Go on Chinese social media around lunchtime and you will likely see picture after picture of distinctly underwhelming lunches: raw mushrooms and pepperoni on crackers, a plain chicken breast or a lonely baked potato.
Videos and photographs showing simple meals like these have gone viral on the Chinese internet accompanied by the playful hashtag: #whitepeoplefood, or #白人饭 in Chinese.
The shots depict people’s minimalistic, sometimes uncooked lunches [but of your 3 examples, 2 are cooked!] based on what they have seen in North America and Europe. Part of the appeal is that “white people food” is meant to bewilder many people in China with its no-frills, no-fuss nature – by contrast, Chinese cuisines can be complex in flavor, using dozens of ingredients and spices and a balance of meat, vegetables and carbohydrates, often cooked or stewed for long periods of time.
Teresa Duan, 23, likes how healthy a basic sandwich or salad can make her feel, but she admits there is a touch of sarcasm when the phrase “white people food” pops up on social media: “Chinese people don’t understand how foreigners can fill themselves with such food. They might even think it’s an insult to gastronomy.”
Duan often shares such pictures of her “white people” meals from Shanghai – inspired by the simple, minimalistic food she found her classmates eating when she was studying for her undergraduate degree in the United Kingdom.
Hailing from China’s central Hubei province, famed for the spice in its cuisine, Duan says at first, she was not used to eating a cold, plain sandwich for lunch. She often craved hot dry noodles, a specialty from the province’s capital, Wuhan. The noodles are tossed with sesame oil, soy sauce and some tart pickles, and served hot.
But with little time left over after her school deadlines, she began to find the sparer diet of her classmates convenient. “I found this food healthy and time-saving at the same time, and two or three years is long enough to change…
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