
Contents
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Mulberry at a Glance Mulberry at a Glance
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What’s Soy Got to Do with It? What’s Soy Got to Do with It?
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Toward Molecular Understandings: Silkworm Feeding Behavior Toward Molecular Understandings: Silkworm Feeding Behavior
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Artificial Silkworm Diets Artificial Silkworm Diets
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Re-engineering Sericulture with Artificial Food Re-engineering Sericulture with Artificial Food
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Discussion Discussion
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8 A Matter of Taste: Making Artificial Silkworm Food in Twentieth-Century Japan
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Published:August 2021
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Abstract
It is largely understood that the silkworm, Bombyx mori, eats the leaves of the mulberry plant exclusively. In practice, many silkworms reared in industrial, laboratory, and hobbyist conditions today can also eat “artificial food.” Such food, compounded from powdered mulberry, starch binders, and nutritional substances such as soybean extract or purified amino acids, is often used where mulberry is absent or when the production of protein-rich larvae is favored over silk cocoons. The development of silkworm nutritional physiology, motivated by biological inquiries into silkworms’ diets, occurred within the context of food-rationing and searches for human food alternatives during Japan’s imperial expansionist agenda and nation-building projects of the 1930s. Mulberry shortages in Japan and increased production of soybeans in Manchuria propelled research on silkworm food substitutions and silkworm feeding behaviors during the interwar and postwar periods. This history of making artificial silkworm food stresses the continuity of research spanning prewar and postwar Japan. This analysis also illustrates a broad set of political, economic, and technological issues that motivated biological experimentation, especially as races to industrially engineer artificial feeding media coincided with new genetic analyses of the picky feeding behaviors of silkworms—and how to change their natures.
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