Feast and famine in republican Shanghai: Urban food culture, nutrition, and the state (China)

The dissertation uses food to illuminate aspects of Chinese modernity, defined in the dissertation as a twin project calling for (1) a reconciliation of historical Chinese culture with so-called “global” and “universal” norms and values, and (2) the creation of a distinctive Chinese identity in an unstable world. It begins with an overview of food culture in Republican Shanghai, highlighting the vast differences in the diets of the city's rich and poor. This is followed by a discussion of methodological problems in the study of food, drawing on examples from Republican Shanghai to show how eating and thinking about eating connect to the city's history. Chapter Two shows how physicians and state agents used the science of biomedical nutrition both to criticize and affirm Chinese dietary practices. Chapter Three looks at how the same “modern” municipal state agents, when faced with a food supply crisis, drew upon “traditional” Chinese ideas about the government's responsibility to feed its population. Chapter Four considers how social reformers and home food providers accommodated biomedical nutrition with Chinese medicine and cookery for the purposes of family-planning and nation-building. Chapter Five examines how in Shanghai, China's most “Westernized” of cities, restaurateurs and restaurant patrons domesticated Western food to Chinese sensibilities, while the city's restaurant industry, organized along regional lines, increasingly celebrated the diversity of Chinese cuisine.