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Embarrassment and wild caught meat

circumstantial food avoidance in China after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic
Embarras et viande capturée dans la nature : évitement alimentaire circonstanciel en Chine après l’apparition de la pandémie de COVID-19
Chenyu Zong

Abstracts

In the initial COVID-19 pandemic, much speculation was made about what, exactly, Chinese appetites involved, and whether Chinese had a penchant for sourcing and consuming wild caught meat. Accusations abounded, principally (but not exclusively) from the West, as well as from inside China itself. An old adage resurfaced: Chinese people will eat anything. This paper examines how this old saying is responded to in China in ways that became important to national pride during COVID-19. I found Chinese eaters as a collective are not as much co-transgressors bound in collective embarrassment against their countryfolk as they are bound together, eaters of wild meat or not, by the intensity of the judgement of those beyond China, from the Western world. It is to this audience that China principally performs its adherence to the state-declared norm of avoidance of wild meat.

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Introduction

  • 1 This anthropological study was carried out during the spread of COVID-19 from January 2021 to June (...)

1During the initial outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic1, a video of a Chinese woman tucking into a bowl of bat soup whipped around the internet. It was a bad time for a Chinese person to be eating a bat on social media; the video played right into the narrative that Chinese preferences for wild meat had caused the pandemic. The bat eater herself, Mengyun Wang, apologized online for the video, and clarified that the footage had been shot in Palau, a south Pacific Island. She explained that she’d eaten the dish as part of a unique local travel experience. She revealed that the bat was one raised specifically for consumption and was a daily dish for local people (O’ Neill 2020). Her explanation did little to quell the notion that COVID-19 had its root cause in wild animal consumption in China, a notion that was widespread both within and beyond China and especially across the Western world. For instance, U.S. Senator John Cornyn remarked, “China is to blame because it is a culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that” (see Shepherd 2020: n.p.). The underlying presumption of this and a plethora of other similar remarks is that Chinese people do not have any food taboos that would serve to govern their unbridled culinary enthusiasm. The inclusion of dogs in the remark indicates that Chinese people eat way too far into category of “domestic” for Western sensibilities; dogs are “companions” or “working animals” in the West and do not occur in the edible category. In Chinese classificatory systems, dogs can be beloved pets and appear on the menu. The inclusion of bats indicates that Chinese people eat way too far into the category of “wild” for Western sensibilities, too. Certainly, eating wild caught meat is a practice carried out in the West; deer, pheasant and game fish for example are luxury foods found in top end restaurants. These animals are all also farmed, reducing the distance between “wild” and “domestic” animals. While bats are not farmed in China, other animals that Westerners would also likely classify as inedible, like porcupines and bamboo rats, are farmed. Knowing that rats are farmed is highly unlikely to make Western audiences more comfortable with their consumption – probably about as comfortable as they might be with having dogs belong in both “pet” and “edible” categories. The proscriptions that make animals and the humans who eat/do not eat them understandable for insiders are often baffling for outsiders (see Douglas 1966; Leach 1964). The consumption of wild animals in China came under intensive scrutiny when the outbreak of COVID-19 was connected to the practice in Wuhan. The practice did not sit comfortably against Western norms of consumption, and what Ingold (2000) describes as the Western tendency to separate domesticated from wild animals, part of what he says is a broader narrative about bringing nature under control. This narrative asserts that the wild-domestic divide is akin to the nature-culture divide (Descola 2013). In China, both wild and domestic fit into the larger framework of the social system (see Campbell 2018); bats, dogs and porcupines are good to eat.

2In response to the emergence of the pandemic and strong Western reactions to China’s apparent role in the outbreak, the Chinese state acted to ban the consumption of many wild-caught animals. One impetus to do so came from the need for China to respond to outside accusations about its role in the rise of COVID-19. I am particularly interested in how prohibitions and taboos have played to external audiences to preserve the reputations of Chinese eaters – and China more broadly. Here, embarrassment plays a central role. I use Hertzfeld’s (2016) insights to understand the internal and external workings of embarrassment, and the relationships it founds between China and Western “audiences” in the context of the pandemic.

Chinese people eat EVEYTHING! (?)

3In the memoirs of his trip to Guangzhou in 1832 the American diplomat Edmund Robert described Chinese people as “gross gluttons”, noting that, “everything that will supply the place of food, whether of the sea, or the land, and articles most disgusting to other people, are by them greedily devoured” (Robert 1837:151). This impression of indiscriminate Chinese eating habits has barely diminished in the intervening years since Roberts’ memoirs; a cursory look on Google is replete with questions: is there any food Chinese people won’t eat?2 and Why do Chinese people eat everything?3 Memes abound too; in a research article entitled “Bat Meat and Chinese Identity”, Patgiri (2020) pays special attention to two conjoined images emerging after the May 2020 locust plague in India to demonstrate how China’s eating habits are typically depicted (see https://imgflip.com/​i/​43oan7). One image shows a locust plague that hit India, where the skies teem with winged insects. The other depicts Chinese people plucking the locusts from the sky with chopsticks and feasting on them. The first image is accompanied by the text: “Locust attack in other countries”. The second reads, “When locust enter China”. Patgiri (2020) notes that this meme is a typical representation of a nation of people who are thought of as indiscriminate eaters.

4This isn’t just a depiction with which international audiences are familiar. There is a popular joke within China itself about Cantonese food choices that goes like this: “they eat anything that has four legs other than a table, and anything that flies other than an airplane”. As a Chinese person, I’ve heard this joke many times. And, as a Chinese person living in Australia now, I have been subject to this question from curious non-Chinese people. At drinks after the weekly Higher Degree Research Anthropology Student Seminar at the Australian National University in 2019 when I was a student there, I was asked by a fellow PhD candidate, Jason, whether Chinese people eat everything. To remove any offense I might have taken at the query, Jason explained the reason for his question. When he had asked his undergraduate students in a tutorial to share food customs in their hometown, a Chinese student had said, “we eat everything”. This answer aroused Jason’s curiosity, but due to the time limitations of the tutorial, he did not receive any further explanation of what “everything” might actually mean. Other colleagues present at the gathering were interested in Jason’s question, and they all turned their attention to me – the only Chinese person there – to hear my answer. Their interest was also likely informed by the fact that, at that time, my PhD research was on hairy tofu – a fermented food with white cultured mould growing on the surface that is a popular health food in Huangshan, China. Hairy tofu was a good example of the notion that Chinese people would eat anything, even mould. Hairy tofu wasn’t something anyone had come across in Australia, and the idea of eating mouldy bean curd seemed very odd to my fellow students. So too did the idea of eating chicken feet, pigs’ livers, kidneys and brains; these parts, my friends had heard, were routinely eaten by Chinese people but were certainly not everyday ingredients they would consider using.

5While I knew it would not serve as a complete or very satisfying explanation, I carefully responded that the difference between Australian preferences and Chinese eating was perhaps usefully conceived of as parts versus wholes: only certain parts of animals are considered as food here, and compared with that, I considered suggesting that Chinese people eat more of the whole, perhaps. But even that would not be quite right; as I say later in this paper, while we Chinese may eat chicken feet, other parts of the bird are routinely avoided. I knew my explanation would be troublesome in that way, and that it would also not cover the broad range of animals that make it to Chinese tables that would never make it to an Australian dining table. It was more than a little daunting to explain foodways that I knew would be repulsive to my friends. I settled for an explanation that relied on the idea that Chinese people did indeed observe food taboos and began to explain how yin-yang principles worked, how potent animal parts can be, and the notion of “biteability”.

Yin-Yang food avoidances

6There is an enduring investment on the part of Chinese people in Yin-Yang, and its maintenance of balance of the body, the humours, of life (see for example Wang 2013; Mathews 1983). Yin refers to “repressive and inhibitory factors”, and yang refers to “active and aggressive factors” (Yan et al. 2020 : 384). A body that is of yin-yang balance is healthy (Yan et al. 2020) and the yin-yang balance of an individual body can be profoundly influenced by consuming foods that influence this balance. Foodstuffs are classified as hot and cold, and the intake of either temperature can influence the balance of a consuming body. For example, although frozen drinks and ice creams are quite popular for cooling down during hot summer periods, these foods are replete with yin qualities that could easily put a consumer’s body out of yin-yang balance. The consequences could be dire; a body out of balance is one at high risk of illness. Particularly vulnerable are females. If a woman has recently given birth or is menstruating, she would typically take pains to avoid drinking frozen water or eating ice-cream, no matter how blazingly hot the summer day. These kinds of temperature-based avoidances, intended to keep the body in a mean condition and to avoid extremes that upset median balances, are widespread in China (Wang 2013). All food is attributed either yin or yang value according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, and people generally eat in accordance with the principle of maintaining this balance. Such everyday observances can be regarded as food taboos in very general sense (Dang n.d.), which is consistent with the functional structuralist approach that the pursuit of yin-yang balance indicates a pursuit of order (Levi-Strauss 1969).

Potent parts and “biteability”

7Alongside this principle of generalised balancing, exist values and qualities assigned to particular parts of food animals that are considered to contain or concentrate dangerous elements of an animal. This potency is also drawn into practices of Traditional Chinese Medicine when, for example, those qualities lacking or missing in a person’s body might be provided by animal means. The blood of certain animals is considered a good tonic for humans so that, for example, anaemic people and women who have recently given birth are encouraged to have pork blood soup to enrich and replenish their own depleted blood. In addition, people might eat animals’ brains to boost their own; likewise, lamb’s kidney – a common dish of Chinese-style barbeque – is supposed to invigorate consumers’ kidneys. These direct relationships between body parts and their benefits are reflected in language: “chi nao bu nao”, “chi shen bu shen”. Chi means eat, nao means brains, bu means enrich or nourish, and shen means kidney.

8More commonly, the notion that certain parts of animals contain harmful concentrations makes for a series of routinely observed food avoidances. While in general one could say that Chinese people make more comprehensive use of the entirety of a chicken that people might do in Australia, it is in fact uncommon for people to eat what I’ll coyly term “chicken butts”, because they are widely believed to cause cancer. Likewise, chicken necks are considered a pathogenic part by many consumers; they contain the lymph node, where the chicken itself would store dangerous illness geneses. Chicken wing tips – the very edge of the animal’s lateral body – are also frequently avoided in some regions; that part is thought likeliest to be where toxins dwell, safely away from the heart of the bird.

9Chicken butts are always avoided in my (and my family’s) dietary practices, but when I took a short holiday in Dali, Yunnan province without my parents, I did venture to taste a chicken butt kebab, as part of a culinary tour I had taken. My friend Dazhuang admonished me for my initial reluctance, telling me it was “ji qiao” (instead of ji pigu – the name given to chicken butts in Mandarin), a local delicacy that I must try. He handed me a kebab and encouraged me to have a taste. I took the first bite tentatively, found it delicious – just like grilled chicken meat with spicy and sweet sauce – and I needed no further encouragement to finish the remaining food. Later, though, I was shocked, a little bit disgusted, and found it hard to calm myself. “It is not a big deal”, I constantly told myself. “Ok, so I ate something forbidden. I am here to experience local tastes, and this is one of them”. As Dazhuang further explained, if I categorized chicken butts as something exotic – an authentic local taste – in my trip to Yunnan province rather than something I should not eat, consuming a chicken butts kebab would be “just a try”, not something I would do in my ordinary life back home in Hebei province. The experience brought home to me that no matter how I tried to rationalise it in his terms, I experienced the micropolitics of my choice to taste – my body registered just how wrong the food felt, and I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth or out of my mind.

10Even more specific than the location of toxins and disease sites in the animal body is the particular relationship between the mouth and the food. This is a major category of food avoidance and leads to a wide range of edible material being rejected as unsuitable for consumption. It is very common in China, for example, for significant portions of KFC breast fillet to remain in the famous bucket; the moistness of the mouth and tongue is not matched by the dryness of a chicken breast fillet; among both my informants and my family and friends, it’s the least favoured chicken part to order. Legs are much better and do not require the awkward navigation between wet and dry. Another version of the mismatch between the mouth and the potential foodstuff recently circulated on Chinese social media platforms. A photo was uploaded, depicting a bowl of bat soup. Millions of Chinese net citizens immediately questioned the “bite-ability” of the dish, and indicated their reluctance to eat the dish, as my informants’ comments below indicate:

I have looked at the picture of this bat soup for a long time, but I still cannot find a place to bite it. How can those eaters take a bite?” (Informant Lulu 2020).

Who can tell me which part of bats are designed for eating?” (Informant Wangyu 2020).

Bats have already tried their best to be too ugly to be eaten, why do those people still eat them?” (Informant Lixia 2020)

11These comments all distinguished bats from something edible – bats are not food. Douglas (1966) might explain this by recourse to the impurity of bats. As Douglas (1966) notes, in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy, based on “the general command: ‘Be holy, for I[the Lord] am holy’” (Douglas 1966 : 53), Israelites are taught the distinction between holiness and abomination – “holiness is the attribute of Godhead. Its root means ‘set apart’” (Douglas 1966 : 49). Douglas (1966) remarks, “holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused…holiness means keeping distinct the categories of creation. It therefore involves correct definition, discrimination and order” (Douglas 1966 : 53).

12The dietary rules regulating what could be eaten by Israelites clearly classified animals, as Douglas (1966) summarizes: “in general the underlying principle of cleanness in animals is that they shall conform fully to their class. Those species are unclean which are imperfect members of their class, or whose class itself confounds the general scheme of the world…. Any class of creatures which is not equipped for the right kind of locomotion in its element is contrary to holiness.” (Douglas 1966: 55)

13According to this standard of classification, bats are identified in both Lev. xi and Deut. xiv as “abominable things” that Israelites shall not eat (Douglas 1966 : 41-43). Bats are “anomalous” (Douglas 1966 : 56) because they have wings flying like a bird in the air as well as they give birth like other mammals on the earth; in other words, “they are not fully bird-like” (Douglas 1966 : 57) nor fully mammal-like. Bats are thus inedible as a creature that “cuts across the basic classification” (Douglas 1966 : 56).

14Certainly, the rejection of bat consumption expressed by my informants is not derived from rules in Lev. xi and Deut. xiv, but it embodies a similar principle of classification. The inedibility of bats expressed in these comments is closely associated with the appearance of bats – there is no place for biting an animal that looks like a bat. Similar discussions on the “bite-ability” are commonly found in terms of the consumption of meat with skin on. In the consumption of meat (i.e., fried chicken), if there is hair or feather detected on the skin, only the hairless, featherless part is considered “biteable”. Likewise, in the consumption of fish (such as braised whole barramundi), if there is scale detected on the skin, it is usually not biteable. As Levi-Strauss (1969) notes, food practices illustrate the binary opposition between the raw and the cooked and between food and non-food. Cooking is a practice in which nature is transformed and delimited and in which the raw is culturally transformed into the cooked (Levi-Strauss 1969). According to this primary binary opposition, both hair and scale on the skin of the cooked are “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966 : 35), which fundamentally challenges the boundary between the culture and the nature, as well as the cooked and the raw (Levi-Strauss 1969).

Reconsiderations of Jason’s question

15At the onset of the pandemic, I reconsidered Jason’s question. The question took on new meaning in a context where the notion that Chinese eating habits, and particularly a preference for eating wild animals, was responsible for the rise of a frightening new virus that would profoundly impact the world. The question gave me pause to consider, anthropologically, the responses that have been made within China to longstanding popular opinion about unbridled Chinese appetites in a new and dangerous context. This reconsideration goes beyond the original query that Jason put to me to consider the judgements of others, and how Chinese people responded to them as their food choices came under intense scrutiny at the onset of the pandemic.

16Alongside notions of balance, the avoidance of toxic animal parts, and biteability, another kind of food avoidance is also commonly practiced in China, one of circumstantial avoidance. Activated in response to particular conditions, this kind of food avoidance is made to preserve valuable relationships with powerful others. This kind of food avoidance spans long historical time in China, and it is my argument that it has once again been operationalised in response to Western condemnation of Chinese foodways and eating practices in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

17According to descriptions provided in Youyang Zazu, a book written by Chengshi Duan in the 9th century during the Tang dynasty (618-907), people were not permitted to consume carp. In Chinese, carp is called liyu (yu translates to “fish” in English), while “li” has the same pronunciation as the Emperor’s surname (Duan 2012). Associated in this linguistic and symbolic way with the Emperor, eating carp would be akin to eating the Emperor, culinarily corrupting the relations of hierarchy in the everyday act of eating. Likewise, during a period in the Ming dynasty (1505-1521), slaughtering and consuming pigs was strictly forbidden since “pig” (zhu in Chinese) was the zodiac sign of the sitting Emperor, Houzhao Zhu.

18In modern China, such avoidances persist well past the end of the Feudalist period. According to my informant Xiaochen, everyone in her family knows not to eat animals that are the zodiac signs of family members; for example, the zodiac sign of her grandmother is the horse. Accordingly, no one in her family is allowed to eat horse meat. While horse meat is not frequently consumed in China, the same principle would stand if Xiaochen’s grandmother’s sign was any other of the animals represented in the Chinese zodiac. This practice maintains key familial relations of the mutual valuing of family members and flattens otherwise fairly sternly observed genealogical hierarchies; Xiaochen’s grandmother also has to avoid eating Xiaochen’s zodiac sign. Luckily for everyone’s culinary lives, Xiaochen’s zodiac is the rarely consumed monkey. In my family, only my zodiac sign – the rooster – is an animal frequently consumed by Chinese people on an everyday basis. This inconvenient zodiac assignation has not done anything to stop anyone in my own family from eating chicken, however. This does not mean that no one questions the appropriateness of this consumption. Every time I enjoy braised chicken meat – an essential dish of Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner in my family – my father will jokingly say, “how can a chicken love eating chicken so much?!” He and the other members of my family are aware of the inappropriateness of consuming my zodiac animal, but we are practical people and these things are variously observed depending on the family. Some things, though, are visited upon people from beyond their familial parameters and are not the subject of elasticity and family in-jokes. Sometimes, there is a lot at stake, as there was when Chinese foodways became the subject of intense international scrutiny and blame for the pandemic.

Cultural intimacy: COVID-19 and food consumption in China

19When the first confirmed COVID-19 cases were reported in Wuhan, a rumour began to circulate on social media platforms that the consumption of bats in Wuhan had caused the COVID-19 virus to emerge in humans (see Patgiri 2020). It was later revealed to be a piece of fake news, but the damage was done; Chinese people were identified as those who would eat anything – even bat – and wind up imperilling the whole world. This racial stereotyping, and that which precedes it on culinary basis, as Herzfeld (2016) points out, “reduce all the members of a population to a manageable iconicity” (Herzfeld 2016: 37) and has immense power to oppress and damage them. On 16th March 2020, Donald Trump posted a tweet calling COVID-19 “the Chinese Virus”. He wrote, “the United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!” (Gstalter 2020). Spurred on by this renaming of COVID-19, resultant damage took serious physical, economic and other forms (Gstalter 2020; Tvernise and Oppel 2021). Overseas-dwelling Chinese – whether natives to the areas in which they lived or, like me, living in them on visas or having emigrated to them, faced growing racist attacks. For example, a 26-year-old Chinese girl was shouted at and spat on by an American man in Washington on her way to the gym; in New York City, a Chinese woman with a facemask was kicked and punched in a Manhattan subway station, and in Syracuse, N.Y., a 30-year-old Chinese man was verbally abused at a Costco (see Tavernise and Oppel 2021, for these and numerous other examples). In America, Australia, and elsewhere across the West, thousands of Chinese restaurants experienced a sharp decline in business as frightened patrons stayed away in droves (Yeung 2020; Jackson 2020). These incidents and changing consumer behaviour amount to what Devakumar et al. (2020) describe as direct threats to the social bonds holding people of Chinese heritage to everyone else in the community.

20Inside China, where I was carrying out ethnographic fieldwork on COVID-19 as it unfurled, an interesting response was made to these blame-claims. I happened to be in Wuhan, apparent epicentre of the peril, where nobody I interviewed disputed the reliability or the truth of the claims that had been made about the genesis of the virus. My questions about what people ate there, and if they ate wild caught meat, were likely interpreted by my informants in a particular way. I am Chinese, but I am not native to Wuhan. I am sufficiently insider to put the question, “do you eat wild animals”, and have it answered in such a way that wildlife consumption is not denied, but I am not sufficiently Wuhan to have anyone admit to eating wildlife themselves. My informant Lixiang distinguished herself from people who ate wild animals, saying, “we are not the same”. Another informant, Bingjie elaborated: “No one has yewei [wild meat] here. Consuming yewei is not a part of our (local) culture. At least all people I know here never eaten wildlife. We are not interested in that.” “Remember? SARS was caused by someone in Guangdong province consuming Paguma Larvata. It is not surprising to know of someone eating something weird again, but I am pretty sure, it is not anyone I know” (informant Cailing 2022).

21There is a sense in these remarks that my informants knew about the consumption of wildlife but were uncomfortable saying much more about it to an outsider. Of course, it may well be that none of my informants had ever eaten any wildlife — but people I spoke with did consistently reference that people outside of their own immediate groups of associates might well have done so. This may be an expression of the kind of embarrassment that Michael Hertzfeld (2016) notes operates in circumstances of food consumption that are regarded by outsiders as shameful, but draws a group of insiders together in a taboo practice.

22For Hertzfeld (2016), embarrassment is “not solely personal feelings but describe[s] the collective representation of intimacy” (Hertzfeld 2016 : 11). Herzfeld (2016) uses the term “cultural intimacy” to refer to the recognition of those aspects of a “shared identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality” (Herzfeld 2016 : 7). This is “part of a cultural identity that insiders do not want outsiders to get to know yet that those same insiders recognize as providing them with a comfort zone of guiltily non-normative carryings-on” (Herzfeld 2013 : 491). As I will argue in what follows, “outsiders” are not always at great cultural, geopolitical, linguistic or physical distance from “insiders”, such as “Chinese” and “Western” eaters – the intimate relations of embarrassment might operate within all of these categories.

23The responses my informants made to me, a person not from Wuhan where eating wild animals is practiced (Xiao et al. 2021), might indicate that they had found a way to disengage themselves from a sense of embarrassment, shame and guilt shaped by the blame apportioned to some Wuhan eaters for the pandemic. Their reactions might be considered in light of scholarship on the matter, which readily attests that wild animals of a broad diversity are very regularly traded and consumed in China and are generally thought of as more nutritious and much better tasting than animals raised in commercial contexts (Lin 2021; Volpato et al. 2020; Aguirre et al. 2020). Their medicinal qualities are also highly valued (Zhu and Zhu 2020; Wit et al. 2022). And, wildlife consumption is also often a kind of conspicuous consumption, used by rich consumers to flaunt their wealth and high social status (Volpato et al. 2020; Aguirre et al. 2020). Conversely, wild sourced meat is a crucial dietary supplement for the poor, who might make up a significant portion of their protein requirements from this source when they can procure it for themselves as a function of living proximally to forests (Hoffman and Cawthorn 2012; Lin 2021; Liu et al. 2020). Wildlife sources are also valued as “traditional” and a crucial part of operationalising what it means to be a traditional Chinese person; this is what the phrase kao shan chi shan, meaning “eating what is in the mountain when you live in/close to the mountain”, means (Lin 2021). China, however, is a diverse nation and at the same time as these various valuings of wild caught meat operate, so too does a distinction between it and “normal meat”, which the majority of Chinese people consume on a daily basis (Lin 2021; Lunstrum et al. 2021).

Embarrassment before Western outsiders

24Across China there is a keen awareness of and embarrassment about what people outside of China think of eating wildlife. When Chinese and especially Wuhan people were accused of causing COVID-19 as a result of their eating preferences, top-down measures were immediately adopted. On February 24, 2020, the 16th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Thirteenth National People’s Congress adopted The Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on a Complete Ban of Illegal Wildlife Trade and the Elimination of the Unhealthy Habit of Indiscriminate Wild Animal Meat Consumption for the Protection of Human Life and Health (referred to as “The Decision” in the following). The Decision officially defined ordered and disordered eating. Chinese eaters were instructed by the state about what was fit and unfit for consumption, and idealized virtues and behaviours of individual consumers were also therein set out – a morally and culturally responsible Chinese person is one who is aware of the inedibility of wild animals and regards such consumption as taboo. Indeed, The Decision made the consumption of wild animals immediately illegal in China. As Chang (2020) notes, China’s decision to eliminate the consumption of wildlife at the start of the pandemic was a way to establish for external and particularly Western audiences that China is a responsible country not only in terms of pandemic responsibility, but also in terms of its appreciation of animals as beings deserving protection (Chang 2020). As Grace Gabriel, the Asia Regional Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, notes, this notion of protection of wildlife is inextricably intertwined with China’s external reputation as indiscriminate eaters of anything. In her words:

“What we need to note in particular is that this kind of large-scale trade and consumption of wildlife has never been part of Chinese “traditions” or “culture”. It is the disastrous and abnormal consequences of today’s highly-industrialized chain of wildlife poaching, smuggling, transportation, and trade. Those engaged in the business and buyers have never been the public at large but rather a minority of people! Ivory collectors, those who drink tiger bone wine, eaters of shark’s fin soup, wearers of tortoiseshell, those who hang up polar bear’s heads, not a single one of them is a regular consumer from the general public. It is a handful of Chinese people with their extravagant requirements that have brought such disgrace and blame, but it is the country that must foot the bill.” (Gabriel 2013: n.p.)

25The sense of embarrassment herein is not evoked by what most Chinese people actually do, but by their recognition of who they are as a part of the collective body. The consumption of wildlife like bats and its relationship to the outbreak of COVID-19 is not the first event that has given rise to the kind of embarrassment before external others that has made the Chinese state adopt measures to regulate its citizens’ behaviour. An online article entitled “Chinese Tourists Warned over Bad Behaviour Overseas” published in 2013 in The Guardian quoted Yang Wang, one of China’s four deputy prime ministers at that time, who remarked that Chinese tourists visiting Western countries, “speak loudly in public, carve characters on tourist attractions, cross the road when the traffic lights are still red, spit anywhere and [carry out] some other uncivilised behaviour. It damages the image of the Chinese people and has a very bad impact” (Branigan 2013 : n.p.). Wang instructed officials to provide formal guidance for Chinese citizens to follow while travelling abroad, which included the advice that Chinese tourists should “consciously obey social and public order and social morality, respect the local religions and customs, pay attention to their words and behaviour in the public, especially in the international environment, protect tourism resources and protect the environment” (Branigan 2013 : n.p.). This advice was required, according to Wang, because, Chinese citizens travelling overseas are “ambassadors for China’s image” (Branigan 2013 : n.p.).

26Herzfeld’s notes (2016) exemplify the close bond between the individual body and the national body that is referenced in the provision of such advice:

“Nation-states, especially new or fragile ones, are generally very touchy about the kinds of story their citizens tell the outside world and the impression they make on powerful countries, as the recent Chinese drive to get Chinese tourists to behave better while travelling abroad very clearly demonstrates. Yet citizens of virtually every country treat such efforts with cynicism even while they often adopt its structures – an apparent inconsistency that springs from the fact that, while they may not be very impressed by their leaders’ claims to moral hygiene, they would not wish to be singled out as the prime cause of a national humiliation. Rebellious adolescent offspring do much the same; nation-states – the majority – that have adopted the kinship idiom of identity can hardly claim never to have realized that it always contains the possibility of subversion from within.” (Herzfeld 2016:19)

The possibility of subversion from within

27I mentioned earlier that none of my informants might have ever eaten wild caught meat. I might have taken their answers at face value and drawn the conclusion that they simply had not partaken. This may indeed be so. However, they may still feel, keenly, the embarrassment associated with the outside impression of what Wuhan people eat, including the outside impression they may have thought I formed, as a city-dwelling, modern Chinese woman. Protestations and claims of never having had anything to do with wild caught meat might be thought of as a way for Chinese individuals, especially those who have never regarded wild animals as something to eat, might be able to escape the embarrassment that Herzfeld (2016) describes. This came home to me in June 2022, when I went to eat with one of my informants at the local food market in Wuhan, at her invitation. When we arrived at the entrance of the market, we saw a poster, prominently displayed on the wall declaring “a total ban is on the consumption of wild animals and there is a severe crackdown on illegal wildlife trade”. A hotline number was given on the poster, encouraging people to report any illegal occurrences or consumptions. It was so prominent that almost all customers entering looked at the poster when they passed by it – its position and size made it impossible to ignore. Similarly, on another visit accompanied by an informant to a famous restaurant of local speciality in the central part of Wuhan, I was immediately attracted to a large board beside the entrance. In the middle part of this board, it said “there are no wild animals or illegally harvested fish-catches served in this restaurant”. Everyone who entered this restaurant could read it and customers like me, who were waiting in line to be seated, were able to read it many times. It noted what was forbidden in the restaurant, shaping a collective, temporal-spatial taboo among consumers; every consumer there was involved as a practitioner of this taboo without doing anything other than making an order from the menu. My informant and co-consumer Xiaohui, a Wuhan local, told me “See! No one consumes them[wildlife]. I have already told you.” Xiaohui made this emotional response to the generalized accusations put to Chinese people about eating dangerously. Her protestation stood at odds with what others had told me: “we know people who eat wild meat, but we do not”.

28Avieli’s (2019) work describes male consumers in Hoi An, Vietnam, eating jungle meat, something that is expressly forbidden. Avieli (2019) describes how, when discovered consuming the forbidden meat, consumers feel an intense embarrassment arising from their knowledge that what they had done was socially and morally wrong. Their feelings, Alievi (2019) explains, are not simply individually experienced, but are based on collective consumptive practice that binds them to others who also consume the forbidden food. For Avieli (2019), cultural intimacy is shaped among these consumers of the forbidden, distinguishing them from others as co-practitioners of transgression.

29While there would almost certainly be repercussions for consumers of wild caught meat at the hands of the Chinese state, the situation for my Chinese informants differs as a result of the intensity of the accusatory gaze of outsiders beyond China. Chinese eaters as a collective are not as much co-transgressors bound in collective embarrassment against their countryfolk as they are bound together, eaters of wild meat or not, by the intensity of the judgement of those beyond China, from the Western world. It is to this audience that China principally performs its adherence to the state-declared norm of avoidance of wild meat, as expressed in The Decision.

Conclusion

30In the context of the accusations around the genesis of the pandemic and the spotlight that shone brightest on Wuhan, I recognised Xiaohui’s desperation, to be thought of as someone who ate “normally”. As Henderson (2011) notes, food is a principal marker of the identity of individuals and nations. I recognised it too as a fellow Chinese person, equally desperate to be understood as a normal eater in Australia. Many of my attempts to seem normal in my adopted home have involved nothing like embarrassment. For instance, the hot chocolate served in the campus’ café much favoured by my fellows is far too sweet for me. I cannot come at what seems to be a favourite for my Australian friends: sweet, mushy rice pudding. And, unwise to the European influences that have shaped South Australian tastes, I barely concealed my bafflement when I watched my colleagues dip fresh baked bread into olive oil, rather than just buttering it as I had thought was the right thing to do. These were small indications of my newness to eating locally in Australia, and I was treated gently until the pandemic drew my eating habits into the realm of close scrutiny, when I was no longer asked if Chinese people ate everything. I was accused instead of eating everything. The accusation of eating everything was made to China as a nation when the pandemic hit. The state made a response to what I have suggested herein is embarrassment, of the kind Hertzfeld (2016) describes. This embarrassment binds eaters of forbidden flesh together, but not in a bond of taboo consumption, as Avieli’s (2019) case suggests. The accusation put to China, that it caused the pandemic, has produced much more of a “tarred with the same brush” situation. China is a nation of indiscriminate eaters – even if only some few consume the bats or rats that provoke such disgust among Western observers. State actions such as The Decision might be seen as equally collective responses to Western accusations. It is to a Western audience that China performs its adherence to a prohibition on wild caught meat; a national response of collective embarrassment to its powerful accusers.

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Notes

1 This anthropological study was carried out during the spread of COVID-19 from January 2021 to June 2022. Data was gathered from 30 main male and female informants aged from 20-50 years. Due to restrictions on mobility in this period, I interacted with informants primarily via social media platforms, where rich conversations unfolded about what people were eating during lockdown, how they were getting food, what they missed and craved that they couldn’t get, and what was safe and dangerous to eat.

2 See https://www.google.com/search?q=is+there+any+food+Chinese+people+won%E2%80%99t+eat%3F&rlz=1C1GCEA_enAU1041AU1042&oq=is+there+any+food+Chinese+people+won%E2%80%99t+eat%3F+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyCAgAEEUYJxg5MgcIARAhGI8CMgcIAhAhGI8CMgcIAxAhGI8C0gEJMjY2OWowajE1qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

3 See https://www.google.com/search?q=Why+do+Chinese+people+eat+everything+%3F&rlz=1C1GCEA_enAU1041AU1042&oq=Why+do+Chinese+people+eat+everything+%3F&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg80gEJNDIyM2owajE1qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

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References

Electronic reference

Chenyu Zong, Embarrassment and wild caught meatAnthropology of food [Online], 18 | décembre 2024, Online since 07 December 2024, connection on 12 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/aof/14942; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12zm9

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About the author

Chenyu Zong

anthropology, The University of Adelaide, chenyu.zong@adelaide.edu.au

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