LAUSR

This article examines nutrition studies on Korean diets between 1937 and 1945 as a case study on the liaison between nutritional science and total war regimes in the twentieth century. Building on critical scholarship on nutritional science, this article argues that nutritional science—as a scientific governmental technology and racial discourse—served the wartime colonial regime in the Japanese empire aimed at managing the Korean population in the most scientific manner. As a governmental technology, nutritional science produced scientific frameworks and data that shaped state food policies for the efficient mobilisation of Korean diet and labor for war. As a racial discourse, nutritional science construed Korean diets as a scientifically defined nutrition problem. By construing the nutrition problem as an expression of colonial backwardness in need of governmental intervention, nutritional science justified wartime state policies like the school lunch programme as welfare measures to improve the colonial diet and body.