eastern and Western civilizations.⁶ As Leigh Jenco (2013: 47) has shown, speculation about the nature of differences between “Eastern” qua Chinese and “Western” civilization went back to the mid-nineteenth century, but May Fourth theorizations departed from earlier iterations of this civilizations debate by offering alternatives to the universal, homogenous trend of evolution envisioned by late Qing thinkers. By seeing all cultures and civilizations as having a historical trajectory whose experiences encouraged the development of certain institutions and attitudes and discouraged others (eg rise and fall of hunting and martial culture), May Fourth participants of the civilization debate became increasingly aware of the possibility “that different civilizations may occupy a shared global space without enduring the same processes of time—their historical developments may be mutually out of joint” (Jenco 2013: 47). In the case of the Chinese diet, this was exactly the disjointed predicament that Wu Hsien was describing. The Chinese diet derived from a confluence of quietistic factors (eg homogenous population, conflict-avoidance, emphasis on nature over human agency, etc.) that, on the one hand, facilitated the early adoption of agriculture and nurtured rapid population growth, but, on the other hand, lacked exposure to the more activistic factors that would have supported more meat-eating. The vegetarian-ness of the Chinese diet could be attributed to the structural interplay of large-scale social, economic, and political transformations specific to China and yet nonetheless contained within it a more general pattern of civilizational development. After all, the development of agriculture also occurred in the West, but at a later time and in a more activistic environment of political and economic competition.

Wu Hsien was especially strident about the long-term consequences of this dietary divergence (Fu 2018: chapter 3). Lecturing before medical students and fellow scientists in 1926, Wu Hsien (1927: 74–75) insisted Chinese of yore were taller and stronger than their modern counterparts. “It is mentioned in Mencius that Cao Jiao, who measured nine feet four, wondered why he could not be as great as Emperor Wen Wang and Emperor Tang, who measured ten feet and nine feet, respectively. Confucius also measured nine feet four.” Adjusting for differences in measurement, Wu nonetheless maintained that “ancient celebrities” still measured six feet seven and though clearly not representative of the average height of all ancient Chinese, “the fact still remains that the height of the modern Chinese with the best physique do not even approach these figures.” The problem was not merely one of height; it was also one of disposition. If Chinese civilization was quietistic, then Chinese people were “over peaceful, non-persevering, non-aggressive, [and] non-enterprising, and [were] content with the environment in which they find themselves.”

Wu Hsien's colleague William H. Adolph argued along similar lines by likening China to the camel used to deliver his household winter supply of coal: “The Peking camel is a patient, philosophical plodder, not the prancing race-horse of the school books, and such a natural part of the landscape because he is stodgy, slow-moving, never effervescent, a fatalist, and a believer in the doctrine of the mean.” China was a meditative, non-militaristic culture. What some Western contemporaries derided as China's pervasive state of historical anachronism, Adolph demurred, quoting another of his colleagues at Yenching, “‘the art of living’ is not to subjugate the environment and thus improve existence (as is axiomatic in the Occident), nor to treat it as illusory and escape its influence (as in India), but to accept it as it is and adjust oneself to it” (Adolph 1933).

Wu and Adolph were hardly alone in advancing historical causal narratives about the Chinese diet. Writing in 1929, the Communist writer Dong Wentian 董文田 (1903–1935) applied a Marxist-Malthusian interpretation in his history of the evolution of Chinese food (Zhongguo shiwu jinhua shi). Dong had studied sociology at Yenching University and also served as the editor for the Yanda zhoukan (Yenching University Weekly). In presenting an evolutionary account of food, Dong (1929: 58–70) positioned food as the most important economic criterion determining a people's livelihood. Echoing Thomas Robert Malthus’ observation that an increase in a nation's food production improved the well-being of the populace, but only temporarily, as it also led to population growth, Dong recontextualized Chinese history as bound by a food–food production dialectic whose mutually entangled influence determined broader social, political, and economic relations. An evolutionary timescale of Chinese food began, Dong asserted, by way of Han Feizi, with a period when men did not sow and women did not weave. Animal skins to make clothes were abundant. The population was small, yet natural resources were abundant. There was no internecine conflict, and there was no need for punishments as the people were self-governed.

This earlier period of apparent plentitude and peace was soon eclipsed by cultivated agriculture and the rise of a food production system that no longer depended on shared individual effort. Instead, the common people (pingmin 平民) labored, but did not enjoy the (literal) fruits of their labor. The people's mutual, communal labor for food became concentrated into familial units of which the patriarch occupied the most dominant position. Within this feudal system, the patriarch was the person who ate, but did not work for what he ate. Access to food constituted an edifice of inequality that differentiated people into different social classes.

According to Dong (1929: 56–57), the feudal system could be further broken down into three major periods: age of natural food (ziran shiwu shiqi 自然食物時期) that spanned the very ancient times up to the appearance of the legendary inventor of fire Suiren 燧人, the age of man-made food (rengong shiwu shiqi 人工食物時期) that followed from Suiren until the establishment of the Chinese Republic, and the age of machine-made food (jiqi shiwu shidai 機器食物時代) that commenced (roughly) after the formation of the Chinese Republic.⁷ This periodization was made all the more strange by Dong's admission that much of the Chinese population had yet to enter the machine-made food age as they continued to toil on the land with their hand tools and back-breaking labor. And yet, his essential point remained coherent: the system of food production established after the discovery of fire was agricultural and dependent on the exploitation of the broad swathe of the population for the benefit of the few.

Dong envisioned the Westernization (xiyanghua 西洋化) of food and the scientification (kexuehua 科學化) of food production as catalysts of revolution that would force some kind of rupture with the long, interminable past. His Marxist commitment to the revolutionary potential inherent to the age of machine-made food distinguished Dong Wentian from many of the others, including Wu Hsien, writing about the problem of the Chinese diet. One Ren Xian (1939: 33-34) writing for the journal Chinese Medicine (Zhonghua yiyao) identified the progress of material civilization (wuzhi wenming de jincheng 物質文明的進程) as the culprit for China's nutrition problem. Foods that had been formerly rich in nutritional value were altered by mechanical manufacture to the detriment of all those who would eat it. Echoing an earlier debate in which Chinese physicians debated the extent to which science and technology were to blame for present nutritional ailments, Ren Xian wrote,

Everyone knows that unpolished rice/brown rice (caomi 糙米) is high in vitamins (weitaiming 為太命), but because of scientific progress, unpolished rice is ground/rolled (nian 碾), and the vitamin rich husks are thrown away (kang bifan paoye 糠秕反拋葉).

The consequences extended far beyond one of preference. Following Ren's logic, Chinese people's white-rice eating practices created a chronotope or a time space in which physical development transpired backwards in time and across urban and rural landscapes. “Material civilization,” Ren (1939: 33-34) bemoaned, “means that the physique of civilized people (wenmin ren 文明人) is no better than that of savages (yeman 野蠻), urbanites’ no healthier than rural folk.” To rectify this situation, Ren urged his readers to eat more natural, fresh foodstuffs. The cultural preference for polished white rice instead of the more nutritious, coarse brown rice was framed as part of the deleterious effects associated with modern society, its crowded urban ways, and technologically mediated food products. Juxtaposing a healthy, robust, and rural citizenry still vibrant in its relationship to the land against sallow, overstressed urban residents highly dependent upon the importation of basic foodstuffs, Ren found much to fault with modern technology and its industrialization of food practices.

What tied all these writers together was a general conviction that the Chinese diet was itself an object of history requiring proper excavation and that Chinese food played a formative, if largely negative, role in shaping the health and material outcomes of the Chinese people. For Wu Hsien, the vegetarian-nature of the Chinese diet was the cumulative outcome of qietistic features of Chinese civilization. The absence of a vibrant martial culture and the decline of hunting, when combined with religious sensibilities, had resulted in a Chinese culture and a Chinese diet wholly out of sync with the competitive demands required of modern life. Marxist analyses of food production as integral to the base formation of society emphasized different socio-economic relations than Wu's, but not a different outcome. In both accounts, the Chinese diet had been syncretized from localized civilizational characteristics. Such characteristics were not quintessentially Chinese, and yet their aggregation had nonetheless encouraged the development of a Chinese culture lacking martial spirit and tradition-bound agricultural institutions that alienated those farming from the fruits of their labor. These historical assessments were largely negative in cast, and yet the very act of historicizing Chinese food and re-periodizing the broad contours of Chinese history in terms of food production also facilitated a closer examination of the specific objects of social, scientific, and political action that might be marshaled toward the greater goal of creating fitter, stronger, healthier Chinese citizens. Put differently, the act of historicizing the Chinese diet conditioned the possibility of treating Chinese food and eating as scientific objects that could be tinkered with and re-engineered.

3 When the Transnational is Universal, What is Chinese?

To historicize the Chinese diet was to engage in scientific storytelling, or using narrative to create coherence between a variety of different elements that might otherwise not appear to hang together (Morgan and Wise 2017; Wise 2011). Wu Hsien's characterization of Chinese culture as grounded in sedentary agricultural work that prioritized grains over meat, and by extension pacifism over competition and war, constituted a specific narrative for how to understand the relationship between food and people. We might be inclined to think this function of narrative was primarily communicative and perhaps symbolic, as Wu Hsien, for example, was writing for an educated but non-specialist audience. Narrative and storytelling, in this sense, become the gloss that attracts the non-specialist's attention, but does not have any ontological or epistemological functions. But narrowly treating the historicization of the Chinese diet as simply a communicative device that appeals to lay audiences constrains our ability to understand how this interpretation informed the overall scientific study of the Chinese diet and its intersections with public policy.

The history of the Chinese diet Wu set forth on the pages of Duli pinglun was but an iteration of the one he included in his 1929 nutrition science textbook, Yingyang gailun 營養概論 (Treatise on Nutrition), and what he presented in lectures to his scientific colleagues and medical students. In other words, the line separating how structures of scientific knowledge express broader cultural narratives from how cultural narratives shape structures of scientific knowledge was blurry at best. We see this when we examine more closely the Chinese Medical Association's (CMA) 1938 nutritional guidelines, a project that formally began in January 1937 with the formation of a special sub-committee of the Chinese Medical Association to study the question of mass nutrition in China and to “work out schedules of minimum diet requirement of poor people” (“Council on Public Health” 1937: 763). Wu Hsien served as the chairman and was joined on this committee by some of China's most preeminent research scientists and nutritionists, notably Siu-feng Huang (dietitian, Peking Union Medical College), Hou Xiangchuan (Associate Researcher in Physiological Sciences, Henry Lester Institute of Medical Research), and William H. Adolph (Professor of Chemistry, Yenching University).

The official report appeared first as a special report published in 1938 (CMA 1938) and again in the April 1939 issue of the Chinese Medical Journal under the title, “Minimum Nutritional Requirement for China” (Zhongguo minzhong zuidi yingyang xuyao), (1939: 301-23). The recommendations took as their model and point of departure the League of Nations’ 1936 report, “Physiological Bases of Nutrition” and focused on three subject categories: adults, pregnant women and nursing mothers, and infants and children. The Chinese Medical Journal was published in English, but for the original 1938 report, the text was written in Chinese with an English translation and included recommended dietary menus that had been crafted with an eye to variation in local costs and availability of foods.

Examining the report's reasoning and argument for nutritional minimums offers us a cross-sectional glimpse of how Chinese scientists translated their cultural critique of Chinese heritage into objective parameters for rationalizing the Chinese diet and improving Chinese bodies. As we saw in the previous section, historicizing food and diet offered narratives for understanding why the Chinese had developed differently, and poorly, in comparison to their Western counterparts. Although clearly a policy document that the CMA hoped would be adopted by the Nationalist Government, these guidelines nonetheless retrace similar conceptual territory by highlighting the importance of the civilizational long durée in shaping Chinese bodies and their food practices while also insisting on the malleability of the scientific present and the right of different peoples to determine the appropriate scientific measures to dictate policy.⁸

To understand their reasoning, we will need to venture into their particular calculus for determining the epistemic value of calories, body weight, and digestibility as determinants of a people's national health and well-being. All these terms may seem straight-forward by our own contemporary reckoning, but within the CMA report they serve as proxies by which to litigate China's edible past and its relationship to the transnational scientific present as represented by the League of Nations’ “Physiological Bases of Nutrition.” Of particular importance was the idea if the Chinese were nutritionally and physically different from their Western counterparts, because of the different civilizational trajectories traversed by each group, thus creating nutritional standards had to begin with where the Chinese were, and not with where they could be. As Hou Xiangchuan (1939: 129) explained in his summation of the committee's work, “Because Chinese people's body weight and food customs differ from Euro-Americans, as well as the difficulty of obtaining dairy and dairy-related products, the Nutrition Committee drew up a [different] set of nutritional standards for the Chinese people.”

From the outset, the CMA challenged a basic premise of contemporary nutrition science, namely that body weight should play a critical role in determining nutritional intake. According to the prevailing nutritional understanding of the day, smaller body weight should have entailed a corresponding decrease in total caloric requirement—the reasoning being that smaller bodies need less energy. But such a conclusion was counterproductive to the Committee's aims. In seeking to establish minimum nutritional requirements for the Chinese, the CMA wanted to both recognize existing physical differences without codifying such differences as inherently Chinese. Put differently, that the Chinese were smaller was a consequence of different historical trajectories, but it was not an irreparable one. Indeed, the more important determinants that had been largely overlooked in the League of Nation's “Physiological Bases of Nutrition” and needed to be properly addressed in any attempt at standard-making in the Chinese case involved digestibility and protein.

Digestibility functioned as a scientific proxy for qualitative assessments of the Chinese food and diet. It systematized broader cultural perceptions about what the body should or should not eat and the role of waste in proving or verifying the validity of such perceptions. The CMA report (1939: 304) argued, “Although the Chinese has a smaller body weight and therefore a smaller caloric requirement, the same allowance of 2400 is recommended on account of the lower coefficient of digestibility of foods in the Chinese vegetarian type of diet as compared with the European diet.” The coefficient of digestibility referred to the relation between constituents of food consumed and the corresponding constituents of the feces. Chemistry of Food and Nutrition, by Henry C. Sherman (1918: 101), a Columbia University chemist whose 1911 book was the oft-cited nutrition textbook by Chinese researchers, explained the coefficient of digestibility in the following terms: “[I]f the feces from a given diet contain 5 per cent as much protein as was contained in the food, this proportion is assumed to have been lost or expended in digestion, and the coefficient of digestibility of the protein of the diet is stated to be 95 per cent.”⁹ Thus, the difference in amounts found in the food and then in the feces represented that which was available to the body. The standard table of coefficients of digestibility was determined by Wilbur Atwater, the father of American nutrition science, in the late nineteenth century and continues to be used today. His results placed animal’s foods highest in utilizable protein, fat, and carbohydrates.

By attributing the need to retain the baseline of 2400 calories as the body's caloric requirement despite the smaller body weight of the Chinese, the CMA was attempting to balance a series of perceived deficiencies against the demands of a normative ideal. Because the CMA used the League of Nations’ “Physiological Bases of Nutrition” as their starting point and theoretical framework, they had to account for how divergences from the norms were legitimate and necessary to accommodate an alternate geographic and cultural sphere. Thus on the one hand, they diminished the line of reasoning that linked smaller body weights with fewer required calories, and on the other hand, reaffirmed prevailing nutritional thinking that the best calories to have were those derived from animal-based foods. Lower coefficients of digestibility represented an alternate way of emphasizing the lack of animal-based foods in the Chinese diet. In practical terms, this meant that although the Chinese diet could satisfy caloric requirements, its nutritional composition lacked certain positive, desirable qualities found in diets associated with optimal health.

And indeed, recent studies by Ruth Guy and K. S. Yeh at the First Health Station of the Beiping Municipality (1938: 201-22); Zheng Ji, Tao Hong, and Zhu Zhanggeng of the Nanjing Biological Research Center (1935: 1753-58); and Ge Chunlin of the Chemistry Department, Shandong University (1936: 564-74) all provided sufficient detail justifying the conclusion that in terms of numerical value, local Chinese diets could and did afford sufficient caloric coverage. Prior to the issuance of the League of Nations’ and the CMA's respective dietary guidelines, the figure representing essential caloric needs for an adult male in the Chinese context varied according to the researcher and the specific study. American and European nutritional studies tended to have less variance in this regard. Paul Weindling (1995: 325-38) has observed that the standard figure of 3000 calories—the daily calorie requirement of a man at work, which had been elucidated by Voit, Atwater, and Rubner—persisted until 1932, when that figure came under challenge by the League of Nations Health Organization's efforts to standardize and systematize international nutritional guidelines.

For Chinese researchers, the caloric baseline depended upon the reference book at hand. In their dietary survey of Nanjing, Zheng Ji and his colleagues (1935: 1753-58) cited 2801 calories as the daily caloric requirement. They then found in their investigation of the diets of Nanjing workers and their families that though the poorest group obtained only 2322 calories daily—a deficit of 479 calories in comparison to the 2801 standard—the wealthiest group exceeded the standard caloric requirement by 433 calories.¹⁰ Indeed, only those families whose monthly income was less than 40 yuan failed to meet the calorie requirement. All other families—those with an average income between 40–150 yuan and those between 150–300 yuan—partook of diets that amounted to 2829 and 2870 calories, respectively. Ruth Guy and K. S. Yeh (1938: 201–22) set the basic caloric need for an adult with a weight between 50 and 60 kg and a height between 145 and 155 cm at 2000 calories. The diets they studied—a milled-cereal-meat diet and a whole-cereal-soybean diet—straddle this 2000 value in a reasonable enough manner for the authors to suggest that though there were two distinct types of diets found in Peking, “Both, at their best, are excellent, as may be seen, not only from the computation of their composition, but by the ultimate test, the health, vigor and reproductive performance of the people who eat them” (Guy and Yeh, 1938: 206).¹¹

In Ge Chunlin's survey of the diets of middle school students, ages 15–17, Ge discovered an even more unexpected result: caloric amounts for winter and summer diets that surpassed the 3000 calorie mark. Drawing upon Sherman's Chemistry of Food and Nutrition and Wu Hsien's work on the diets of Beiping schoolchildren in Yingyang gailun (Principles of Nutrition), Ge (1936: 566) noted,

American boys age 15–17, according to Sherman's calculations, need 2700–4000 calories. Wu's survey of the diets of Beiping middle school students found that average daily caloric intake is 2746 calories. This study has discovered that the [Nanjing] summer diet yields 3150.8 +/− 39.1 calories and the winter diet 3420 +/− 21.92. The winter diet gives 270 more calories than the summer diet. During harvest season, students labor rather more and therefore need more calories—hence the sum of 3420 calories.

All of these studies indicated that in terms of total calories, Chinese diets were sufficient to meet an international baseline of 2400 calories. And yet, the health outcome of these caloric values did not meet international qua Western standards, as the Chinese were still smaller in size. Thus the problem was not so much caloric quantity as quality. Despite the superficial satisfaction of caloric needs, be they 2000, 2400, or 2801, the fact remained that such calories were easily made and easily lost, because the Chinese diet was more vegetarian in nature. “Correct nutrition,” the League of Nations’ Nutrition report had argued (1937: 60), consisted of a diet that supplied the necessary substances for the growth and repair of the organism, as well as the energy for the production of animal heat and muscular work. Calories as the measured expression of the heat or energy producing value of food satisfied a person's general energy requirements to do work. But in terms of aiding and enhancing the body's ability to grow and repair itself, calories were only part of the story. Contemporary nutritional wisdom maintained that there were two general categories of food: “energy-bearing” foods and “protective” foods. The Chinese diet with its grounding and heavy reliance upon the five grains (wu gu 五股) provided sufficient coverage in terms of “energy-bearing” foods, but with respect to “protective” foods, it tended to come up lacking, hence the smaller bodies.

The Chinese diet, CMA report observed, was primarily composed of grains and legumes (gulei doulei 穀類豆類). Foods rich in animal proteins, which the League of Nations’ Nutrition report identified as “body-building foods,” occupied a smaller, sometimes miniscule, portion, and herein lay the problem. To build and repair tissues, the League of Nations’ Nutrition report (1937: 60) asserted, “the proteins contained in animal foods are of better quality than those contained in foods of plant origin, the proteins of milk, eggs and glandular animal tissues (liver, kidney) being specially valuable.” The CMA report did not claim the Chinese diet rendered the Chinese body unable to build and repair tissues, but they accepted the implication that the Chinese body failed to perform these essential functions as well as when nurtured on a diet whose protein sources were largely animal-based.¹² To remedy this perceived deficiency, the CMA report identified ways to articulate the Chinese body as both a local manifestation of the universal body and a unique product of social, economic, and political forces.

If the protein quality of the Chinese diet was lacking, then one way to solve this problem was to increase the quantity of protein Chinese should consume. “For the Occidental in whose diet about 50% of the protein is of animal origin,” the report (CMA Nutrition Committee 1939: 303) observed, “the minimum requirement for the adult is 1 gram of protein per kg of body weight.” This assignment of one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight had emerged by the 1930s as a simple rule of thumb, not because it had been borne out of exhaustive chemical analyses of the human body's minimum protein needs to satisfy basic physiologic functions (see Levenstein 2003 on how protein recommendations have been determined). Wu Hsien noted that although the League of Nations Health Organization had set one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight as its protein requirement, its decision had been predicated upon the assumption that the sources of protein within the diet were multiple and included a good proportion from animals. Indeed, if American dietary surveys were any indication of actual consumption patterns, meat, milk, and eggs occupied a high proportion of the diet and more than amply satisfied the protein requirement of 70 grams of proteins per day.¹³ But the importance of the American example was less fidelity to real consumption than the presentation of robust national progress. To eat meat and drink milk, and a lot of it, signified evolutionary advancement and national success on an international scale.

In setting the Chinese guideline for protein requirement, the CMA report took these details into consideration and identified a method by which to adjust the broad contours of the international standard to fit both the Chinese body and environment. Raising the ratio of protein to kilogram of body weight opened up conceptual space to systemize and rationalize Chinese difference. “For the Chinese whose diet is essentially vegetarian the [protein] requirement should be higher.” Building off of Wu Hsien's proposal of 60 grams of protein in his 1929 nutrition science textbook, the report (1939: 305) continued, “An allowance of 80 grams a day for an adult of 55 kg of body weight or approximately 1.5 grams per kg, is probably sufficient. This amount may be slightly reduced if more animal protein can be included in the diet.”

The Chinese reassessment of protein requirements did more than just alter a few numerical quantities. The specific objective behind the constitution of dietary guidelines shifted as well. The League of Nations’ Health Organization devised nutritional guidelines that sought to promote optimal health, and its standardization of a proposed allowance of one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight for adults was meant to provide cushion for not only health maintenance but also health advancement. The Chinese guidelines operated from a completely different vantage point. The scientists and physicians working on the CMA report accepted the one gram of protein per kilogram of body weight as demonstrative of “the minimum requirement for the adult”—that which the Chinese needed to obtain to raise the level of nutritional health to match American, European, and Japanese precedents. Their insistence that the Chinese needed a higher protein allowance to compensate for smaller body size and lower digestibility diet positioned Chinese metabolic needs as exceeding those promoted by the League of Nations Health Organization.

By conceptualizing the guidelines as a tool for achieving and ensuring the minimum nutritional requirement for healthy adults and children, the CMA report set forth a position that took the international metrics of optimality and recast them as baseline requirements for Chinese nutrition. On the one hand, this approach would seem to have been at odds with what two of its members had previously argued. Both Wu Hsien and William Adolph conceptualized nutrition as a race- and nation-advancing enterprise of which optimality, rather than minimality, served the higher purpose. “[T]he prosperity of the nation,” Adolph (1930: 428), for example, had written, “demands not mere maintenance, but an optimum metabolism expressed in terms of improved growth and vigor.” But as social, political, and economic circumstances became increasingly constrained over the course of the 1930s, the process of composing guidelines came to highlight the imbricated nature of nutrition and health with political economy and the necessity of thinking about nutrition existentially.

On the other hand, nutritional minimums that both adopted and expanded upon metrics of optimality ensured a path of evolutionary survival—hardly a minor feat for a country saddled with the unfortunate, but not necessarily unwarranted, moniker of “Land of Famine” (Li 2007: 283-85). All around conditions augured poorly for nutritional optimality. The historian Xia Mingfang has estimated that more than 15.2 million people died in ten major drought famines that occurred during the Republican period (1912–1949) (Edgerton-Tarpley 2017). The CMA's proceedings occurred just a couple of years prior to the Nationalist government's decision to breach the Yellow River dike in a desperate attempt to “use water in place of soldiers” (yishui daibing) to slow the Japanese assault. This decision ultimately led to devastating flooding in three provinces and put nearly two million acres of cropland out of dependable production from 1938 until 1947, resulting in the Henan Famine of 1942–43 (Edgerton-Tarpley 2014: 447). Even without the devastating Henan Famine, we need look no further than the immediate context of Shanghai in 1939 for evidence of how precarious Chinese nutritional health was. Although the CMA had formally began their committee deliberations in January 1937, their work was interrupted and constrained by war. The full-scale Japanese assault on China began in late summer 1937, and in a city such as Shanghai, refugees abounded. The practical problem of ensuring some basic level of nutrition was neither esoteric nor hypothetical.

Thus, the problem of protein and by extension food more generally within the Chinese context was from the start embedded in an evolutionary process of transformation that required attention to the specificity of socio-economic and racial differences over time.¹⁵ The modification of the international standards eg body weight as determinant for caloric intake; amount of protein needed per kilo of body weight) were modest, but nonetheless represented in a numerical, objective form a nationalist intervention in a transnational conversation about scientific universality. “A half gram per kilo more” should be understood as a concerted attempt by the CMA to address perceived somatic and cultural deficiencies through the language of nutrition science. Chinese bodies were small, they argued, but such smallness could be offset by the proper manipulation of nutritional determinants. In this light, protein intake was essentially a cultural product and practice that could travel and change as it moved across spatial and temporal boundaries Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 Atwater's Coefficients of Digestibility (percentage)¹⁴

	Protein	Fat	Carbohydrates
Animal foods	98	97	100
Cereals and sugars	85	90	98
Vegetables and fruits	80	90	95

Table 2 Protein Recommendations (grams per kilograms of body weight)¹⁶

Age (years)	Chinese Recommendations	League of Nations Recommendations
1–3	3.5	3.5
3–5	3.5	3.0
5–12	3.0	2.5
12–15	3.0	2.5
15–17	2.5	2.0
17–21	2.0	1.5
21 and upwards	1.5	1.0
Women: Pregnant – 0–3 months	1.5	1.0
4–9 months	2.0	1.5
Nursing	2.5	2.0

4 Conclusion

Despite their best efforts, the CMA's recommended guidelines for minimum nutritional requirements for the Chinese people were never officially adopted by the Nationalist government. By the time the recommendations appeared in print, the country was already more than a year deep into what was looking increasingly like a protracted stalemate between Chinese and Japanese military forces. Japanese military advancement had succeeded in forcing the Nationalist government to retreat deep into the interior and make Chongqing the wartime capital. The Nationalist government had not been inattentive to the importance of nutrition prior to 1937, but with the outbreak of war, it advanced a series of popular initiatives that transformed dietary reform advocacy into a wartime food-saving movement that encouraged days of national fasting to protect wartime provisions, promoted nutritional recipes and cookbooks, and set-up public canteens to raise morale, improve bodily vigor, and reduce overall rice consumption (Lee 2015). War also transformed the government's understanding of the necessity of improving military diets to produce stronger soldiers, and by extension the broader public (Liu 2019). In 1944, at the invitation of the Nationalist government, Wu Hsien traveled to Chongqing to set up and head a national Nutrition Institute. For Wu Hsien (Wu and Zhou 1945), the Nutrition Institute was the institutional linchpin that secured a nutritional infrastructure that could be described as that which organized food before and after it reached one's mouth. In describing the organization's various responsibilities and relationships, he focused on socio-technical arrangements that could be made to and within the confines of the national geo-body. New lands should be opened up for cultivation. Greater integration of transportation routes across provincial lines would better facilitate the movement of food to areas in greater need. Campaigns and educational programs would improve the general public's understanding of what constituted proper nutrition and which foods were more nutritious (Wu and Zhou 1945: 11–12).

In describing this new national nutrition institute and its mandate, Wu Hsien also invoked the United States and Europe as examples in which earlier, comprehensive state-planning of nutritional infrastructure had yielded significant advances. His use of the United States and Europe as paradigmatic models will seem a pale comparison to his earlier ruminations about the different civilizational trajectories that separate China from the West, and yet, the geo-national specificities signaled by “United States” and “Europe” do little to diminish an underlying sense of civilizational discordance that could potentially be rectified through social engineering. As Jenco has suggested (2013: 51), engaging in “Eastern” and “Western” tropes as civilization characteristics was not to suggest that such characteristics were categories of “the inevitably universal and the irredeemably particular.” Instead, that earlier willingness to construct civilizational histories about why the Chinese ate what they ate—and therefore how their bodies became what they became—highlighted how deeply indebted spatial categories such as “East” and “West” were to the contingencies of human actions. In this sense, the formulation of a national plan for Chinese nutrition represented an affirmation of the value and importance of human agency as a mark of the incompleteness of the historical process at any given temporal stage.

It would be tempting to treat the Nationalist plan for creating a national nutritional infrastructure as too little too late and overly concerned with American and European precedents. But if the previous two episodes tell us anything, it is that the global structure of this coherence rested upon a more complicated entanglement of scientific objects and the stories we tell about them. To speak with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, modern science creates the future, but not in any narrowly linear sense. “The present as the future of the past is not a ‘result’—whatever that means—of the past; the past is the result of a future—its presence as a surrogate” (Rheinberger 1994: 70). How Chinese scientists spoke of and historicized Chinese food and diet were never simply elaborate rationalizations or idealizations of Chinese difference in civilizational time. The very act of historicizing the Chinese diet conditioned the possibility of treating Chinese food and eating as scientific objects that could be researched and in the process of research produce something different from the present state. In this sense, making China's edible past legible was an extension of how scientific research operated as a kind of past- and future-generating device. Recognizing and confronting China's vegetarian past, for example, made it possible to imagine a non-vegetarian future. When it came time to translate that scientific story of the Chinese diet, the significant units of the experimental system (e.g. body weight, digestibility, protein intake, calories), to borrow Rheinberger's words (1994: 70), concatenate into a constantly changing signifying context—one which, for Wu Hsien and his colleagues—could appeal to and support a distinct vision of the Chinese eating body as something less than yet improvable to a universal body. This was a kind of Chinese particularity that nonetheless existed within a longer-frame civilizational narrative.

To return then to the title of this essay, “would Mr. Science eat the Chinese diet,” one must see in “Mr. Science” the desire for a future possible creating an edible past and conclude that yes, Mr. Science would eat the Chinese diet. But such a conclusion requires a kind of intellectual bracketing of the Chinese diet as both a scientific object and an act of historical narration. Conducting research on the Chinese diet, historicizing its effects, writing about its form and deficiencies for popular audiences, translating such research into practicable policy—all of these activities demarcated the intellectual terrain that May Fourth thinking continued to shape with its twinned embrace of science and nation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jia-Chen Fu

Jia-Chen Fu is an associate professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has researched the cultural history of science in 20th century China, focusing on the health sciences, histories of the body and food.

Notes

1 This essay will not address the important topic of popular reception of nutrition science.

2 Following the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the Qing government agreed to pay an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver over the course of 39 years to the eight nations involved in the suppression of the Boxers. Because the Qing made payments according to the exchange rates at the time (i.e., with interest), the total amount expended far exceeded the original indemnity amount. The United States agreed to use their proportional difference to establish a scholarship program to send Chinese students to the US.

3 The journal operated from 1932 until 1937 during which time Wu Hsien published fourteen essays in the journal (Jiang 2012: 106). Wang (2001) provides a more detailed consideration of the journal and its relationship to a Chinese public sphere.

4 This argument was a distillation of a longer narrative he had included in his textbook, Yingyang gailun (Wu 1929).

5 Wu's account is distinctly flat and unitary. He does not appear to have been familiar with the “plural origins” theory of Chinese civilization (Fan 2008).

6 Jenco (2013) clarifies to examples, Du Yaquan's 1916 article, “Quietistic Civilization and Active Civilization,” and Li Dazhao's 1919 essay, “The Fundamental Differences between Eastern and Western Civilizations.” Du suggested that Eastern civilizations were quietistic civilizations (jingde wenming 靜的文明)—fairly homogenous populations that emphasized nature over human agency, family over interactions with strangers, and conflict avoidance and or minimization—whereas Western civilizations were active civilizations (dong de wenming 動的文明). Li argued in a similar vein, contrasting how a bounty of women let to the more common practice of polygamy in “southern” belt societies such as Japan, Indo-China, India, Egypt, etc. with how a scarcity of women led to single-wife families in “northern” societies such as Mongolia, Russia, Germany, Holland, England, France, and Spain.

7 Dong Wentian's classification did not stop with these three major time periods. The age of natural foods was further partitioned into the period of fruits and the period of meat. The age of man-made food was broken down into three lesser periods each with their own subdivisions and approximate dates. For example, the initial period of the age of man-made food ran from Suiren until the twenty-one centuries before Yu the Great founded the Xia dynasty, while the middle period of the age of man-made food can be roughly dated from when Yu the Great demarcated the nine territories or provinces until Shang Yang's reforms, circa the fourth century BCE.

8 An emerging debate among dieticians in the United States about the ways in which nutrition science as a profession and discipline perpetuates racial, ethnic, and gender normativity that exclude different body types and identities suggests that concerns about how to reconcile scientific universals and local difference has neither been resolved, nor properly addressed (Krishna 2020).

9 First published in 1911, Chemistry of Food and Nutrition was quite a successful textbook in home economics and dietetics courses in the United States, and it subsequently underwent several reissues, the most recent being in 1952.

10 Zheng and his collaborators divided their subject base into four categories (A, B, C, and D) according to the monthly income of the head of the household (每戶家長每月之收入). Group A had a monthly income of 300 or more yuan; B 150–300 yuan; C 40–150 yuan; and D less than 40 yuan.

11 The whole-cereal legume diet was generally the diet of the poor, whereas the milled-cereal-meat diet tended to be eaten by the rich.

12 An earlier study from 1929 did, however, indicate that Shanghai diets lacked sufficient protein for muscle repair and fat for energy (Liu 2019).

13 Levenstein (2003: 96) describes the results of a food survey of students in a boarding house at the University of Minnesota in 1910 as “typical” for its time. “[T]hey consumed an average of 3,715 calories and 105 grams of protein per person per day, and this does not include food and beverages consumed outside the boarding house.”

15 One does not want to draw too sharp a line of distinction here. The German pathologist Carl von Noorden (1858-1944) argued that dietary habits were the results of biological laws that came into formation over the course of thousands of years. When applied to the issue of protein, von Noorden reasoned that differences in quantity were themselves representative of racial differences of strength. Stronger races ate more protein; weaker races ate less (see Sherman 1918: 375 for free translation and further discussion).

14 Table comes from Atwater and Langworthy (1898: 85). The table included in Sherman's Chemistry of Food and Nutrition (1918: 101) was an expanded one that included “cereals and breadstuffs” and “dried legumes” and separated “vegetables” and “fruits.” The percentage for fats and carbohydrates were largely the same, with the main differences pertaining to protein percentage for “dried legumes” (78), “vegetables” (83), and “fruits” (85).

16 The table comes from CMA Nutrition Committee (1939: 306).