Nutrition and the state
Multigrain and War: Nutrition Science and China’s Wartime Mobilization, 1931–1945
Nothing offers a better laboratory for nutrition scientist than a war. This paper explores how nutrition was understood and taken into practice as a significant component of total war mobilization in China. Even before the outbreak of the war with Japan, nothing concerned Chinese elite as much as the food problem In the 1930s, the Guomindang (KMT) members believed that China’s food problem was caused not only by the unsecured and unpredictable food supplies in the rural areas, but also by unhealthy eating habits that demanded more and more the imports of foreign foodstuffs, most conspicuously, highly-polished white rice in costal cities. What if a potential enemy country blockaded China’s coasts and cut off the food trade routes?
Having realized the significance of wartime provision during the Great War in Europe (1914–1918), a number of experts asserted that China needed to develop a new scientific way of food consumption in order to both maximize nutritional value and minimize waste.
Given the nature of total war, nutrition science had to meet two demands: to create an optimal military ration for the soldiers in the frontline, at the same time, to rationalize the food consumption in the home front where wasteful eating habits were prevalent. Therefore, a new dietary suggestion proven by nutrition science had to be more than a scientific regimen for the improvement of individual health. It also was a new moral language calling for the change of every individual’s eating habits for the nation.
Seung-joon Lee
National University of Singapore
Nutritional Knowledge, Dietary Practice and the Transformation of Irish Society c.1845-7.
By situating the Irish Famine into a history of nutrition, as opposed to politics or economics, I argue that medico-scientific ideas relating to nutrition became central to debates surrounding relief. The Famine coincided with the rising social prominence of chemical and nutritional science. For decades, imperial policy had expressed a desire to stimulate industrialisation and to change Irish agricultural and dietary practices. The Famine provided an opportunity for medical scientists to partake in this debate.
Their approach to relief policy focused closely upon the body of the Irish peasant, and how it assimilated and digested foodstuffs. Earlier medical discourse had maintained that the Irish peasant’s stomach had become engorged and enlarged due to over-indulgence in excessive quantities of potatoes. I argue in this paper that medical scientists transformed perceptions of the Irish body, which became defined as requiring quality rather than quantities of food.
I focus closely upon the Scientific Commission who investigated the loss of the potato crop between 1845 and 1846; the Board of Health’s response to the dispersion of Indian meal; and the controversial Soup Kitchen scheme instigated in 1847. Analysis of these areas proves useful as a study of the limitations of scientific medicine in regulating the Irish body at a time of crisis. The medical profession became increasingly disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of relief and the misappropriation of their doctrines in official soup kitchen schemes, whilst the ineffectiveness of scientific policy became entangled within wider responses to the limitations of relief by the British government.
Dr Ian Miller, Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI), K115X, Newman Building, School of History of Archives, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Republic of Ireland.