In 1930s Shanghai, just as in London or Chicago, families could order a daily delivery of bottled milk to their door. In London and Chicago this was cow's milk; in Shanghai, however, soybean milk was a frequent alternative. In The Other Milk Jia-Chen Fu skilfully charts the transnational networks, political imperatives and social conditions that led to the rise and brief apotheosis of soy milk as the food of the future in Republican China. One particular fascination of Fu's story is that despite the many favourable factors that converged to convince an effective coalition of Chinese nutrition scientists, social reformers, crisis managers, entrepreneurs and responsible middle-class parents that soy milk was the perfect food to nourish modern citizens and strengthen the nation, the Chinese cult of soy milk was no more than an episode, limited both in time and space. The promotion of manufactured soy milk as a nutritious, sanitary, modern yet quintessentially Chinese food began in about 1910 and collapsed, along with the Republican government, in the 1940s; meanwhile advocates proved unable to convert ordinary Chinese living outside Shanghai to the gospel of soy milk.
The Other Milk is an accomplished contribution to the growing corpus of studies that put the science and politics of food at the core of modern nation-building in East Asia. When Sun Yat-sen declared that adequate food, shelter and clothing were basic necessities that a government should guarantee to its citizens, he was endorsing a long-standing principle of imperial governance, namely that the state was responsible for “nourishing the people” (yangmin) by ensuring adequate supplies of staple foods, including both promoting agricultural development and distributing relief in times of war or natural disaster. The concern was that everyone should have enough to satisfy hunger. Although everyone thought rice a better, more nourishing food than sweet potato, and procurement policies aimed to ensure that stocks were reasonably fresh, the state's primary concern was with quantity, not quality.
Through the civil wars and natural disasters that harried the Republican government, along with the ever-looming threat of Japanese invasion, issues of quantity remained urgent. The government recognized its obligation to provide relief to famine victims and refugees, and fretted about levels of national food security. But the potential of food to strengthen the nation was now also understood in another register, in qualitative terms. Christian medical missions, Western and Japanese universities and Japanese government policies all played a part in forming a new dietary mindset, convincing Chinese reformers and scientists to think of “nutrition” (yingyang) as fundamental to nation-building and defence. Combining studies in anthropometrics, demographics and nutrition, researchers sought first to identify and then to improve the “Chinese diet,” to nourish strong, healthy and intelligent citizens equipped for the challenges of modern society.
International nutritional science not surprisingly tended to affirm the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon diet, with wheat considered more nutritious than rice, and animal proteins, especially beef and milk, attributed unique properties for promoting physical, moral and intellectual vigour. Cow's milk was analysed and declared a “perfect food,” complete in itself. Non-Western aspirants to world power understood that they must drink milk if they wanted to compete! The Meiji government promoted cattle and dairy farming as a key element of its modernization policies, pushing urban elites to adopt Western cuisine however disgusting they might find it. In Republican China too, reformers seized upon the importance of animal proteins. But in China established farming patterns severely restricted the expansion and dissemination of dairy production.
The Chinese reformers’ search was for nourishing and easily available foods that poor as well as middle-class families could afford. In their analyses of poor households’ diets, researchers found that animal proteins were almost entirely absent, but soy products like soy sauce and bean curd provided some essential protein. Soybeans were cheap and plentiful in China. Soy milk, a by-product of traditional bean curd manufacture, was categorized in Chinese medicine as a nourishing tonic for the old and frail. In laboratory analyses its protein profile showed promise. Perhaps this was an affordable, traditionally Chinese nutrient that could substitute for unattainable cow's milk? Rather than coming from the dirt of the stable, it could be manufactured and bottled in sterile conditions, so perhaps it was not just second-best, but best – more modern and more sanitary?
Fu recounts with brio (though using a little too much post-colonial terminology for elegance) this “recast[ing of] the humble soybean as both intrinsically Chinese and modern” (p. 13). With lively sketches of key actors at work in Paris and Tennessee, Shanghai, Chongqing and Kunming, she tells one story of success and another of failure. She recounts how soy milk companies and advertisers allied with scientists, educators and media to preach the gospel of soy milk to middle-class Shanghainese parents, re-branding it as the perfect daily staple for raising healthy children. She shows how social workers and government collaborated in Shanghai's refugee camps of the 1930s, taking advantage of the strict order and captive consumers of the camps to integrate soy milk and soy cake into food distributions. When Shanghai fell, the soy milk evangelists moved with the government to the cities of the Southwest. But the networks of outreach and distribution that had worked in organized, prosperous and outward-looking Shanghai failed to mesh with the rhythms, exigencies and preferences of poor families’ lives in wartime Chongqing or Kunming. The gospel would not translate, the assemblage did not travel, the Chinese soy milk moment passed.
The Other Milk tells a fascinating story of imagined futures and re-invented pasts. Its focus on food and nation, and the diversity of sources it draws together, will appeal not only to historians of China but also to global historians and historians of science. It should also attract Science and Technology Studies (STS) readers: while Fu unfolds her analysis as a historical account, her story of how soy milk became a shared project irresistibly invites translation into the terms of Actor Network Theory and global assemblages.
