Food, health, and nutrition in Chinese history

Abstract

This essay explores the relationships between food and health in Chinese history, from ancient times to the present. It briefly reviews how historians have written about dietary knowledge in China's past, from a midcentury focus on discoveries that prefigured those of modern nutrition science to a more expansive recent understanding of healthy eating. From there, the piece draws on scholarship from the past 2 decades to highlight the complexity of pre-modern Chinese ideas about food and its connection to ritual, social order, moral rectitude, pleasure, and physical and emotional well-being, all of which factored into dietetic prescriptions and prohibitions. Finally, the last section focuses on the modern period. It suggests that while Western foods and nutrition science acquired great prestige in early twentieth-century China, by the early 21st century both had lost some of their luster, and interest in classical and folk understandings of diet—inflected by the postsocialist political and economic order—was again flourishing.