Racism in the Chinese Food Scares
With the priority that the Chinese place on food in their culture, it's a shame that the recent food scares have been tinged with a hint of racism, says Jeff Yang in the Washington Post:
That's troubling, because it reinforces the notion that befouled food is the consequence of a foul culture. Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain may have said it best in a 2006 Salon interview in which he noted that there's "something kind of racist" about culinary xenophobia: "Fear of dirt is often indistinguishable from the fear of unnamed dirty people."
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2 Comments:
Thank you so much for posting this. The recent commentary on the Chinese food scares drove me mad, and I couldn't really articulate why. But Yang's article sums it up nicely.
toastykitten at 1:48AM on 07/18/07
Yes, thank you. I've been disappointed in the media for getting on this anti-Chinese bandwagon without anyone realizing that our own recently-maligned, heavy-lobbying industrial food machine has everything to gain by pointing its fingers at a foreign culprit.
Yang's point stands: US corporations are importing unregulated goods from China, because they want to lower their costs - and they certainly know the contamination risks. However, as we've seen, it's a win-win situation for corporate food interests: they get lower costs and a higher profit until the contamination outs itself, then they get to blame China, not their own greed, for the problem. The PR problem becomes another country (already suspect in many American eyes), not theirs.
Sure, a few people might get sick and die, but that is not the concern of corporate interests in this country - they only care about their bottom line.
producestories at 10:21AM on 07/18/07