Description:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Health, Wealth, and Solidarity: Rice as Self in Japan and Malaysia -- 2. Confronting the Cow: Soybean Milk and the Fashioning of a Chinese Dairy Alternative -- 3. Moral Responsibility for Nutritional Milk: Motherhood and Breastfeeding in Modern Japan -- 4. Eating Well for Survival: Chinese Nutrition Experiments during World War II -- 5. The Good, the Bad, and the Toxic: Moral Foods in British India -- 6. The Good, the Bad, and the Foreign: Trajectories of Three Grains in Modern South Korea -- 7. Snacking, Health, Modernity: Moralizing Confections in Japan, 1890-1930 -- 8. Bad Meat: Food and the Medicine of Modern Hygiene in Colonial Hong Kong -- 9. Becoming Healthy: Changing Perception of Tea's Effects on the Body -- 10. To Build or to Transform Vegetarian China: Two Republican Projects -- 11. From Civilizing Foods for Nourishing Life to a Global Traditional Chinese Medicine Dietetics: Changing Perceptions of Foods in Chinese Medicine -- 12. Good Food, Bad Bodies: Lactose Intolerance and the Rise of Milk Culture in China -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index
Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia investigates how foods came to be established as moral entities, how moral food regimes reveal emerging systems of knowledge and enforcement, and how these developments have contributed to new Asian nutritional knowledge regimes. The collection's focus on cross-cultural and transhistorical comparisons across Asia brings into view a broad spectrum of modern Asia that extends from East Asia, Southeast Asia, to South Asia, as well as into global communities of Western knowledge, practice, and power outside Asia.The first section, "Good Foods," focuses on how food norms and rules have been established in modern Asia. Ideas about good foods and good bodies shift at different moments, in some cases privileging local foods and knowledge systems, and in other cases privileging foreign foods and knowledge systems. The second section, "Bad Foods," focuses on what makes foods bad and even dangerous. Bad foods are not simply unpleasant or undesirable for aesthetic or sensory reasons, but they can hinder the stability and development of persons and societies. Bad foods are symbolically polluting, as in the case of foreign foods that threaten not only traditional foods, but also the stability and strength of the nation and its people. The third section, "Moral Foods," focuses on how themes of good versus bad are embedded in projects to make modern persons, subjects, and states, with specific attention to the ambiguities and malleability of foods and health. The malleability of moral foods provides unique opportunities for understanding Asian societies' dynamic position within larger global flows, connections, and disconnections.Collectively, the chapters raise intriguing questions about how foods and the bodies that consume them have been valued politically, economically, culturally, and morally, and about how those values originated and evolved. Consumers in modern Asia are not simply eating to satisfy personal desires or physiological needs, but they are also conscripted into national and global statemaking projects through acts of ingestion. Eating, then, has become about fortifying both the person and the nation