Skipping Breakfast to Save the Nation: A Different Kind of Dietary Determinism in Early Twentieth-Century China

摘要

Dietary advice that advocates of scientific nutrition offered to Chinese people in the early twentieth century often encouraged them to adopt a Western-style regimen prominently featuring meat, wheat, and dairy. Some East Asian intellectuals, however,promoted science based dietary reforms that did not require a change in the composition of their diets. This article examines one example of such an alternative perspective, a book of dietary advice called On Eliminating Breakfast for Health and to Prevent Aging (Jiankang bulao feizhi zhaoshi lun, based on a Japanese original and published by the Chinese scholar Jiang Weiqiao Silt* in 1915.