Dog meat consumption is indeed widespread in parts of Hunan, guizhou, guangxi, Yunnan, places that are near to northern Vietnam. Not all chinese eat dog, most don’t, but some do (the same is true about Korea and correspondingly parts of northern China). It isn’t a cultural norm in all of china, China is just very diverse.
Have you ever been to the Miao areas of china before? Dog meat is pretty ubiquitous in those places. Like, many westerners visit Guilin, and it’s very easy to run into dog meat there.
Chinese have been known to eat all kind of exotic wild animals for medicinal and recreational reasons.
The government may be trying to curb this, but a large portion of Chinese are still rural and food superstitions are rife, the regulation is not that easy I suppose.
I wonder if the choice of meats is a regional thing. I would definitely not peg chicken as characteristic of China, but I've never been anywhere near Shenzhen.
In China the most popular is donkey meat, or ?? (lvrou, pronounced lew-row*). For those who don't study characters, the left-hand part of ? is ? ( horse), which is the simplified form of the traditional character ? which is what the Japanese are still using, and has a reconstructed proto Sino-Caucasian root.[0] It's all over China but more popular perhaps in the north, Shandong and northern Jiangsu in the east to Xinjiang in the west. Of course part of this culinary capacity descends from earlier nomadic and steppe peoples. You can also try Mongol horse milk alcohol, which is now available right across China in bottled form.
I think it's fair to say that in the past, most people ate most meat, as long as it was fresh and there were no local taboos. I haven't read any studies but for bacterial reasons I suppose that raw consumption correlates with cold climates.
I agree. When I lived in China in 2002, meat wasn’t that rare, even in tier 88 cities I travelled to. The cafeterias in Beijing’s universities definitely had no problem finding it. Maybe in the 70s and early 80s?
I've only been to China once (Guanzhou), but it was very hard to find vegetarian food. Everything everywhere seems to have duck or pork in it. The variety is definitely lacking compared to Europe or North America.
I think chicken is pretty popular in US Chinese restaurants as well.
Seafood is a big thing in Beijing too. I've been out to a lot of restaurants with my Chinese in-laws and almost every meal includes a whole baked fish, and other aquatic creatures besides.
FWIW the notion of unscrupulous food vendors serving dog/cat meat is pretty common in other cultures, and it doesn't exclusively apply to Chinese restaurants. I've heard it in just about any context where meat is served.
To give a specific example, there's an old Soviet joke about a guy buying meat pierogi from a street vendor; after closely inspecting them, he asks: "So, did this meat bark or meow?", to which the seller replies, "Neither; it asked too many questions."
I've visited China several times, one of those times I traveled all over the country for thousands of miles and stayed in many small towns, villages and giant cities, and spent many months over dozens of trips in other east Asian countries.
I am 100% certain the Chinese will never, ever, EVER change their eating habits, even if it meant they were all going to lose their firstborn sons. It's never going to happen. We will see Americans willfully giving up their guns and embracing communism and Jews eating Pork before the Chinese give up dogs, cats, bats and everything else you can find at a neighborhood Chinese market.
Greetings from Shenzhen. Lots of coffee shops here too, but chicken you can get absolutely everywhere. Pork is ubiquitous too. Beef, as far as I can tell, much less so.
Also, the longer I'm staying here the more I'm getting cured out of obsessing over my energy use. The amount of propane a street vendor uses to prepare a single meal is greater than what I use up in an entire day.
Teochew people eat a lot of (from my anecdotal experience) and we don't have the same culture of charcoal burning our meat. I wonder whether a similar comparison could work for South East vs other parts of the Chinese diaspora...
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