Commodification and Westernization: Explaining Declining Nutritional Intake in Contemporary Rural China ZHUN XU AND WEI ZHANG Despite China’s rapid growth in the past decade, Chinese rural residents suffer from a continuing decline of both calorie and protein intakes.We investigate the dramatic historical changes in nutritional intake in the Chinese countryside.There are two main explanations for the decline: first, the changing demographic and economic structure contributes to a lower demand for energy compared to traditional rural society; and, second, the rising cost of non-food essential goods could lead to a squeeze in the food budget. Using both national-level and provincial-level data, we find evidence for both factors.We further argue that the current abnormally low level of nutritional intake is mainly due to commodifica- tion in the context of diet westernization. Rural residents’ nutritional intake declines as they divert their consumption from relatively cheap sources of energy (grain and vegetable) to more expensive alternatives (meat and poultry) under a squeezed budget. The shocking failure of sustaining a healthy rural population is a unique manifestation of the contradic- tion in the Chinese agrarian relations. Keywords: decline in nutritional intake, commodification, westernization, rural, China INTRODUCTION China’s rapid growth in recent decades has been accompanied by a decisive increase in both real per capita income and food consumption. One of the easiest measures of Chinese people’s welfare is to look at what they have on the dinner table, because ‘food is heaven’, according to an old Chinese saying. In general, the Chinese have been rapidly moving from a plant-based to a meat-based diet in recent years (Zhai et al. 2014). Nowadays, China produces 500 million metric tons of grain and consumes even more, as it has recently become a major importer on the global food market (Xu et al. 2014). At the same time, however, China’s bon appétit seems not to be evenly shared amongst its population, at least in terms of nutrition. There is a secular declining trend in nutritional intake for the more than 600 million rural residents in China over the past decade. Figure 1 Zhun Xu, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Howard University, Washington, DC 20059, USA. Email: xuzhunjune@gmail.com. Wei Zhang (corresponding author), Assistant Professor, School of Labour and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China 100872. Email: wzhang12@ruc.edu.cn The authors would like to thank Henry Bernstein, Carlos Oya, HairongYan, JingzhongYe, Qian Zhang, the participants at the JAC special issue workshop at the China Agricultural University and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.This research receives the support of aYoung Faculty Research Grant from Renmin University of China. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 15 No. 3, July 2015, pp. 433–453. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd doi: 10.1111/joac.12119