Nourishing Life

Can food determine your fate? Could indulging in delicacies bring calamity to your community? Nourishing Life reevaluates the history of Japanese food culture by examining how ideas of healthy eating became both a popular phenomenon and a matter of grave concern among trained medical experts and amateur culinary enthusiasts alike. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Japan witnessed an unprecedented explosion of popular interest in dietary advice, compiled in commercially printed manuals, pamphlets, and guides to household know-how, dedicated to practices for promoting well-being known collectively as "nourishing life."

Nourishing Life is the first book-length study to explore why ordinary people ate what they did, how these ideas on proper eating came to be, and what social, economic, and moral concerns propelled their rise. Joshua Schlachet argues that diet was never value-free, nor was it reducible to an objective relationship between nutrients and their physiological outcomes in the body. Instead, guidance on dietetics conveyed priorities about how well-nourished bodies were meant to act in the world, whether as agricultural workers, samurai bureaucrats, or merchant consumers. Failure to keep a proper diet carried life or death consequences, according to these guides, that could bring not just disease to oneself but financial and moral ruin to one’s household, domain, or even society at large. The book thus reveals an early modern dietetic revolution in the making, which disrupted older forms of expertise and provided a venue to critique official policies on eating and living right before the introduction of modern scientific nutrition.

In Nourishing Life, Schlachet investigates how early modern Japanese society became invested in eating—and thinking about eating—with unprecedented enthusiasm and anxiety, asking what it felt like not just to survive from food but to live with it. In doing so, it uncovers a terrain of knowledge and practice both unexpected and profoundly relatable to our contemporary struggle to navigate the cacophony of dietary recommendations around us. Tracing these themes across two centuries of historical change, Nourishing Life tells the story of how diet in early modern Japan became as much about maintaining a healthy society as a healthy body.