Would Mr. Science Eat the Chinese Diet?

Abstract

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.