Domestic Cookbooks and the Emergence of Female Culinary Authority in Twentieth-Century China

The MIT Press eBooks · 2025-03-04

Say no to bat fried rice: changing the narrative of coronavirus and Chinese food

UNC Libraries · 2025-07-11

The fear of Chinese food in the United States has risen with the advent of COVID-19, amidst widespread news reports pinpointing a wildlife wet market in Wuhan, China as the origin site of the novel coronavirus. Although scientific evidence for the exact pathway of zoonotic transmission is not yet conclusive, racist, anti-Chinese memes were quick to circulate, including a T-shirt design posted on social media by an art director at Lululemon, which featured an image of “bat fried rice” with the words “No Thank You” in chopstick font on the sleeves. It is important to address the facts of wildlife trade and consumption in China, but it is equally crucial to fight back against racist characterizations of Chinese food as “bat fried rice” with a different kind of Instagrammable image. I have taught an undergraduate seminar on the cultural history of Chinese food at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the past eight years, and this year, one of my students shared a photograph of a Chinese family celebrating the New Year in one of her assignments. This image distilled everything I associate with Chinese food— the joy of gathering with family—and stands as a powerful rebuke to the narrative of fear and disgust, replacing it instead with a vision of Chinese food as familiar source of comfort.

Rumor, Chinese Diets, and COVID-19

Gastronomica The Journal of Food and Culture · 2021 · 7 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History

As the coronavirus emerged as a global pandemic during early 2020, “ground zero” of the disease was initially named in the press as the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in the city of Wuhan, Hubei, in central China. With a population of over 11 million residents, and as a major transportation hub situated on the Yangtze River, Wuhan was placed under strict lockdown at the end of January by Chinese authorities, with severe restrictions on travel and movement. These efforts at containment proved too late to prevent the eventual spread of the virus around the world. The dramatic global impact of the virus has been all too painfully clear, yet the exact origins and zoonotic transmission pathway of the virus remain uncertain. Scientists suggest that SARS-CoV-2 probably jumped from horseshoe bats to an unknown intermediate animal vector, from which it spread to humans, but exactly how, where, and when this happened is still unknown (Cyranoski 2020).The social impacts of the coronavirus pandemic have not been limited to public health and the economy. Anti-Chinese bias incidents have been on the rise around the world, with President Trump and his supporters insisting on calling the coronavirus a “Chinese virus” or using the even more overtly racist epithet of “kung flu.” The idea that exotic Chinese eating habits and unhygienic wet markets are to blame for the coronavirus have led many around the world, including Australia’s prime minister and US congressional lawmakers, to call for a wholesale ban on all wildlife wet markets globally (Neuman 2020). More scurrilous versions of these anti-Chinese sentiments have also circulated on the internet, with claims that the Chinese eat raw bats and video footage of Chinese people, supposedly in Wuhan, eating “bat soup” (Rozsa 2020; Palmer 2020).What exactly is a wet market? Why are they so popular in China? Do Chinese people really eat bats and other wildlife? If so, why? Why don’t they ban these markets, when so many zoonotic diseases come from China? How might we think more critically about wildlife consumption, zoonotic diseases, and their relationship to our food supply? As Chinese food historians, we wanted to share our perspectives on these and other related questions with a broad public. On May 14, 2020, we held a public virtual panel discussion on “Rumor, Chinese Diets, and COVID-19: Questions and Answers about Chinese Food and Eating Habits,” with Miranda Brown (Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Chinese Studies, Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan), Wendy Jia-Chen Fu (Associate Professor, Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures, Emory University), and Michelle T. King (Associate Professor, History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Donny Santacaterina (doctoral candidate, History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) served as moderator. The panel was sponsored by the Carolina Asia Center and the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The opinions expressed here are the speakers’ own and do not represent the views of any other entity. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity; the full recording can be viewed at https://covid19asia.unc.edu/2020/05/234/.*****The first time I ever heard about civet was actually from my undergraduates talking about civet coffee. There is a cross-border civet trade, and civet coffee is something that rich people in New York and San Francisco can order from Amazon—you can get the cage-free variety. This is something I don’t see a lot of in Western media when we talk about how civet was linked to the SARS outbreak. Looking in the other direction hasn’t happened enough.We should be thinking hard about why people consume wildlife. It’s worth pointing out that some Westerners have reasons for preferring some wildlife to factory-produced meat. I have found writers who talk about wildlife as an ultimate form of free-range organic meat, and a sustainable food source (Schmitt 2015).We need to open our minds to what food can be. People need to get over the idea that Chinese food is weird because it is different. The Chinese consume meat and milk from a wide variety of animals (like yaks, for example). That is a wonderful thing. I’m worried that the breakneck pace of food industrialization will lead to less biodiversity and less variety in the diet. I don’t look forward to the day where there are only three meats on a Chinese table: pork, chicken, and beef. We don’t want China to feel like it needs to become like the US: a world of rubbery chicken breasts and hamburgers.What is really interesting about consumption patterns in China is that they are very, very highly regionalized. It’s much more common that people consume wildlife in southern China—it’s just historically been so. In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province in the South, when people answered the question, “Have you consumed wildlife in the past year?” 83 percent of the respondents said yes. That’s a quite high percentage. But in Beijing, in the north, less than 5 percent of the people said yes. Likewise, in Beijing, you find the highest level of people who think that wildlife should be entirely protected, versus in Guangzhou, which has the highest level of people who think that you can just use wildlife however you see fit. Wuhan is [geographically] somewhere in the middle between those two places.We also have to point out the class connection here. It’s not at all the case that Chinese people are so poor that they have to eat bats, as was suggested on Fox News (Rozsa 2020). Quite the opposite. Only people with money and power can consume these expensive creatures: they now have disposable income, and this is a way to flaunt what they can do with it. The contemporary wildlife trade is very much tied up in the political economy of China and its economic development in the post-Mao era.The closer you get to the wildlife trade, the more you see how complicated it is and how hard it is to regulate. As of February 24, 2020, China banned the wildlife trade for consumption—but only for eating. They didn’t ban its other uses, such as for traditional medicine, clothing, or decorative items. To me, the comparison is like the gun control debate in the United States. For outsiders looking at the US, they think, “How on earth can you tolerate living with all those guns?” But if you live here, you know that it’s complicated, and that there are a lot of powerful forces at work. Likewise in China, different people see the wildlife trade as part of their traditions, and corporate interests, powerful people, and money protect it—all of which make it very difficult to control. If you ban the wildlife trade, it’ll go underground and become an illegal trade. Overall, it’s a huge 73-billion-dollar industry, employing 14 million people (Su 2020). If they can’t work in the wildlife trade, you have to give them another option.This also underscores the way that only certain kinds of human-animal interactions are envisioned as “dangerous.” From what I’ve learned about climate change, the best thing you can do to cut down on your carbon emissions is to not eat beef, but we don’t really think about that as a human food choice with profound, long-term impacts in quite the same way as shutting down the Chinese wet markets.Now compare it to a page from Punch Magazine from Britain in 1858. It includes a caricature of a Mandarin with his long queue and a little boy holding it, and a poem with the stanza, “With their little pig-eyes and their large pig-tails, / And their diet of rats, dogs, slugs, and snails, / All seems to be game in the frying-pan / Of that nasty feeder, JOHN CHINAMAN” (“Chanson for Canton” 1858). So, this is nothing new to say that Chinese people eat everything, they don’t have any discernment, and will put anything in their mouths. I also want to point out that this particular magazine is from a period of conflict between China and the West during the Second Opium War [1856–60], which China fought against the British and the French. There is a lot more to be said about the larger political climate, because it really shapes how people think about Chinese food.That we should again see so much popular and political attention, especially during the initial outbreak period, directed towards the “nastiness” of Chinese eating habits means that this idea of the “unscrupulous stomach” has never gone away. It is a very old story. In the nineteenth century, interest in what Chinese people ate became more than simply a discussion of their eating habits: it was rather an index of their moral character—unscrupulousness in the sense of being unprincipled. These were people who didn’t follow the right kinds of rules. And I think we see that again today.Of course, all of these discourses are embedded in systems of power. I think much of what we’re seeing reflects at some basic level the fact that the Cold War hasn’t actually ended, at least not in East Asia. In East Asia, the Cold War persists in real, metaphoric, and institutional ways. Much of the rumormongering is actually coming from our governments, both American and Chinese. Take, for example, the Chinese rumor that the virus actually came from American military personnel who were in Wuhan participating in the Military World Games [or the American conspiracy theory that the virus was accidentally released, or perhaps even intentionally created, by a virology lab in Wuhan] (Myers 2020; Cyranoski 2020). We have the invocation of both nineteenth-century tropes of unscrupulous stomachs and 1950s Cold War rhetoric about political influence and domination.On a more positive note, I read a story about Lucas Sin, the chef of a chain in New York called Junzi. After hearing about all the negative press about Chinese food, he developed a distance dining delivery service, and the first meal was called “Chinese Food is Good for You” (Junzi n.d.). If you look at the menu, it’s chicken broth, lion’s head meatballs, yam, and osmanthus. I love that Asian American chefs are pushing back. They’re saying this is what Chinese food is, and it’s wonderful. There are ways that you can change the narrative so it’s not just about bat soup. If you want to show people what good Chinese food is, cook a meal and invite someone to share it. Take a picture of the next meal that your grandmother makes for you and post it on social media.

<i>The Other Milk: Reinventing Soy in Republican China</i>

East Asian Science Technology and Society An International Journal · 2021-10-02

2. Reforming Customs: Scholars and Morality

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

3. Seeing Bodies: Experts and Evidence

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

4. Saving Souls: Missionaries and Redemption

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

Special Issue on Chinese Culinary Regionalism: Introduction

Global Food History · 2020-05-03 · 1 citations

1. Deciding a Child’s Fate: Women and Birth

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

Say no to bat fried rice: changing the narrative of coronavirus and Chinese food

Food and Foodways · 2020 · 20 citations

• Sociology
• History
• Sociology

The fear of Chinese food in the United States has risen with the advent of COVID-19, amidst widespread news reports pinpointing a wildlife wet market in Wuhan, China as the origin site of the novel coronavirus. Although scientific evidence for the exact pathway of zoonotic transmission is not yet conclusive, racist, anti-Chinese memes were quick to circulate, including a T-shirt design posted on social media by an art director at Lululemon, which featured an image of "bat fried rice" with the words "No Thank You" in chopstick font on the sleeves. It is important to address the facts of wildlife trade and consumption in China, but it is equally crucial to fight back against racist characterizations of Chinese food as "bat fried rice" with a different kind of Instagrammable image. I have taught an undergraduate seminar on the cultural history of Chinese food at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the past eight years, and this year, one of my students shared a photograph of a Chinese family celebrating the New Year in one of her assignments. This image distilled everything I associate with Chinese food— the joy of gathering with family—and stands as a powerful rebuke to the narrative of fear and disgust, replacing it instead with a vision of Chinese food as familiar source of comfort.