TY - JOUR
AU - Soon,, Wayne
AB - Jia-Chen Fu has written a fascinating intellectual history of soy in China from the early 1920s to the late 1930s, covering most of the period of what historians call Republican China (1911–49). Drawing on extensive writings by missionaries and nutritionists, newspaper advertisements and Shanghai Municipal Archives’ documents, Fu argues that the reinvention of soy in Republican China was based on the desire of Chinese reformers to strengthen the bodies and minds of Chinese people through a soy-based modern nutritional science. Such promotional efforts did not preclude drawing on premodern notions of soy to promote the legume, even as these Chinese reformers and their international counterparts struggled at times to persuade a local audience on the universal good of soy and its derived products. Chapter 1 tells the story of Li Shizhen, a French-educated Chinese intellectual, in promoting soybean-derived products to a French audience. Li extolled how soy, as a product native to China, was ‘more uniform, more hygienic to produce, and less prone to fraud and manipulation’ than cow’s milk (p.36). Chapter 2 argues that some foreign missionaries perceived Chinese people as consuming too many vegetables and too little animal proteins. Their arguments set the stage for Chinese nutritionists such as Wu Hsien to later critique the nature of the Chinese diet. Chapter 3 reveals how Harvard-trained Wu Hsien saw the inadequacies of the Chinese diet as a technical problem that could be solved by fungible and adaptive soybean proteins. Chapter 4 shows how Chinese intellectuals focused on children as a critical constituency to reimagine the efficacy and importance of soymilk for the future of China. Chapter 5 illustrates how companies and thinkers combined both classical therapies of supplementing the brain and moistening the lungs and modern concepts of scientific nourishment in advertising soy-related products. Chapters 6 and 7 detail how Chinese-American Nellie Lee, American-educated Hou Xiangchuan, and the China Nutritional Aid Council provided soybean milk to refugees and children during the Second World War. However, critics including Johns Hopkins trained Marion Yang argue that the Aid Council and their supporters should aim to provide more basic grains for hungry wartime folks, rather than spend an excessive amount of time and money producing, processing and distributing soybean milk. The key strength of the book is Fu’s success at challenging the dominant narrative of a ubiquitous nature of soy as an undeniable good for all. Fu reveals how Chinese intellectuals saw soy as a marker for Chinese deficiency, a repository of classical nourishment, hope for the Chinese future, an embodiment of scientific progress and an impractical product in wartime China. These sentiments were engendered by the Chinese people’s encounter with total war, western imperialism, rapid industrialization and intense commodification of products in Republican China. Soy created its own flows, agencies and problems in modern China, even as it was seen by many as native and stable to the country. By bookending the monograph with the stories of Li Shizhen and Nellie Lee in promoting soy and studying nutrition in France and the USA, respectively, Fu clearly shows how diasporic experiences were important to these intellectuals’ strategy at working out ideas and practices of soy in different time and spaces. A similar exposition of Hou Xiangchuan, Wu Hsien and Marion Yang’s education in the USA could also shed similar light on the origins of their varying perceptions towards soy. Furthermore, including more voices of Chinese consumers, patients, dissenters, farmers and cow-milk advocates could illustrate more clearly Fu’s central arguments on the mixed degree of acceptance of soy by residents of Republican China. This book is an essential read for historians of food, science and medicine because of Fu’s creative and nuanced readings of texts and images, as well as her critical analysis of the varied meanings and embodiments of soy in the different political contexts. Students interested in the intellectual history of nutrition outside of the Western world would find this monograph instructive and inspirational. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Jia-Chen Fu, The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China
JF - Social History of Medicine
DO - 10.1093/shm/hkz134
DA - 2009-11-17
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/jia-chen-fu-the-other-milk-reinventing-soy-in-republican-china-pKmKJ1FomG
DP - DeepDyve
ER -