Second, the hypocritical idea that some animals are socially permissible to eat, while others are not, is a belief in one’s own cultural hegemony.
As Charlie Campbell writes for Time, the “Child Zero” victim of Ebola in West Africa was likely infected via contact with bat droppings, and “MERS was also primarily spread from live camels to humans through association, rather than the eating of camel meat.” Without more research and evidence, it’s premature to assert definitively that the virus jumped from bat to humans through meat consumption at the market. According to a study in the Lancet by Chinese researchers and doctors, more than a third of the earliest known cases of this virus - including the outbreak’s first known case - had no connection to the market. First, as Palmer writes for Foreign Policy, the supposition that Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market is the source of the outbreak has not yet been confirmed.
There are a few threads to untangle in this recent wave of Sinophobia. This why we got that mf virus casually floating around - Zay HNDRXX January 27, 2020 People commented “This is not human behaviour” on the articles on Twitter, searching for anything related to keywords like “China,” “eat,” “virus,” and “food” is enough to bring up an endless scroll of statements that suggest that Chinese people “ deserve” the karmic retribution in the form of the deaths and illnesses that the virus has wrought, at least in part because of what they eat. Tabloids like the Daily Mail quickly resurfaced old videos of Chinese people eating bat and mice that had nothing to do with the current outbreak (the bat video, as Foreign Policy’s James Palmer points out, didn’t even take place in China, but the Pacific archipelago of Palau meanwhile, the “delicacy” shown in the mice video has been debunked it is not popular or mainstream by any means). These ideas, perennially the subtext behind how Chinese people are viewed by the Western gaze, have been given oxygen anew after preliminary reports linked the coronavirus outbreak to a Wuhan wet market where produce and meat are sold alongside livestock and more exotic wildlife like snakes, civet cats, and bamboo rats and to bats, which are frequent carriers of viruses that cause human disease. The outbreak has had a decidedly dehumanizing effect, reigniting old strains of racism and xenophobia that frame Chinese people as uncivilized, barbaric “others” who bring with them dangerous, contagious diseases and an appetite for dogs, cats, and other animals outside the norms of Occidental diets. While panic and fear abound in response to the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak that has killed at least 213 people in China and infected more than 9,700 worldwide, there has also been a conspicuous - if not entirely surprising - lack of empathy for those who are suffering most from the virus: the Chinese people who face lockdowns, supply shortages, and a higher chance of contracting the illness.
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