When she tried to cook another meal, he refused to partake, insisting that no Dutch person has a “big lunch” every day. Instead, he had bread, though he did buy Cai a “most exciting” local treat: buttered bread with chocolate sprinkles, or Hagelslag.
For years, Cai thought she was alone in disparaging the tasteless cold cuts, lukewarm salads and microwaved soups that are staples of contemporary Western urban life. Then, earlier this year, she saw a widely circulated video on the Chinese lifestyle app Xiaohongshu depicting a passenger on a Swiss train putting mustard onto lettuce leaves before stuffing them into her mouth with cold cuts.
A new low for “White people food,” graduate student Huang Jinglan wrote in the caption of the clip she filmed.
Mocking “White people food” is all the rage on China’s heavily censored internet. Tens of thousands of people — many of them Chinese citizens living abroad — have joined Huang in the social media trend of sharing their bland workday meals with the hashtag #WhitePeopleFood. Photos of unseasoned chicken breast, poached eggs, celery sticks, baked beans and dry crackers abound.
Eating these foods for lunch is to “learn what it feels like to be dead,” one user quipped on the Weibo microblogging service.
In China, office workers often visit nearby Chinese restaurants and food courts for an inexpensive midday meal or bring lunchboxes prepared at home the night before. For cost and convenience reasons, that’s not usually an option for Chinese people living abroad, like Huang, a 29-year-old student in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
“But having too much of it can drain the soul and human warmth out of you,” said Huang, who tries to make up for the lack of flavor with hot sauces.
She also obeys the unspoken rule that “White people food” should not be shared, “because we shall not punish others with our self-torture.”
Cultural observers in China say the mockery around #WhitePeopleFood is innocent, and that many Chinese people who use the term enjoy living or working in the West.
“Most Chinese use it as a [form of] self-irony, without any bad intent or the awareness of racial sensitivity in the U.S.,” said current affairs commentator Hong Guangyu, who studies social media trends.
China’s upwardly mobile middle classes have consumed Western food regularly since the late 1990s, when international travel took off and people began taking pride in being worldly. But more Chinese people are frequently swapping soup and noodle dishes for salads and sandwiches as the country urbanizes and growing numbers find employment in the private sector. (Giant state-affiliated enterprises often have staff canteens.)
Unlike those early adopters, younger converts see “White people food” as easily accessible sustenance — not as a status symbol. “The love and appreciation of food has served as a significant cultural identity and a means of social bonding for people with a Chinese background,” said Wei Shuihua, a food writer based in Hangzhou, a southeastern city that is the home of slow-cooked beggar’s chicken.
“For burned-out urban professionals, the removal of pleasure from a work lunch” symbolizes how they merely “eat to work,” he said.
The reactions around “White people food” remind some of the stigma that most Asian cuisine has long faced in the United States. The Korean American chef and YouTube star Maangchi, for instance, has written of boiling soup soy sauce outside her house, “where no one will complain.”
“Persistent stigma against Chinese food was closely linked to histories of anti-Chinese sentiment in the U.S.,” said the Chinese American TikToker Lisa Li, a social activist who co-founded a trade journal for Chinese restaurants in New York.
Chinese food was often labeled unhealthy and Chinese restaurants unsanitary, she said — a perception that has shifted over decades with the rise of Chinese American celebrity chefs and writers. Li added that the “evaporation of prestige associated with American food corresponds with the Chinese public’s growing disillusionment” with the United States in an era of intense geopolitical and economic rivalry.
“White people food” does have its Chinese defenders, including people who say such low-carb meals help them avoid postprandial “food comas” and stay awake for work in the afternoon. Others say it has helped them lose weight. Some have also used the time saved from the minimal cooking and dish washing for leisure.
Chinese state media has weighed in, too, citing dietitians who argue that such meals “are not for everyone.”
“This unbalanced diet does little to satiate hunger: It may not meet your daily needs,” Sun Yuanyuan, head of the clinical nutrition department at Hefei No. 2 People’s Hospital, told the state-owned China Food News.
