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Both Western news outlets and Chinese state media this week uncovered a hot new trend on Chinese social media: “white people food.” The trend consists of Chinese users expressing astonishment at the horrifying discovery that some Americans and Europeans eat sandwiches and salads for lunch.
The gist of the “white people food” craze — more colorfully dubbed the “lunch of suffering” by one Chinese blogger — is that Chinese diners prefer more elaborate and heavily spiced meals, so they cannot believe Westerns would be satisfied munching on lettuce out of a bag or making lazy sandwiches with a few scraps of processed meat and a forlorn slice of cheese.
“White People Food” has little flavor or “zero feeling” and requires minimal preparation, often being eaten directly out of a package. Chinese social media users made a game out of recreating the most melancholy of foreign lunch items and expressing their extreme feelings of guilt and despair when eating them.
Chinese people eating white people food to experience «what it feels like to be deαd». I snorted. pic.twitter.com/NE7fCmGixT
The Genius (@Truth_n_Respect) June 14, 2023
“It is a handful of oatmeal mixed with low-fat yogurt, with half an apple and a carrot. If such a meal is to extend life, what is the meaning of life?” wailed a Chinese user living in Germany who watched a colleague eat the same unhappy meal for ten years in a row.
According to the Guardian, the “White People Food” trend was “pushed along” by “a viral video of a woman in Switzerland on a train eating a bag of lettuce with ham and a packet of mustard.
