Mouthing Off | Add sandwiches, peanut butter and raw carrot to ‘white people food’ – my relatives can’t stand it either, like those Chinese bloggers
- Recently, posts on Chinese social media mocking bland ‘white people food’, often served cold, have been trending; our columnist has family who think the same
- But ‘white people’ can hate flavourless, uncreative cooking too, just as others can enjoy bland dishes – in the end it depends what you’re used to eating
I have relatives who absolutely abhor sandwiches.
They are of a more senior generation, who like their food hot or at least warm, the same way they prefer their drinking water. They cannot comprehend why anyone would eat raw vegetables, and not just because “there’s no taste”; they insist that uncooked foods are unsanitary.
In these sarcastic posts, an assortment of broccoli, chicken, brown rice and raw vegetables is a “lunch of suffering”. Death is equated with a serving of sliced tomato and a banana. To some Westerners, yogurt with fruit and muesli is a healthy and light meal option; to the Weibo-verse, it’s gastronomic torture.
I suppose if you grew up on rich plates of fried rice or hearty bowls of dan dan noodles, plain white bread and lettuce is pretty much hell in a lunchbox.
The people posting their dislike of simple Western foods are of a younger generation, which is what you would expect in a social media forum. But obviously, the feeling is not exclusive to millennials. The fear and loathing of bland and dreary sustenance affects many older Asians too.