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
