Japan's Dietary Transition and Its Impacts uses rich and wide-ranging statistical data to delineate the significant changes in the Japanese diet from 1900 to the present, attentive to the ways Japan's foods have been sourced locally and internationally. Recent studies have profiled the ways in which food enters national discourse as cuisine, notably by Katarzyna Cwiertka21 and by Barak Kushner in his examination of ramen as a symbol of culinary nationalism.22 Smil and Kobayashi's book allows readers to learn the benefits in wellness wrought from improvements in the modern diet as well as the environmental costs.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the scope of the transformation of the Japanese diet within the last century. In 1900, Japanese per capita consumed virtually no pork or poultry, less than one egg a month, and half a teaspoon of milk a year in a diet that resulted in stunted growth....
