Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan

Can food determine your fate? Could indulging in delicacies bring calamity to your community? This talk 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. It explores 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. 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. According to these guides, failure to keep a proper diet carried life-or-death consequences that could bring not just disease to oneself but also financial and moral ruin to one’s household, domain, or even society at large. This study of historical nourishment modes in Japan 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.

Joshua Schlachet is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Department Artifacts, Action, Knowledge at the MPIWG and an associate professor of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona. A cultural historian of early modern Japan, he examines how everyday knowledge about food, health, and material culture is produced and circulated. At the MPIWG, he is developing a project on Japanese craft ceramics that situates these objects within a social history of producers, materials, and knowledge systems. He is the author of Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2026), which will be the topic of his talk.