Part 1 -- Do Chinese restaurants in the USA serve Dog and Cat meat to unsuspecting customers??
And, yes, you really should already know the answer.
Greetings, thanks for coming back.
This week marks a new approach. My goal is to grow readership substantially over the next year, and while I am at it increase paid subscriptions too. (Psst, please tell your friends about this publication and share it on social media if you think it’s good.)
But to do that, I have to have something that people really enjoy reading and will consider sharing with their friends. And that means, it has to be shorter and more focused. Traditionally, most substacks are about a 5-10 minute read probably and come out daily. Mine, by contrast, have tended to be about a half hour read and come up weekly. So this week, after doing what I usually do, I took my lengthy piece and literally cut it into six parts. Therefore, this week you should get a daily, short read on something related to Asian history and culture for the next week.
Consider it an experiment. We will see what happens.
Again feedback, likes, and comments are appreciated.
This illustration appeared in American Heritage magazine in their Fall 2017, Vol 62, No. 5 issue in an article on the history of Chop Suey with the following caption: “Chinese immigrants faced bigotry and humiliation from San Francisco to New York. In 1894 the St. Louis Republic published a cartoon of a Chinese man eating rat stew with one chop stick in each hand.”
Do Chinese Restaurants in the USA actually serve dog and cat meat to unsuspecting customers?
Oh my. I was going to avoid American politics in this forum, but it’s all just “so very, very,” as the Valley Girls allegedly used to say. Tuesday night I was watching the debate, and, lo and behold, there it was, on my TV, Donald Trump ranting away about immigrants eating pets despite a total lack of evidence. When called on it, he cried, “I saw people talking about it on TV,” without naming the time, channel, or television program. It was a decidedly odd and completely unpresidential moment, but arguably not something that belongs in a project called “Mostly Asian History.” I planned not to mention it here.
Then a strange thing happened. Multiple people in person or in social media said “But it might be true. After all, the Chinese eat dogs and cats, you know.”
Therefore, with a groan and a sigh of resignation, this week’s subject is do Chinese restaurants in the United States and similar countries secretly serve dogs and cats to unsuspecting customers? This, it seems, is an important subject at the moment. This is the first of four scheduled pieces on the subject and you should get one from now until Wednesday. (As stated this daily but shorter format is an experiment. Please let me know what you think, and we will see if I can keep it up.)
Now I will not write about two related subjects, at least not in any depth. The first is “do Chinese in China eat dogs and cats?” (yes, but only rarely on special occasions) and the second is “do non-Chinese people in East Asia eat dogs and cats?” (yes, but not regularly or very often and not as a staple item in anyone’s diet.)
Let’s begin with background on how people choose the meat in their diet. Hint, a lot of it depends on ecology and economics.
Some history.
Long, long ago, in prehistoric times, people roamed around and ate what they found. They did not raise animals for food as this was not something people knew how to do back then. Instead, they killed, hunted, and ate wild animals around them. In such a case, naturally, if a person saw a wolf or a coyote or, yes, a dog of some kind, and if they were able to kill it and eat it, then it would make sense to do so, especially if you and your family were hungry and needed protein and calories.
So, at the time, canines were pretty much part of most humans’ diets as was pretty much every other animal they could catch.
Then, someone discovered that it was possible to catch live animals and raise them in captivity. Killing and eating a captive animal that is tied to a post or fenced in an area is a lot easier than catching, killing, and eating a wild animal, and requires less work and calorie expenditure. And successful human diets move in a direction where the consumers absorb calories instead of expending them. Think in terms of economics. Gaining calories is good, burning them off is bad. This has been true for almost all cultures throughout almost all of human history until recently when, suddenly, developed nations had excess calories in their diets and obesity became a real and common health problem. However, for the overwhelming majority of humans for the past million years or so, the chances of becoming obese were laughably and sadly slim with risk of starvation outweighing the risk of becoming morbidly obese.
So, let’s do a brief mental exercise. Imagine you are living in some grassy valley long, long ago and you have a fenced in grazing area of your own. Perhaps a hundred acres with a big fence around it. In this area, you can raise a limited quantity of animals. Your goal is to get as much meat as possible to feed your friends and family, and perhaps useful things like milk, skin (for leather or fur), and bones while you are at it. (Bones, by the way, are very useful for making tools.)
Would you decide to use your farm to raise cows, sheep, goats, and similar grazing animals that could eat your grass? Or would you decide to raise canines, including wolves, dogs, coyote, and so on, along with some felines, including domestic cats and perhaps a lynx or a tiger, knowing that these animals could not eat the grass and would require a great deal of effort to feed?
Remember the basic food chain that you learned in school? Dogs and cats are higher on the food chain. You can’t just throw a herd of cats out in a field, and then call them in every day for milking and when it seems appropriate choose one for slaughter and invite several friends over for a meat filled feast. Now you could do that with goats, cows, and sheep, but not cats or dogs.
Therefore, most farms or ranches are going to have more herbivorous animals than carnivorous animals on them and the carnivorous animals when seen on farms are used for helping the humans maintain and preserve the herbivorous animals. A sheep dog, for instance, is a canine that helps guard sheep and goats. On a farm or ranch, the cats usually keep mice from eating stored animal feed such as hay or grain. The pieces all go together in a pattern, each serving a function, and if you were to flip flop the pieces and try instead to have the cows and sheep help take care of the dogs and cats so people can eat the dogs and cats, it just sounds silly and laughable.
So economics and ecology dictate that people who wish to eat a lot of meat and obtain protein and calories should be eating herbivores not carnivores.
If you want some homework, do some online or real life comparative shopping. Compare the prices pound for pound for living and dead goats, sheep, cows, dogs, and cats. Consider visiting farms, kennels, and animal shelters. Ignoring ethics or personal preference, you should find that you will be able to purchase a lot more of the herbivore meat than the carnivore meat for the same price.
SO WHY WOULD ANYONE CHOOSE TO REPLACE HERBIVORE MEAT WITH CARNIVORE MEAT IN A RESTAURANT MENU UNLESS THE CUSTOMER IS WILLING TO PAY ENOUGH TO MAKE A PROFIT? WHY WOULD A RESTAURANT DO THAT?
Now everything I have said here is, I hope, interesting. However, there are no dates, no places, no names, just a general set of facts that kind of, sort of, get at the how and why or why not of the whole thing, but it’s not really history in the classical sense.
So let’s try to do some real history. More real history tomorrow.