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Date(s)： 2024/03/26
Time： 10:00~12:00
Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall
Host： Prof. Fu Jia-Chen（Associate research fellow, IMH,AS）
Speaker：Prof. Hilary A. Smith （Associate Professor, DU）
Organizer： Western Learning and China Research Group
Abstract: This is a story about how science made Chinese people sick—or at least, how it made them seem to be sick. Starting in the early twentieth century, acolytes of a new discipline, nutrition science, began to discover that certain illnesses were caused by deficiencies of protein, or vitamins, or other nutrients. In China, scientists both Chinese and foreign associated these disorders with native patterns of eating, concluding that eating rice as a staple, for example, or consuming little meat and dairy, had made Chinese people vulnerable to illness and degeneration. Dietary defects of long standing, they suggested, had stunted Chinese bodies, weakened minds, and rendered the nation less competitive. Such ideas embody what I call nutritional imperialism, an ideology that presents understandings of healthy eating originally built on the consumption patterns and bodies of white Euro Americans as a universal, global standard. Nutritional imperialism represents eating patterns that differ from the putatively universal standard as deviant, and the people nourished by them as inferior. Guided by nutritional imperialism, scientists and other authorities have invented diet-related disorders that ostensibly require state, industrial, or pharmaceutical intervention to correct. In this talk, I seek to explore the problem and consider how it has changed over the modern period.