Nutritional Imperialism

How Western nutrition science defined difference as disease in modern China.

For more than a century, Western observers have treated Chinese foodways as evidence of deficiency, danger, or backwardness. In Nutritional Imperialism, Hilary A. Smith shows how these assumptions entered the heart of modern nutrition science and reshaped understandings of health, diet, and difference. Nutrition scientists, physicians, and policymakers presented Western dietary patterns as universal benchmarks of health and transformed ordinary physiological variation into signs of pathology.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Western researchers compared Chinese diets to Euro-American norms and framed rice-based, low-dairy, and low-meat eating patterns as evidence of weakness. Over time, these judgments hardened into scientific claims about vitamin deficiency, protein insufficiency, lactose intolerance, and alcohol metabolism—each treated as a disorder requiring intervention. The book follows these ideas from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first, showing how Chinese scientists and officials both adopted and contested nutritional standards shaped elsewhere.

Through detailed historical cases, Nutritional Imperialism calls for closer scrutiny of how science defines normalcy. The book offers a powerful reminder that expertise is never neutral—and that nutritional standards carry political consequences long after their origins are forgotten.