Immigrants have consistently been subject to this racist food rhetoric throughout American history. In 1883, the New York Times posed the question: “Do the Chinese eat rats?” It continued: “A large portion of the community believe implicitly that Chinamen love rats as Western people love poultry.” The piece in question discussed a slander suit in which a New York City doctor claimed “Chinamen” in New York City had “killed and cooked rats and cats in the yard” — a claim that the Chinese grocery owner in question vehemently denied.
Myths around immigrants and food have persisted in the American political canon. As Soleil Ho writes in the 2018 Taste piece “Do You Eat Dog?,” while some Asian cultures have indeed eaten dogs, it is an outlier of a practice, with most people seeing dogs in a pet-like way. Racist, antiquated narratives hold an outsized shadow over East and Southeast Asian communities in the West, with Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino people often subjected to allegations of eating dogs.
These racist tropes stem, in part, from the Chinese Exclusion Act, which curtailed entry of Chinese workers to the U.S. Passed in 1882, it’s considered a major turning point in the U.S. transitioning from a country with an open immigration policy to one with more restrictions. Tales of Chinese people eating rats and cats and of Chinese restaurants serving “mystery meat” — a bogeyman that pervades — represented growing skepticism about the country’s new additions. As with the rhetoric of immigrants “stealing” jobs today, the Chinese Exclusion Act was largely motivated by economic concerns about the influx of Chinese laborers taking jobs away from American workers.
In a chapter on dog meat in the book Dubious Gastronomy, Robert Ji-Song Ku writes about the cultural deployment of disgust: “The foods — and the people who eat them — we mutually find disgusting can be the source of a social bond that distinguishes the in-group (or our group) from the out group (or their group), a marker for not only preserving ethnic, racial, and class boundaries, but also creating new ones.” This is the political function of accusing immigrants of eating cats, dogs, rats, and whatever else a “good American” sees as beyond the pale.
Food has often been weaponized in this way. Just recall how Wuhan’s wet markets were discussed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when eating bats was often invoked as the cause for the outbreak; it’s a way to point blame and suggest that certain lives — lives of immigrants and people of color around the world — were worth less than others.