{"id":10131,"date":"2025-12-25T23:05:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-25T15:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/?p=10131"},"modified":"2025-12-29T16:17:18","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T08:17:18","slug":"stories-of-taiwan-studies-wang-wan-yu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/2025\/12\/25\/stories-of-taiwan-studies-wang-wan-yu\/","title":{"rendered":"New Voices in Taiwan Studies: Wang Wan-yu and the Postwar History of School Lunches in Taiwan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u3000\u3000Wang Wan-yu (\u738b\u5a49\u80b2)<\/strong> is a PhD student at NTNU\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Can you give us a brief introduction to your dissertation?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000My doctoral thesis is “The History of ‘Nutritional’ School Lunch in Post-War Taiwan (1951\u20132001),” and discusses how school lunches, led by the government, gradually evolved from their earliest incarnation as part of “nutritional improvement” (\u71df\u990a\u6539\u5584) policies into a school lunch policy internal to the education system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000I 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000I have also published work reinterpreting anthropological theories through literary works, exploring mother-daughter relationships and the inheritance of culinary skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. For readers who may not be familiar, what are the origins of Taiwan\u2019s school lunch system?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Why? 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\u2019t 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\u2014it was not universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000This 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000The term “school lunch” (\u5b78\u6821\u5348\u9910) itself is a post-1988 development. Prior to that, it went by various titles, including “nutritional lunch,” (\u71df\u990a\u5348\u9910) “student lunch,” (\u5b78\u751f\u5348\u9910) or “school-provided lunch” (\u5b78\u6821\u4f9b\u9910).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000But I’m currently thinking about whether “nutritional” is a good translation or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000In fact, this question is at the core of my research: I believe that “nutrition” (\u71df\u990a) 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 \u201cnutritional\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000That’s part of why I say that this is not objective, neutral history. Like Foucault said, knowledge is never neutral or objective\u2014it is a reflection of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000This isn\u2019t the only way nutrition was used, bureaucratically or politically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000At the time, children\u2019s nutrition was integrated into an area\u2019s morbidity rate (\u7f79\u75c5\u7387). 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Thus, school lunches became considered a concrete way to modernize and \u201cmake citizens healthy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000So the development of school lunches in Taiwan is intertwined with the development of Taiwan as a nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Through 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\u2014now it requires a nutritionist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000In 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\u2014currently approximately 1.7 million children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000According to research by Professor Chen Yu-jen (\u9673\u7389\u7bb4), 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. How did you formulate this topic?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000In between graduate school and beginning my PhD, I did five years of advocacy work for Doceur Network (\u5927\u4eab\u98df\u80b2\u5354\u6703), 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000There 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000I thought that this had the makings of a doctoral thesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. How did you develop your interest in food culture, and how did it transform into a direction for research?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000My 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\u2019s unique breakfast culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000More generally, food culture touches on personal experience, a society\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000The 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Later 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Speaking 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000This reflects a greater neglect of our own culture, where we don\u2019t recognize how unique we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000In 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\u2014Taiwan’s cuisine has been here for a long time, and it’s not just snacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Foreigners, who haven’t grown up in this culture, have the advantage that they can really see how Taiwan is different and unique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. What role can the study of food culture play in promoting Taiwan and Taiwan Studies? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000In 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Eating is something much more down-to-earth. We’ve all heard that phrase “you are what you eat,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000It 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\u2014it’s layered, one on top of another. And that metaphor applies to much more than just food culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. What advice would you give to students who are beginning to study Taiwan \u2013 whether they are starting from the angle of Taiwan Studies in general or from one specific aspect?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Early 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 \u201cIntroduction to Taiwanese Taigi,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000This 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000Second, if you’re going into researching Taiwan, it’s best to combine it with your own life experiences\u2014this will lead you to think more deeply about your topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u3000\u3000I 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u3000\u3000Wang Wan-yu (\u738b\u5a49\u80b2) is a PhD student at NTNU\u2019s Departme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-237","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10131"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10166,"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10131\/revisions\/10166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itsc.ntnu.edu.tw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}