This book on to nutrition and public health policies in modernisation of Japan in interwar years describes the birth of public health administration and the cultural significance of rice. It focuses on the figure of Tadasu Saiki, who boosted national policies and wide international diplomacy in Japan and abroad.
Hunger and nutrition are central to public health, social stability and a balanced economy. A powerful interdisciplinary field has recently emerged among demographers, cultural, economic and science historians around food studies.This book is a study of the historical interactions between diet, hunger and health in contemporary Europe. The author uses archival sources from the League of Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Health Organisation to show the impact of food shortages on the health of the European population during the first half of the twentieth century. In the context of the international diplomatic reaction and national health and nutritional policies, the book shows how these exceptional circumstances led to new scientific research, the production and circulation of scientific knowledge, and the political role of experts, as a new political economy of scientific knowledge about food and diet was developed during the central decades of the twentieth century.
The first decades of the 20th century were marked by a crisis. The impact of the Great War, the rise of the workers’ revolutionary movement and the National Socialist expansion as well as the disaster of the 1929 crash and the great depression of the 1930s created a landscape of tension, radicalism and political instability. In this context, nutrition emerges as an excellent ground from which to explore the genesis of experimental knowledge, the social interests involved, and the transfer of knowledge and practices to public health, the economy, trade and politics. The exceptional confluence of all factors influencing the interwar period contributed to building the problem of nutrition.This book offers a wide perspective including international agencies committed to a global approach to define nutritional problems, agricultural reforms, surveys in different countries and rural areas, methodological agreements on nutritional standards, the main trends of experimental research, the dreadful impact of the war and some experiments developed in internment camps. The author examines nutrition as a cornerstone to show interactions between science, politics, economy and public health.