Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 6 Biology and Biological Technology. Part V: Fermentations and Food Science (review)

H. T. Huang. Science and Civilization in China. Volume 6 Biology and Biological Technology. Part V: Fermentations and Food Science. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001. xxv, 741 pp., illus. $150.

This latest volume in the Science and Civilization series represents the culmination of a lifetime’s work on the part of the author H. T. Huang. This book deals with developments in fermentations and food science, including a section on nutrition and deficiency diseases, covering the time period from ancient antiquity to the nineteenth century. There are altogether eight sections: a) Introduction; b) Literature and sources; c) Fermentation and evolution of alcoholic drinks; d) Soybean processing and fermentation; e) Food processing and preservation; f) Tea processing and utilization; g) Food and nutritional deficiency diseases; and h) Reflections and epilogue. It also includes an extensive bibliography of works in Chinese, Japanese, and English.

Since antiquity, the Chinese have cultivated a wide variety of food sources and spices and have devised different methods of cooking. Food sources utilized in ancient China include grains, oilseeds, vegetables, fruits, and land and aquatic animals. Steaming and boiling techniques have remained basically the same from ancient times, but frying and roasting have changed much. Skewer roasting, important in ancient China, is no longer important in modern times, but deep frying and stir frying, which were unknown in Zhou (ca. 1030–221 BCE) and Han (202 bce–220 CE), have become the most widely used methods of cooking today. Spices played an important role in cooking, and the introduction of the chili or Capsicum pepper from the New World has had a great impact.

However, because natural ingredients tend to spoil quickly, the Chinese over time refined their methods of preserving raw food materials by using microbiological or biochemical, and chemical or physical approaches. Predominant among the food processes is the use of a special ferment called qu () (a microbial culture preparation containing a mixture of fungal enzymes, spores, and myceliae and yeast cells), originally developed for making wine but widely used for fermenting foods, including the making of soy sauce during the Han. Fermented foods were a major source of vitamin B₁₂ for the poor.

Of particular interest to historians of medicine are sections where Huang examines the relationship between food and medicine, especially the section on food and nutritional deficiency diseases. Traditional Chinese medicine has long recognized the close connection between diet and health, thus food has always been an essential aspect of medicine. It is not surprising, therefore, that Huang relies on a wide spectrum of sources, including classical texts on medicine and materia dietetica. He points out that the very word yi (, medical arts) is itself the name of a wine made by the fermentation of a thin congee (p. 232) and that the word is in part derived from the radical you (, wine, p. 233). Medicated wines were used very early for treatment of illness.

Huang considers four deficiency diseases (goiter, beriberi, night blindness, and rickets). Because diet therapy is an integral part of traditional Chinese medicine, the Chinese have been most successful in treating nutritional deficiency diseases, with the exception of rickets. Goiter was treated with seaweed before the time of Christ and with thyroid glands of animals around the sixth to seventh centuries. Beriberi was prevalent in the rice-producing regions in South China after the Han dynasty. Huang believes this was the unexpected result of improvements in the technology of polishing rice (thus removing the bran). But it seems that the Chinese physicians did not make the connection between rice consumption and beriberi even though they observed that feeding cats and dogs polished rice produced bent legs and inability to walk. The therapy mainly centered around recipes including seeds and beans.

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