Régulation et Marché
Bat Soup Didn’t Cause the Wuhan Virus
Racist memes target Chinese eating habits, but the real causes of the coronavirus are more mundane.
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/27/dont-blame-bat-soup-for-the-wuhan-virus
But as it turns out, the market may not have been the cause of the outbreak at all. A new study shows that the early known victims had no contact with the market. And although the virus, at present, does seem to have originated in bats, it’s unclear how it made its way to humans. It’s quite likely no chowing down on the creatures of the night was involved.
Many Chinese people certainly like tucking into dishes Americans would consider unusual, though a lot of this is confined to very high-end or weirdly macho audiences, such as Beijing’s penis restaurant. But the standards of what animals we do and don’t eat are culturally arbitrary. Vegetarianism is morally consistent, but deploring the eating of dogs while tucking into companionable and intelligent pigs isn’t. (I myself have eaten many things others might find gross: dog soup, insects, Chicago deep-dish pizza.) And it goes both ways: A lot of East Asians, for instance, find the taste of lamb disgusting. The range of tastes inside China is as great as it is outside; the Cantonese habit of eating “everything with four legs save the table and everything that flies but the airplane” is a standing joke in the rest of the country.
And when it comes to disease, it’s not what’s being eaten that matters as much as the conditions—such as the standards workers are trained to meet, the lack of barriers at markets, and the absence or bribing of regulators and health inspectors.
And when it comes to disease, it’s not what’s being eaten that matters as much as the conditions—such as the standards workers are trained to meet, the lack of barriers at markets, and the absence or bribing of regulators and health inspectors.
The H1N1 virus, after all, started not in any uncommon species, but in pigs.