Porkrisis
Remember that ad campaign from a few years back that proclaimed pork as “The Other White Meat”? If you ran that ad in China, my peeps would look at you funny and think, “Those Americans, (tongue cluck), so inscrutable.” Because pork in China isn’t the other white meat, or the other meat for that matter, it’s just meat. OUR MEAT, in fact. Chinese civilization couldn’t have sustained itself for thousands of years and invented fun stuff like gunpowder and spaghetti without consuming mass quantities of Wilburs and Babes.
Which is why there’s a major pork flap happening in China over a recent announcement that Olympic athletes will be fed specially-raised pigs who are reportedly receiving organic diets and two hours of exercise a day. The Chinese blogosphere is enraged, and here’s what they’re saying, according to the Wall Street Journal:
“I would rather be a pig for the Olympics than a human in a coal mine!”
“It actually shows how serious the food-safety problem is. What am I going to eat?”
Jessica Wu, 24, a Nanjing export-company employee who posted her own reservations on the Web, said in an interview she can “understand that the country wants to hold a glorious Games” but that “they can always find reasons to justify [giving] priority to the elite groups.”
Dude, isn’t this country called the People’s Republic? Give the people what they want. Don’t pork ‘em over!
Filed under: China We Have A Problem, Food Elitism, Meat, Porking People Over, the Olympics