When interviewed by The Hill about the COVID-19 pandemic, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) blamed the spread of the disease on Chinese “culture, where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that.”
His response effectively racialized the origins of the pandemic. His remarks framed China as an inherently backward country, with a meat diet coded as exotic and dirty.
Moreover, he erased the actual policy and management issues at the heart of the outbreak. COVID-19 spread thanks to the improper regulation of wildlife sold in China’s open-air “wet markets.” Unregulated wildlife markets are prime sites for viruses to jump species, as when COVID-19 likely jumped from bats to humans. But this is not an inevitability of Chinese culture; for example, the Chinese government successfully banned the selling and slaughtering of live chickens at wet markets after the practice gave rise to the avian flu. Furthermore, it is unhelpful to conflate China’s illegal wildlife markets with its wet markets generally, which are a crucial source of meat for Chinese eaters.1
Regulation, not culture, is the key to understanding COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases. Americans, after all, have plenty of their own exotic meats, including rattlesnake, alligator, turtle soup, rabbit stew, and the infamous Rocky Mountain oysters (bull testes). None of these dishes define American culture writ large. And while Americans eat all kinds of animals not formally part of the meat economy, the formal side of the meat economy has produced its own threats to human health.
Take, for example, listeria, which can cause stillbirths and miscarriages and is why pregnant women are discouraged from eating cold-cut sandwiches or soft cheeses. We haven’t known about listeria (also called listeriosis) that long; the bacteria was first identified among a group of research rabbits in 1926, and slowly found in other animal species over the next few decades. Looming over this research, especially after contaminated milk was proven to spread the disease, was the threat that it might eventually pose to humans.2
In the meat industry, listeria was initially known as “circling disease,” a relatively rare livestock disease that would plague feedlots. By 1958, researchers discovered that poultry plant workers were able to catch the disease from the chickens they slaughtered, first raising the specter of contamination in the meat industry. Despite these findings, and despite several international listeria symposiums in the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture took no action to combat the disease.3
There was a chance to stop listeria from spreading as rapidly as it eventually did. Meat inspectors could have been provided the tools needed to inspect for the disease, and testing could have allowed for a better understanding of its prevalence. In 1972, consumer advocate Ralph Nader argued in favor of just such rigorous testing for diseases like listeria. By the end of the 1980s, major listeria outbreaks in several countries revealed that the disease had become a near universal contaminant of the food system. And this could have likely been avoided if there had been regulatory oversight of the contagion decades earlier.4
Listeria and COVID-19 remind us that the history of contagion has little to do with what we eat and far more to do with how what we eat is inspected and regulated. And this is not limited to any particular culture and nation. The only thing that stands between our food and the next infectious outbreak is intense, constant scrutiny.
[Walter Crane], The Farm Yard Alphabet (London, 1865), via Internet Archive.
- Christopher St. Cavis, “No, China’s fresh food markets did not cause coronavirus,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2020; Christos Lynteris and Lyle Fearnley, “Why shutting down Chinese ‘wet markets’ could be a terrible mistake,” The Conversation, Jan. 31, 2020.
- N. E. Gibbons, “Listeria Pirie—Whom Does It Honor?,” International Journal of Systemic Bacteriology 22 (Jan. 1972): 1; M. L. Gray, “Listeriosis in Fowls—A Review,” Avian Diseases 2 (Aug. 1958): 296; Leo H. Buchner and S. Stanley Schneierson, “Clinical and Laboratory Aspects of Listeria monocytogenes Infections with a Report of Ten Cases,” American Journal of Medicine 45 (Dec. 1968): 904–21.
- Walter F. Schlech, III, “Foodborne Listeriosis,”Clinical Infectious Diseases 31 (Sept. 2000): 771; Gray, “Listeriosis in Fowls,” 296; Rijksinstituut voor de Volksgezondheid, “Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Listeriosis, July 13–16, 1966” (Bilthoven, Netherlands: Rijksinstituut voor de Volksgezondheid, 1966).
- Walter Rugaber, “Nader Group Calls U.S. Lax on Meat Inspection and Pesticides,” New York Times, July 18, 1971; Douglas L. Archer and Frank E. Young, “Contemporary Issues: Diseases with a Food Vector,” Clinical Microbiological Reviews 1 (Oct. 1988): 382.
