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Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 6: Biology and Biological Technology. Pt. 5: Fermentations and Food Science (review)
- Technology and Culture
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 43, Number 2, April 2002
- pp. 407-409
- 10.1353/tech.2002.0083
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Technology and Culture 43.2 (2002) 407-409
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Book Review
Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 6:
Biology and Biological Technology. Pt. 5:
Fermentations and Food Science.
Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 6: Biology and Biological Technology. Pt. 5: Fermentations and Food Science. By H. T. Huang. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xxviii+741. $150.
This is a welcome addition to the extraordinary Science and Civilization in China (SCC) series begun by the late Joseph Needham. The first volume was published in 1954, and to date the series includes more than twenty books organized into volumes according to the modern fields of science and technology to which the premodern Chinese subject matter corresponds. H. T. Huang's contribution is the fifth in the multibook "volume" on Biology and Biological Technology and specifically addresses fermentations and food science from ancient times until the nineteenth century.
Huang has had a long association with Needham and his pioneering work on the history of Chinese science and technology. He served as [End Page 407] Needham's personal secretary in China in 1943-44, then later became deputy director of the Needham Research Institute at Cambridge University. A chemist by training, with experience in the food processing and pharmaceutical industries and as a program director at the U.S. National Science Foundation, Huang made a previous contribution to the SCC series in volume 6, part 1 (on botany, published in 1986), an informative section on China's history of controlling agricultural pests with botanical pesticides and predator management.
While Huang's background in natural science drives his approach to the history of science and technology, he also displays a wide knowledge of historical and archaeological sources and a sensitivity to language in both his translations of Chinese texts and his English prose. Readers will note the breadth of Huang's interest: highlights include the chemical processes involved in producing different ferments, archaeological evidence for and against the dating of tofu to the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.-220 A.D.), and such delightful legends as the famed general Zhuge Liang's invention of steamed buns (mantou) as an ingenious substitute for the human heads demanded by "barbarian" chiefs. Frequent cross-cultural comparisons and investigations into the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge demonstrate that Huang shares Needham's admirable concern for history that transcends national boundaries. Throughout, Huang's engaging writing style and unabashed passion for the subject matter brings the material to life.
The book begins with an overview of food resources and culinary technology in ancient China, ending with the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 A.D. The next section provides a helpful introduction to the key primary and secondary sources used in the study. The heart of the book consists of separate sections on the fermentation of alcoholic drinks, soybean processing and fermentation, food processing and preservation, tea processing and utilization, and nutritional deficiency diseases.
A seventeen-page concluding section provides space, however brief, for summary and analysis. Here Huang discusses George Basalla's evolutionary model of technological development and suggests a modification of the theory based on the evidence that food technologies in China developed in "fits and starts" (p. 603), with the greatest activity in the Han and in the Song (960-1279) dynasties, already well-known for scientific and technological innovations. Another theme pursued in the final section—practical, philosophical, and social impediments to change—will be familiar to readers versed in other writings on Chinese science and technology, which have often sought both to celebrate Chinese "achievements" and to explain Chinese "failures." This approach, characteristic of the SCC project as a whole, takes modern science and technology as a yardstick against which to measure premodern Chinese knowledge. While such an approach has lately fallen out of favor among historians seeking to understand past societies in their own terms, it should not blind us to the great contributions Needham [End Page 408] and collaborators such as Huang have made to our knowledge of science and technology...