On Bread and National Ruin

This article explores a reactionary, and ultimately failed, medical dietary movement that sought to counter the influence of Western nutritional sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. Its supporters looked to the early modern past to create a vision of traditional Japanese foodways based on whole grains, unpolished rice, and locally grown vegetables, a nutritional regimen they called cerealism. In articulating a Japanese national diet, cerealism offered a new promise to not only recapture Japan’s food culture but its national subjectivity by envisioning native eating habits that could build both superior physique and quality of character. The intrusion of the Western staples of bread and meat, supporters feared, could cause the downfall of the Japanese nation on bodily, spiritual, and economic grounds. Cerealism thus sought to upend the universal claims of Western medical science by posing a simple question: Was there such a thing as Japanese nutrition?