Nutritional Imperialism: How Science Turned Difference into Sickness in China?

日期： 2024/03/26

時間： 10:00~12:00

地點： 檔案館第三會議室

主持人： 傅家倩教授（中研院近史所副研究員）

主講人：司馬蕾Hilary A. Smith教授（美國丹佛大學歷史系副教授）

主辦單位： 西學與中國研究群

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.

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