Recently, Melanie Gervasoni, Miglė Miliūtė and Mantas Kačerauskas wrote an article for BoredPanda.com, describing a culinary trend in China.
Reportedly, certain Chinese millennials have adopted a habit of eating bairen fan… roughly translated as “white people meals” or “white people food”.
In Mandarin, 白人饭.
Another descriptive term that’s become popular on Chinese social media: “Lunch of Suffering”.
“White people food” (as seen by Chinese users) is an assortment of simple, typically cold meals that require little to no cooking — think raw carrots wrapped in cheese slices, bologna sandwiches, Lunchables, a bag of lettuce eaten as-is without dressing.
One commentator suggested that the reason Caucasians spend so much time basking in the sun is, they consume so little healthful nutrition through their tasteless, hyper-processed food, they try to survive through photosynthesis.
One of the jokes making the rounds:
White people colonized half the world for spices and still don’t even use them.
Lately, a particular gentleman in Great Britain has become popular among Chinese social media users, according to Vice.com. A video of a middle-aged British man assembling a ham and tomato sandwich he will have for his lunch has been liked more than 12 million times.
Almost daily, videos of “Keith” — leaning over his cutting board — have been posted by his wife, who hails from northeast China. Some days, he’s making avocado toast. Or scrambled eggs on toast. These meals, referred to as “Dry Lunch,” have sparked a wave of morbid curiosity in China, “with hundreds of thousands of people making staple Western bread-based dishes and posting them online, to a response that is equal parts opprobrium and disbelief.”
According to Yaling Jiang, a Chinese journalist living in the UK, there are two key elements of a Dry Lunch: The temperature — cold — and the presence of some kind of bread. Beyond that, the parameters are pretty loose. “Anything can be a dry lunch, as long as it’s in a sandwich form… and is seemingly unappetizing,” he says.
Dry lunch, Jiang explains, is less defined by what it is, than what it isn’t — namely “anything that’s either nourishing or tastes good.”
The term bairen fan started trending on Chinese social media last year. Chinese millennials flooded social media sites with cold, spiceless dishes as examples of self-inflicted suffering.
“The spirit of ‘white people food’ is that it’s supposed to be not enjoyable,” one TikTok user explained.
“The point of the white people meal is to learn what it feels like to be dead, but I’ve taken two bites and it was so bad it made me realize how alive I am,” another user wrote.
This trend, I think, raises a question about the whole idea of eating. Should eating be an enjoyable pastime, or something to be suffered through?
I think the Bible pretty much answers that question. When Jesus instructed his followers in the proper way to pray, he gave them this example:
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread…
…and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil…
There is no mention whatsoever of soy sauce in this instruction. Nor Sichuan spices. No garlic… no ginger.
Just daily bread. Period.
Additionally, the prayer mentions temptation, which again relates to food. Many times I’ve been tempted in my life, and it was almost always by a bowl of Halloween candy. Especially, fun-size Snickers.
I don’t think Our Father minds if we add peanut butter to the bread — I mean, since He has provided it.
A chunk of cheese is probably okay. A couple of celery sticks?
But let’s not go overboard.