Wang Wan-yu (王婉育) is a PhD student at NTNU’s Department of Taiwan Culture, Language and Literature. In our interview, she discusses her dissertation on the history of school lunches, and explains how they and food culture as a whole are avenues to study the development of Taiwan as a nation.
1. Can you give us a brief introduction to your dissertation?
My doctoral thesis is “The History of ‘Nutritional’ School Lunch in Post-War Taiwan (1951–2001),” and discusses how school lunches, led by the government, gradually evolved from their earliest incarnation as part of “nutritional improvement” (營養改善) policies into a school lunch policy internal to the education system.
I hope that this research on school lunches will not only fill in a missing piece of the puzzle in the history of Taiwan’s food culture, but also work to overturn the past paradigm of such research, which focused primarily on material culture, agricultural development, or modernity. By instead viewing school lunches from a daily-life perspective, and exploring how factors such as food and nutrition education, public health, and industrial technology converged in daily dietary life, it will enrich the scope of research on Taiwan’s post-war food and education history.
I have also published work reinterpreting anthropological theories through literary works, exploring mother-daughter relationships and the inheritance of culinary skills.
2. For readers who may not be familiar, what are the origins of Taiwan’s school lunch system?
It’s a bit of a misnomer to say that Taiwan as a whole has a school lunch system. Unlike in Japan and Korea, school lunches in Taiwan have not been legally instituted at a national level. Instead, each city or county manages its own system. There is no national-level system for school lunches.
Why? Well, the school lunch systems evolved out of 1950s programs to supply disadvantaged children with milk powder provided by the US or UNICEF aid. At the time, the government wouldn’t provide food being grown in Taiwan, since that was being exported to earn foreign exchange. Hence, aid from the United States was used instead. The key to note here is that this began in poorer, rural areas, outlying islands, or areas hit by disasters—it was not universal.
This was where the inequality and unevenness began. It was only in the 1980s, when even in more developed areas, unemployed parents couldn’t afford to bring their children lunch, that school-provided lunches became truly commonplace. But because each local city and county system has now developed independently for so many years, they are proving very difficult to integrate. They remain very localized, and I don’t know how they would unify, administratively, politically, or legally.
The term “school lunch” (學校午餐) itself is a post-1988 development. Prior to that, it went by various titles, including “nutritional lunch,” (營養午餐) “student lunch,” (學生午餐) or “school-provided lunch” (學校供餐).
But I’m currently thinking about whether “nutritional” is a good translation or not.
In fact, this question is at the core of my research: I believe that “nutrition” (營養) is not a neutral, objective term. It is a representation of the expectations the country had and has for its children. For instance, the term “nutritional” was used to refer to the food provided to malnourished students in the 1950s, as well as to the meals designed for those considered overweight in the 1990s, a period when childhood obesity rates began to rise. By then, nutritionists in the 1990s had begun designing school lunch menus that prioritized nutritional balance rather than mere caloric supplementation.
That’s part of why I say that this is not objective, neutral history. Like Foucault said, knowledge is never neutral or objective—it is a reflection of power.
This isn’t the only way nutrition was used, bureaucratically or politically.
At the time, children’s nutrition was integrated into an area’s morbidity rate (罹病率). This is a calculated figure which is supposed to reflect the percentage of people suffering from certain diseases. They would monitor and test these children, looking at whether the morbidity rate decreased after these children started eating school lunches. When it did, they could point to the decreased morbidity rate to tout how effective their program was.
Thus, school lunches became considered a concrete way to modernize and “make citizens healthy.”
So the development of school lunches in Taiwan is intertwined with the development of Taiwan as a nation.
Through the history of school lunches, you can also see, for instance, their approach to nutritional science, by looking at who reviewed and prepared the menu and nutritional content. At that time, any teacher could do it—now it requires a nutritionist.
In order to provide lunch for so many people every day, a bureaucratic system has to exist, from each school, to the local government education bureau, all the way up to the central government. Only through a system like this can you provide lunch for so many people at once—currently approximately 1.7 million children.
According to research by Professor Chen Yu-jen (陳玉箴), the production of food for school meals, their shipping, the setup of cooking facilities, the employment of nutritionists and cooks, and nutritional education together now form a gigantic social food supply system.
3. How did you formulate this topic?
In between graduate school and beginning my PhD, I did five years of advocacy work for Doceur Network (大享食育協會), an NGO involved in using school meals to promote food education. During that time, I researched the Japanese and Korean school meal systems, in order to find out how to achieve something similar here.
There is next to nothing written about the establishment of a school lunch system in Taiwan, so this was a wide-open space to research and write, both about that history itself and the social contexts and environments which brought it about.
I thought that this had the makings of a doctoral thesis.
4. How did you develop your interest in food culture, and how did it transform into a direction for research?
My interest stems from my family background. My mother runs a breakfast shop, which she started after I was born. I later found that this makes her a living witness to the development of Taiwan’s unique breakfast culture.
More generally, food culture touches on personal experience, a society’s lifestyle at large, diet, and economics. It is therefore highly cross-disciplinary, involving history, anthropology, sociology, and more. There are many perspectives you can take: government systems, gender, technological progress, and so on. That can make it tough, because you feel like you have to read absolutely everything, but I find this variety interesting, and it fits my personality.
The initial goal of my research while working at Doceur was simply to gather data. I succeeded and I wrote it down. I was updating data from the last ten years, but I also felt a bit empty inside. To me, conducting more in-depth research brings deeper meaning to these phenomena and history.
Later on, I was glad that I worked for a bit outside of academia before starting my research. I accumulated more experience and gained new perspectives.
Speaking of perspectives, something I find interesting is that as insiders to this culture, we don’t see the opportunities for research that outsiders do. For instance, I had never once considered whether foreigners usually ate breakfast at home or from breakfast shops. When Professor Chen Yu-jen brought this up in class, I wondered why nobody had researched it before.
This reflects a greater neglect of our own culture, where we don’t recognize how unique we are.
In food culture and history, one reason for this is that when the KMT came to Taiwan, they only gave those who spoke Mandarin a public voice. Those people, seen as experts, discussed Taiwanese cuisine only in the context of China’s Eight Cuisines, because Taiwan was “Free China,” and the Eight Cuisines were core, orthodox Chinese culture. To them, Taiwan was on the sidelines, and the only interesting thing it had was its snacks. But that’s just not true—Taiwan’s cuisine has been here for a long time, and it’s not just snacks.
It’s easier for foreigners to notice these sorts of incongruities. In fact, when I learned about the state of the field, the number of foreigners doing research in Taiwan Studies blew my mind.
Foreigners, who haven’t grown up in this culture, have the advantage that they can really see how Taiwan is different and unique.
5. What role can the study of food culture play in promoting Taiwan and Taiwan Studies?
In grad school, the question of what nation the people of Taiwan identify as would often come up. But it was usually approached from a historical or international relations perspective, or through literary metaphors. It was a very macro view of the topic.
Eating is something much more down-to-earth. We’ve all heard that phrase “you are what you eat,” which reflects the relationship between eating habits and self-conception. It’s not just the interesting foods of Taiwan, it’s about the environment, systems, industries, and other factors that give rise to it.
It falls to researchers to analyze this process. Professor Chen Yu-jen uses the “salad jar” metaphor to express the growth of this culture. It’s not just mixed together—it’s layered, one on top of another. And that metaphor applies to much more than just food culture.
6. What advice would you give to students who are beginning to study Taiwan – whether they are starting from the angle of Taiwan Studies in general or from one specific aspect?
Early on in my PhD, I wasn’t sure if I was going to research languages, but I knew that between literature, culture, and languages, languages were the part I understood the least. I ended up taking “Introduction to Taiwanese Taigi,” which turned out to be quite stressful, technical, and statistics-oriented, which was difficult for me. But I learned about how, through education and language policy, countries like Ireland are starting to recover their own language, after centuries of control and repression by foreign governments.
This made me realize two things. First, that in Taiwan Studies (or any field, really), there will be parts you’re not skilled in or don’t particularly like. But make an effort to involve yourself with them, and you might be surprised at the results.
Second, if you’re going into researching Taiwan, it’s best to combine it with your own life experiences—this will lead you to think more deeply about your topic.
I think we are in a golden age of Taiwan Studies. The field is developing rapidly, and there is lots of space for unique research that nobody has ever done before. Even if you’re not sure of yourself, give it a try! A lot of us, including myself, don’t have that much self-confidence. But now the world is taking notice of Taiwan, and this is our moment to shine. The field is wide open, and it’s nowhere near full, so now is a great time to get involved!