From Sanitation to Soybeans: Kitchen Hygiene and Nutritional Nationalism in Republican China, 1911–45

This article investigates Chinese individuals’ evolving responsibilities to clean, cook, eat, and nourish in their private kitchens, and how certain diseases became urgent touchstones for the change in public health priorities against national and global developments. This article moves away from infrastructural and national-level developments, and instead investigates how local communities and individuals mediated their interpretations of a scientifically-, politically-, and popularly-defined ideal vision of the hygienic kitchen in their daily lives. Personal responsibility and popular interest in kitchen and dietary hygiene increased as Chinese audiences became exposed to globally-circulating ideas of how individuals could achieve better sanitation and nutrition in their homes. Furthermore, this occurred in tandem with, not in spite of, restrictive governmental actions for public health improvement such as vaccination, infrastructure developments, and surveillance. The article also highlights the place of Chinese innovation in the transnational dietary science movement of the early twentieth century, as Chinese reformists developed methods for beriberi and tuberculosis prevention that drew on both “traditional wisdom” and “modern science.” By the 1940s, nutrition had become a corporeal counterpart of hygiene, and the pursuit of kitchen hygiene a way in which every individual could easily and patriotically participate in progress.