2nd year undergraduate course covers Chinese food from Yao to Mao, and into East and SE Asian Diaspora. Begins with session on critical terms, and full lesson on Bourdieu.
The “Food with Footnotes” assignment has students each bring in one food over the course of the semester, in teams of 3 or 4. Students provide a brief presentation on the history of the food, and justify why it’s relevant to the topic for that week. The entire class samples the food while listening to their argument. Students provide a 6-item bibliography for the presentation, share research items online for others to use.
Students have been blogging, writing poetry and making videos about Chinese food. Check it out here.
They also respond on Facebook to the weekly course content here.
Intermittent fasting is trending these days. News articles about it are proliferating, celebrities are endorsing it, and the Internet is replete with beginner’s guides to different forms of this way of eating. Its proponents say that it promotes weight loss, lowers insulin levels, and normalizes blood pressure. Others warn that it can be dangerous—for those with a history of disordered eating, for example, or pregnant women. But the enthusiasm radiating from blogs and fitness websites is hard to ignore. Nor is this enthusiasm confined to American pop culture: jianxiexing duanshi 间歇性断食 is attracting attention in the Sinosphere as well.
Source of image: https://www.taiwannutrition.com/blog/intermittent-fasting/. Accessed August 5, 2019.
Trendy though it is today, the idea is hardly new . I’ve been reading Chinese and Japanese books from the early twentieth century, and I came across one that radiates very similar enthusiasm for very similar advice: Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬’s On Skipping Breakfast for Health and to Prevent Aging (健康不老廢止朝食論). I’ll just call it On Skipping Breakfast from here on, for simplicity. This book claims that by eating only two meals per day, one slightly before noon and one in the early evening, anyone can improve his health and extend his lifespan. Following this advice, it says, can strengthen cases of weak nerves and prevent conditions such as depression, diabetes and obesity, constipation, and even cholera and typhoid. And, as if that weren’t enough, it gives the eater more time, improves his mental clarity, and makes him more successful in his career. When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says that intermittent fasting “helps him save time, stay focused, and sleep better at night,” it’s almost as if he’s quoting Jiang.[1]Or actually, quoting Mishima Kin’ichirō 美島金一郎,since Jiang’s book is a modified translation of a Japanese book published a year earlier.
But On Skipping Breakfast is not just an example of biohacking before Silicon Valley. While Mishima’s original text does celebrate the potential to lighten the body and boost productivity, Jiang’s version has higher aims: his ambition is to “arrive at a world of great harmony” by promoting moderate eating.
When the Commercial Press published the book in 1915, Western scientific ideas about eating were beginning to permeate China. Increasingly, diets were defined, measured, and quantified as the concepts of calories, vitamins, and minimum daily requirements took root. Underpinning much of this knowledge was a conviction that Western diets were superior to what people ate in East Asia. Scientists as well as political and cultural leaders decried Chinese diets as deficient—in proteins, in calories, in micronutrients and in just about every other way. Modernizers in China, like those in other weak countries, wanted their people to adopt what Rachel Laudan has called the “power cuisine” of the West, a high-calorie feast featuring meat, wheat, and dairy.[2]The goal was to create a taller, stronger, and generally more “fit” population that could better compete in the nations’ struggle for survival.
On Skipping Breakfast, though, approaches the question of national diet very differently. It’s not that Jiang rejects modern knowledge. By choosing to translate Mishima’s tract in all its scientistic glory, Jiang demonstrates his fascination with then-current physiological and anatomical ideas. The body described in this book is clearly the body of Western science, not the one of classical Chinese medicine: it has blood but no qi, yingyang (營養, the neologism “nutrition”) but no yin 陰 or yang 陽, and a mind-hosting brain instead of a heart-mind (xin 心), among many other marks. The book revels in mechanistic descriptions of digestion and excretion. But Jiang harnesses these ideas to a very different goal from the usual one of bulking up to better compete.[3]
Jiang Weiqiao, from his book 因是子靜坐法 (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1922). Available through Hathi Trust.
In a preface added to Mishima’s original text, Jiang affirms the Darwinian premise that all living beings are locked in a struggle for survival. But his response sounds like a Buddhist one:
“if there were a way to make living things able to not rely on food to live, then their conflict and killing one another perhaps could be stopped. If there were a way to … make living things return and not be reborn and not die … [t]he conflict and mutual killing could forever not be aroused.”
Unfortunately, he writes,
“there is not yet a good method of not eating. So we will use eating in moderation to save [people]. When there have been generations who have practiced healthy, anti-aging [practices like these] for a long time, this can build up their self-cultivation and produce wisdom, and engrave the truth of no-rebirth.”[4]
Here the goal is not to win the competition but to transcend it. Rather than improving their stock by eating more animal protein and calories, nations can improve their moral essence by eating in a disciplined and economical pattern. Jiang’s perspective echoes not only Buddhist ideals but also Daoist practices like abstaining from grain. It resonates, too, with what Chinese medical classics say about moderating what you eat and drink.
Despite (or perhaps because of) its ties to traditional culture, On Skipping Breakfast clearly remained a contrarian piece. China did indeed absorb Western “power cuisine.” A century later, the attendant problems of a calorie-dense diet heavier in meat, wheat, and dairy have cropped up there, including rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure. No wonder, then, that these days intermittent fasting is attracting attention in Chinese societies too. Today, though, you’re less likely to hear about its potential to save humanity.
[2] Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 255-257.
[3] Hilary A. Smith, “Skipping Breakfast to Save the Nation: A Different Kind of Dietary Determinism in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Global Food History vol.4, no.2 (2018): 152-167.
[4] Jiang Weiqiao, Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun [Skipping Breakfast for Health and to Prevent Aging] (Taipei: Xin wen feng, 1980), author’s preface 2 and 5.
What does milk have in common with blood? According to Kou Zongshi (fl. 1110-1117), author of Bencao yanyi (Extended Interpretations on Materia Medica), they are basically the same vital fluid produced by the female body at two critical moments in a woman’s life. While the first menstrual period signifies the maturation of reproductive power, motherhood is the consummation of that power–miraculously causing the vital fluid to flow upward as milk. After nursing ends, the flow of milk again reverses back to blood, as evident from the return of the menses.
For centuries, Kou’s comment was repeatedly quoted as the dominant theory over lactation in the realm of learned medicine. It also coincides with parallel attempts to speculate on the metaphysical foundation of sex differences in women, and the consolidation of women’s medicine (fuke) and pediatrics (erke) as medical specialties.[1]
However, Kou’s original aim was to make sense of medical recipes. In particular, he was trying to figure out why do so many recipes for eye medicine use human milk to mix up powdered mineral drugs: a practice that has parallels in different cultural contexts. Since blood is essential for the five senses to function and human milk is essentially blood, Kou reasoned, this makes it an excellent medicine for eye diseases. Another recipe that may have been on his mind is the recommendation to drink “three portions of human milk” to help with obstructed menses. It makes sense if they were considered of the same origin. Like cures like.
Let’s pause here to consider what this means. Working with Chinese materia medica texts often means untangling different strands of thought, modes of compilation and miscellaneous quotations. The entry on each substance (e.g. human milk, renru or ruzhi) often begins with a learned survey of previous literature, including passages from classical literature and histories, and ends with a large (and often unwieldy) body of recipes. The problem is that the prescribed uses of the substances in the first part do not always sit well with the recipes, which are messy, opaque, and often outright strange.
In fact, Kou Zongshi’s work could be understood as a scholar-physician’s attempt to impose order and coherence on the unruly recipes, which were becoming increasingly available in print. [2] The incongruities and tension between theory and recipes, however, allows us to follow the intricate dance between empiricism and rationalism in such texts: when did authors equate recipes with real-life experiences, and when did they treat them as exemplars of theory and formulaic principles? When did book culture begin to shape the ways in which medicines were prepared, consumed, and invented?
Back to Kou Zongshi’s ingenious, if somewhat contrived, speculation over the nature of lactation. It did not seem to have caught much attention immediately. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a growing suspicion among medical experts to discipline and curb wet nurses’ sway over childcare, and pediatric treatises abound with warnings against drunken, naughty wet nurses whose milk turns unwholesome to the infant.[3] Again, the female body’s power to nourish but also intoxicate with her transformed milk resonates with similar discourses discussed elsewhere on this blog; notably, alcoholic drinks were seen to be a bad thing that excites her passions, in contrast to ancient Roman recommendations.
In addition, the conquest of Mongols brought about increased consumption of cow and goat’s milk.[4] A leading physician active in the fourteenth century advised consuming those over human milk, which is easily “tainted with poisonous passions.” It looks like the arrival of more abundant dairy products would transform the existing pharmacopeia once and for all.
But not so simple. By the sixteenth century in China, human milk had become a “super food” of sorts, especially among elite families. Kou Zongshi’s dusty theory became a dominant trope, fanning the imagination of the female body as a machine of alchemical wonders, and her milk a sort of elixir that revitalizes the frail and depleted bodies. In the sixteenth-century encyclopedia Systematic Materia Medica(Bencao gangmu), Li Shizhen, the erudite naturalist and capable physician, criticized the excessive fetishizing of human milk. The prudent Li nevertheless included twelve “new recipes” that involve human milk as medicine. Li’s encyclopedia was first printed in 1596; soon after the turn of the century, dietary manuals began to teach people how to prepare dried milk powder at home, after collecting fresh milk from “strong women who just gave birth to boys”. Presumably, women sold their milk not as wet nurses, but directly to pharmacists (as depicted in the picture above).
So did people in imperial China consume human milk as medicine? Quite likely. But was it ubiquitous? Probably not. Recipes can be practical and fantastic, and theorists can explain and inspire. What matters is that human milk as medicine gradually came to be taken out of the context of nursing and acquired a more abstract quality as commodity.
[1] Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History: 960–1665 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
[2] Asaf Goldschmidt, The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty, 960-1200 (London ; New York: Routledge, 2009).
[3] Ping-Chen Hsiung, “To Nurse the Young: Breastfeeding and Infant Feeding in Late Imperial China,” Journal of Family History, 20, 3 (1995), pp. 217-38.
[4] Paul D. Buell, E.N. Anderson, and Charles Perry, A Soup for the Qan : Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Sihui’s Yinshan Zhengyao, 2nd Rev. and Expanded ed. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010).
HH2031 History of Food in China Syllabus
“Human milk.” Anon. Buyi Leigong paozhi bianlan (n.p, 1591), Book 8.