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  • 2001-06-18 (xsd:date)
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  • Are Human Fetuses 'Taiwan's Hottest Dish'? (en)
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  • One of the downsides of the burgeoning Internet in the early 2000s was that it fostered the delirious spread of misinformation as revealed fact in the blink of an eye. That was the case in 2001, when widely-circulated photos which showed a large Asian man eating what appeared to be a cooked baby served at a restaurant were taken by many at face value. The pictures were later teamed with the breathless news that roast fetus was now the hottest dining craze in Taiwan, with outraged e-mails offering the offensive pictures as proof recipients could view for themselves: The photographs shown above were taken seriously by a number of law enforcement agencies who viewed them, and both Scotland Yard and the FBI investigated the matter, trying to determine when and where the pictures were taken and the identities of those appearing in them. The origins of the images were quickly uncovered: The man in the photographs was not a restaurant patron enjoying a common Taiwanese dish, but Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu, who staged a conceptual shock piece called Eating People at a Shanghai arts festival in 2000. Maintaining that No religion forbids cannibalism, nor can I find any law which prevents us from eating people, Zhu Yu acted out a performance in which he appeared to eat a stillborn or aborted child and said that he took advantage of the space between morality and the law and based my work on it. (Whether Yu actually obtained and ate a fetus for his performance or employed a prop such as a doll's head placed atop duck's carcass is still a subject of debate.) The controversial photographs have since been part of a number of art exhibits and caused another stir in 2003 when they were aired on television in the UK as part of the Beijing Swings documentary: Whatever Yu may have intended or done in the course of his performance art, it is certainly not the case that dead babies are Taiwan's hottest food. We do note that (unverified) reports going back at least as far as the mid-1990s have maintained that aborted fetuses have been bought and consumed as folk medicine in some parts of China: (en)
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