Perhaps eating certain animals should be curtailed (I'm no expert) as long as it doesn't result in low protein intake. But, the anti-China sentiment is xenophobic.
Interesting. Source?
Pretty much all serious pandemics started in some other species of mammals, and then transferred to humans. Examples: SARS, bird flu, ebola, hiv, spanish flu.
(I agree that blaming Chinese culture for the problem is xenophobic nonsense though.)
It's bizarre to Americans that _some_ Chinese are eating bats[1] and snakes[2]. It's bizarre to Chinese that _some_ Americans are eating alligators[3][4], bears and frogs.
It is human nature to explore and try new things including animals for food. If one has known better, maybe it's better to educate others what are good/bad food sources, with proofs.
Mutual discrimination based on sensational news and locally-biased "common sense" are not making the world a better place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_as_food [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_soup [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_meat [4] https://youtu.be/V-mJ0UWfxno?t=266
Implying there are 'correct' animals to consume
[1] https://www.bds.org.uk/index.php/advice-education/why-manage...
Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.
That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. China has as much culinary diversity as geographic regions with smaller countries. If you throw it all in one pot, you might end up with "anything and everything", but almost nobody would eat all that.
If it looks as if there was such a thing as "Chinese food", then only because the majority of early Chinese immigrants to North America came from only four counties in Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyi , establishing a standard for Chinese restaurants that later ones had to follow to seem "authentic".
"Weird" food is generally confined to regional delicacies. E.g. 土笋冻 (sipunculid worm jelly) is pretty much only made in Quanzhou in Fujian, even though the worms it's made of can be found elsewhere. (The Chinese Wikipedia article mentions they actually have to import them now because the local stock suffered from pollution.) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E7%AC%8B%E5%86%BB
Kinda like the swine flu?
The only position you can safely hold is to not eat meat. A weaker position could be around the sanitation and care of stock and its preparation. But what you eat doesn’t matter, be it pig or dog or squirrel or bat.
And I'm not trying to make an argument about "the west", it's just about specific animals and ways to get them.
If the threshold is: has caused pandemic, then swine is off the table, pun intended.
Now, that statement assumes that some animals have higher risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans than others, and if you disagree with that then you'll disagree with the statement, but the statement itself was not an argument about that point. Subsequently we have further argued about that specific point. I don't believe that decisions about which animals to consume should be based on cultural factors as you assume, but rather I believe that it should be based on relevant science (not simply "has this specific animal caused a global pandemic in recent history"). I believe that science does not support the idea that all animals or animal procurement practices have identical risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans. Therefore I support the idea of restricting consumption of some animals, especially wild ones (including some currently consumed in the US), and reject the idea that this is simply "closed minded".
Unfortunately the inclusion of the single word "Chinese" in my original comment has blinded everyone to the argument I was making, despite the fact that it was simply a response to the parent comment. It would have been a better comment, and made the same point, without the word "Chinese" in it. Please strike that word from my original comment and read it again.
This is disingenuous. That was nothing like this pandemic.
Don’t say seat belts don’t matter for us because the other car was a hatchback instead of a pickup. They were both still car accidents.