“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? Joshua Schlachet’s Nourishing Life 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. Beginning in the 18th century, Japan witnessed an unprecedented explosion of popular interest in dietary advice, compiled in commercially printed manuals, pamphlets, and guides to household know-how, dedicated to practices for promoting well-being known collectively as “nourishing life.”

Nourishing Life is the first book-length study to explore 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. Schlachet argues that diet was never value-free; instead, 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.

Nourishing Life uncovers a terrain of knowledge and practice both unexpected and profoundly relatable to our contemporary struggle to navigate the cacophony of dietary recommendations around us.

Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan
by Joshua Schlachet
University of Hawaii Press (April 2026)