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Bias: "Chinese eat everything"

刘嘉 biasbreaker 2022-11-28

"Chinese eat everything" seems to be an inherent impression. How did this prejudice come about? What are the facts? Do Chinese people use health ingredient to cook food? Today, I would like to take you to trace the bias of Chinese ingredient culture.

Origin of the bias

Since China started to contact with the West, many western travelers have written about their observations on Chinese food in travelogues and notes. The Franciscan friar Freir Aldrick, who lived in China for three years in the 1420s, specifically recorded Chinese eating snakes. The Dominican monk Gaspar Cruz toured China in 1556 and spoke of Chinese eating dog meat. Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit priest who came to China in 1583, said that Chinese eat bird's nest. Baptiste Duhede, who published the General Journal of the Chinese Empire in 1736, said that Chinese not only eat horse meat and dog meat, but also cat meat and rat meat. In the Brief Collection of Jesuits, published from 1743 to 1762, English missionaries also mentioned that Chinese eat frogs.

In modern times, the spread of this prejudice has further expanded. John Davis, who became governor of Hong Kong, introduced Chinese cooking in a book published in 1848, specifically emphasizing that Chinese poor people eat not only cat and dog meat, but also mouse meat, and pork is the most consumed, and the cured stinky fish seems to be very Chinese taste. John Henry Gray, the vice governor of Hong Kong, also wrote a book describing what he saw and heard while walking in Guangzhou, specifically mentioning that when he walked past a restaurant selling dog meat and cat meat, he could see cat meat, dog meat and garlic fried in a frying pan, and some parts of China also eat rats, which is said to help treat hair loss.

In 1890, the American missionary Arthur Smith published the book "The Character of Chinese", which was very influential, and was reprinted four times in ten years, and it made a lot of defamatory attacks on Chinese and eating habits, saying that Chinese never carefully selected food, and did not fear the cause of death of animals, including dead cats and dead dogs. Since the 1850s, Chinese restaurants in the United States have been subjected to great discrimination, with some newspaper repeatedly insulting Chinese rats and lizards, and saying that Chinese immigrants had brought filth and disease.

These introductions have certainly influenced Westerners' understanding of Chinese food, as the American missionary Wells Williams once mentioned: This type of illustration often appears in American geography textbooks—baskets containing Chinese's favorite odd flavors of food or strings of rats, as if this were the daily food of Chinese. Western tourists who are affected by this will ask the locals if they eat these animals when they arrive in China, and when they get an affirmative answer, they will form a concept that this is the common thing for Chinese.

To this day, many Chinese students are asked if they eat dog meat and bugs regularly, and Western prejudices about Chinese food ingredients remain. As early as 2002, the British newspaper "Daily Mail" published an article attacking Chinese food, titled "Chop Phooey!", which described the Chinese diet as the most deceptive food, explained from the perspective of foreigners, probably they never knew what was clipped on their chopsticks, Chinese dared to eat anything, "dodgiest in the world, created by a nation that eats bats, snakes, monkeys, bears’ paws, birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, ducks ’tongues and chickens’ feet.”

Break down the bias

In fact, the most important ingredients on the Chinese dinner table are very common. According to the 2021 meat supply and demand report, pork, poultry, mutton and beef are the most important meat ingredients in China, seafood and vegetarianism account for a relatively small proportion, and people who eat insect, dog, cat, mouse, etc. are very few and cannot even be counted. The hype in the Western media contains many elements of distortion and exaggeration. For example, "eating dog meat" only exists in a few areas, more than 60% of Chinese oppose eating dog meat, and many people who do not oppose it have not eaten. In northern China, most people cannot accept eating insects, while in the south, only a few nutritious insects will become local specialties, but they will never become home-cooked.

Each region has its own food culture, which depends on the natural conditions and history of the region. China has a vast territory, a large population, diverse climatic terrain, and a long history, and naturally there will be some unique food cultures. However, "Chinese eat everything" is still a bias that judge a person as totally.

To give an example:

Chinese loves dog meat.

People in China's Guangxi province love to eat dog meat.

People in Yulin, Guangxi Province, China love to eat dog meat.

and

Europeans love to eat stinky herring.

Nordics love to eat stinky herring.

Swedes love to eat stinky herring.

(Sweden's national population is on the same order of magnitude as Yulin)

I would like to take another example of eating animal offal.

In China, Confucius went out of his way to prescribe the standard of "seven no-food": if the food is spoiled, do not eaten; If the color is not right, do not eat; Odorous, do not eat; Half-cooked, do not eat; If food does not adapt to the season, do not eat; Cutting or Slicing is not fine, do not eat; If the seasoning is not used correctly, do not eat it. Confucius's living standard at that time should belong to the middle and lower classes of the social class, in fact, he advocated a "simple and thin" style of life, allowing people to eat grains and fresh fruits and vegetables, which is somewhat similar to the concept of healthy diet advocated by Chinese now.

Influenced by Confucian culture, the diet of the Chinese people before the Northern Song Dynasty was still very restrained. In the Song Dynasty, people began to eat animal’s offal, the reason is that the food culture at this time developed to a peak. At this time, wealthy people began to think about eating something fresh, and coupled with the extraordinary maturity of the cooking techniques of the Song Dynasty, people began to focus on animal’s offal. Another reason is that a medical scientist in the Tang Dynasty's, Sun Simiao, put forward the Chinese medicine views of "complementing the shape with the shape", and Chinese began to eat the internal organs of animals for health, and the offals have since entered the menu of the court cuisine. Judging from the history of eating animal offal, it shows the maturity of Chinese food culture and its broad and profound spirit.

In European history, people also ate offal, and the lack of food in Europe continued until the 17th century, after which Europeans began to generally abstain from eating animal offal. During World War II, in order to save money, the US government called on people to eat beef offal, when "tripe sandwiches" and "beef heart burgers" swept the United States. To this day, many national diets still retain traces of the history of the time, such as the English beef loin pudding, the Italian tripe sandwich, the Spanish tripe soup and the king of Scotland's Haggis (chop up the heart, lungs, liver, etc. of the sheep's internal organs, mix them with onions and other ingredients, and stuff them in a sheep's stomach).

In today's "three major delicacies of the world", foie gras and caviar are both the offal of animals. Why do The French eat foie gras is "tall", Chinese eat lamb liver, duck liver, beef liver, pork liver, etc. is "incomprehensible"? Caviar is actually sturgeon roe, and in Western cultural it has more noble status. Why Westerners spoon dozens of "sturgeon baby" and swallowed is noble, while Chinese eating a head of fish is very cruel?


This kind of incomprehensible questioning is not actually a scientific or health problem, but an attitude problem. The basis for determining the elegance of food is not the nature of the ingredients themselves, but the subjective views of human beings in the formation of history and culture. That is to say, there is no distinction between noble and normal food, but people who eat food should divide the ingredients into varies ranks according to their own preferences.

Therefore, we must look at the problem objectively, avoid being affected by the exaggeration of some unfair media platform, respect the cultures of different nationalities, and see the world with our own eyes.

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