The Other Milk by Jia-Chen Fu

Author:Jia-Chen Fu
Language: eng
Format: epub

between the medical and maternal spheres that came to typify relief work with the soybean.

The soybean represented both modern scientific advancement and homegrown ingenuity during a period of national distress (figure 6.2). In its official explanation explaining the selection of the soybean as the primary ingredient for its nutritional supplement, the Refugee Children’s Committee drew upon medical research to justify its choice.

Several years ago in Peiping [Beijing] experiments were made with soya bean milk and found that it is comparable to cow’s milk in vitamin A and richer in vitamin B. It is deficient in minerals, particularly calcium and that is added to the milk. It has been experimented [sic] that a six weeks old infant was successfully fed to 9 months on soya bean milk, supplemented with cane sugar, cod liver oil, orange juice, rice porridge, spinach puree, and sodium chloride. The mental, muscular development and nutritional status in general appear to be as good as

other normal infants reared on mammalian milk diets. It was found that a formula could be evolved which, with the addition of calcium and sugar, produced a bean milk which closely approximated the food value of cow’s milk.47

That the soybean was already a feature of regional Chinese diets, the Refugee Children’s Committee argued, provided further validation. “The soya bean has long been popular in the diet of the Chinese. It can be prepared in many forms and it has been said that one can have a complete feast in which every dish is a soya bean dish but each one so different from the last as to make one feel no sense of duplication.”48

There are two reasons for questioning the Refugee Children’s Committee's narrative about selecting the soybean. In the first case, its invocation of nutrition science, and the experimental work on soybean milk conducted just a decade previously, serves to normalize the comparative relation between cow’s milk and soybean milk in infant diets. Though not specified by the organization, the broader medical community’s fascination with soybean milk as a cow’s milk alternative was quite recent and, in China, reflected a growing medical concern over the state of child development in the country (see chapter 4). What this sanitized, logical explanation excludes is how important—and emotionally charged—the issue of milk and the feeding of the young was throughout the Republican period, but especially at this moment of all-out war with Japan. Furthermore, the insistence that soybean milk was a staple component of the Chinese diet reflected less an accurate description of contemporary eating patterns than a growing cultural consensus about the soybean’s indigenous status and pervasive presence.

Rationalizing Relief

The growing certainty of war with Japan in the years preceding 1937 magnified the social and moral impetus for improving the Chinese diet. Chinese commentators writing for the literate elite bemoaned the severity of China’s “nutrition problem” (yingyang wenti).49 War was a state of emergency (feichang shiqi), and with the Chinese nation under imminent attack, addressing the nutrition problem through the establishment of nutritional standards represented a basic, essential form of preparation.

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