Knowledge and Practice of Healthy Diet in Taiwan

Knowledge and Practice of Healthy Diet in Taiwan

In recent years, Taiwanese government has gradually regarded nutritional science as the only standard of dietary regulations and guidelines.Contrary to the governmental regulations and guidelines, several discourses regarding healthy diet have emerged in the civil society of Taiwan since the 1970s.

These discourses are situated in the unique multicultural medical system of Taiwan. In other words, although nutritional science and biomedicine, which are main standards of governmental regulations, are two of the knowledge consulted and absorbed by these discourses, other knowledge systems including at least Chinese medicine and natural therapies from West are not negligible in these discourses. Furthermore, surrounding these discourses grow promoters, active users, organizations, texts in print, recipes, and plentiful cooking tools.Briefly speaking, a kind of knowledge and practice complex regarding healthy diet is built in these thirty years in Taiwanese civil society otherwise the profession and organization of nutritional science.

In this article, referring to actor network theory's perspective, I will depict the “network of knowledge and practice” based on my field work of five organizations promoting healthy diet in different regions of Taiwan. I joined several cooking classes of these five groups and participated as volunteers in three of them.

Through my study, I classify several different elements forming the network. They are diseases, body parts, “nutrients” , functions of food materials, cooking tools, food materials, skills to deal with food, information about resources of food material, and the different household conditions. The elements are loosely connected in different ways in every participants’ minds according to classes they joined and their practice in daily lives. What’s more, the "connections" which put different elements together and make the network possible come from several kinds of “trust” depending on the characteristics of organizations. The foundations of “trust” include professional background, self-evident, religion, kindness interaction and knowledgeable teaching.

Based on my understanding of the "network of knowledge and practice" about healthy diet, an analysis of epistemology by comparing "possibility" and "probability" would be brought up. And by referring to my field study and existing literature, I will reconsider the limitations of governmental regulations based on nutritional science in Taiwan as the conclusion.