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.
Keywords:
Science has been central to the history and historiography of the May Fourth Movement, but for the most part, the scholarship on science and the May Fourth movements has focused primarily on the views, attitudes, and debates about science, or what can otherwise be described as “scientism”. While this scholastic focus on the ideology of science has shifted, as more and more scholars have deepened our understanding of both scientists and scientific research during the Republican period (Wu and Fan Citation2020), the importance of the science of food and eating to China remains an underdeveloped topic (for more on Republican discourses on food, eating, and health, see, eg Fu Citation2018; Lee Citation2011; Lee Citation2015; Lee Citation2019; Leung and Caldwell Citation2019; Smith Citation2018; and Swislocki Citation2009 and Citation2011). This scholastic lacuna is curious, because food and eating were clearly understood by Chinese as deeply intertwined with traditional social and political values. It may have been the blood of Lu Xun's blood mantou that evoked all the pernicious, cannibalistic ways in which traditional Chinese culture trapped Chinese people in vicious cycles of ignorance and superstition, but without the mantou, would we have noticed the blood?
