Profs & Pints Denver: Dietary Racism—A History

Profs and Pints Denver presents: “Dietary Racism—A History,” on how biases against certain populations have skewed the recommendations of modern nutrition science, with Hilary A. Smith, associate professor of history at the University of Denver and scholar of the histories of science, medicine, and China.

[Doors open at 5 pm and the talk begins at 6:30.]

Most of us think of dietary concerns about lactose intolerance or rice’s high glycemic index as based on sound scientific research. It doesn’t occur to us to think of them as the result of anti-Asian bias.

But the strange truth is that many of our ideas about diets and nutrition are rooted in biases against Asians and other racial and ethnic groups. From its inception in the late nineteenth century up to the present, modern nutrition science has treated the bodies and diets of people of northern European descent as normal—and bodies and diets that differ from theirs as deficient—in conducting research and making recommendations.

Learn how bias against various racial and ethnic groups has helped determine what goes on our plates with Professor Hilary Smith, author of Nutritional Imperialism: How Science Turned Difference Into Sickness In China, senior editor of the journal Asian Medicine, and teacher of courses on subjects such as comparative medicine, disease in world history, and food in East Asian History. 

Dr. Smith’s research focuses on how people living in very different times and cultures made sense of the natural world, including their bodies, and how social, intellectual, and political circumstances inform all knowledge, including modern scientific and medical knowledge. Her talk just might change your assumptions about what you eat.

Being an expert on Chinese history, she’ll especially focus on how nutrition science absorbed prejudices against Chinese diets and bodies and turned them into seemingly neutral scientific concepts. 

She’ll describe how in the early twentieth century scientists tried to prove that the bodies of “philosophic” East Asians metabolized food more slowly than white bodies, and that eating rice as a staple food made a nation sick and weak. You’ll learn how this tendency has not disappeared with time: Starting in the 1990s scientists turned a genetic variation in alcohol digestion into a so-called deficiency commonly known as “Asian Flush.” 

Chinese eaters are hardly the only ones affected by what Dr. Smith calls “nutritional imperialism.” Racial and national biases have made their way into other dietary recommendations, such as calls for heavy consumption of animal protein, a legacy of flawed research blaming health-related gaps between wealthy and poor nations on a lack of protein rather than the real culprit, a lack of calories.

You’ll come away from this talk more alert to biased dietary advice in whatever scientific guise it might assume. (Advance tickets $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with student ID.)

Image: A market in Nanjing, China (Photo by Stephane Tougard / Creative Commons).

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