10 April 2001

Anna Chen

Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Faced with a mass media onslaught scapegoating the Chinese over foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) during the height of a national crisis, the British Chinese community came together, made a fist, and struck out for recognition as human beings, not the two dimensional, cartoon figures that seem to reside deep in the subconscious of the establishment.

The community's joint efforts led to a request from the agriculture minister Nick Brown for a meeting with a delegation from the newly formed Chinese Civil Rights Action Group UK (CCRAG) on Saturday 7 April in which Mr Brown pledged to help the Chinese community now finding itself under siege. We agreed on several points to be included in a statement from Maff clarifying the situation this week. Maff then issued a brief interim statement in which Mr Brown deplored the racist overtones of media reports and denied that investigations into FMD "have positively demonstrated that the initial infection came from waste from a Chinese restaurant. This is untrue. The investigations ... are still continuing ..."

Hardly unequivocal, but as a stop-gap, it would do the job until we got the proper one, which would repeat Mr Brown's assertion in Sunday's meeting that "there is no scientific evidence to suggest the virus was imported by the Chinese community," and "the ministry is not making such allegations"; promise to investigate the source of the rumour and take appropriate action; condemn the racist reporting; and ask environment minister Michael Meacher to look into the issue of compensation for trade plummetting by forty per cent since 27 March due to some eccentric coverage.

Today we received the final statement. It is a replica of Saturday's interim one, and, deploring racism aside, an exercise in how to say very little in 155 words.

We won the battle but not the war.

Only a month after party leaders pledged not to play the race card in the general election, and in the same week as Britain was named as one of the most racist countries in Europe, the suspicion remains that it is in the interest of certain parties - perhaps some within Maff, maybe even Downing Street as The Guardian originally claimed on 27 March - to make this stick to us.

Kicked-off in The Times, the rumour was bolstered by the alleged discovery of "illegal meat" "concealed" within a mysterious container of household goods "smuggled" in to the north-east, all described in the most lurid terms. And all part of a massive underground meat smuggling ring run by Fu Manchu and Emperor Ming the Merciless, no doubt. Mario Puzo, eat yer heart out.

With its collective ignorance of Chinese cuisine on show, much of the media added two plus two and made five zillion.

Tabloids and broadsheets alike competed for the most hysterical descriptions of criminal catering smuggling operations, while TV crews ambushed Chinese supermarkets. With a few honourable exceptions, all of them lacked the healthy-scepticism gene.

When Doug Fox of Newcastle public health authority found packets of meat which didn't have the correct import stamps openly on sale, the press went wild. Now, you may be forgiven for thinking that the meat in question was raw, unprocessed animal chunks dripping with blood, from some of the media descriptions. But the meat turns out to be vacuum-packed packets of dried meat jerky snacks, a bit like Pepperami sticks, for personal consumption only. For the benefit of the media, THIS IS FOR PERSONAL CONSUMPTION ONLY AND IS NOT PART OF CHINESE CUISINE. You are as likely to find dried meat jerky on a Chinese menu as you are a pot-noodle at The Ivy.

Mr Fox acknowledged that the dried meat snacks were FOR PERSONAL CONSUMPTION ONLY AND ARE NOT PART OF CHINESE CUISINE. He cleared all the fresh meat and frozen won ton (made in the UK) as legitimate, contrary to newspaper reports. He promptly found himself bumped from a radio interview when he told the programme that his investigations related to import regulations and had nothing to do with FMD.

He also looked for the fabled container of "illegal meat" at all the ports in the north-east and found nothing but a myth in the making.

Meanwhile, Britain legally imports unprocessed meat from areas of Africa and South America which have FMD.

Chinese cooking relies on fresh, local produce. If you planned to knock up a pork stir-fry, one option would be for you to go to your Meat Godfather and buy assorted bloody and stinking "cow nostrils and antelope hooves", as some have suggested. Or you could phone up your local wholesaler and ask them to deliver. Most of us would go the easy route, but not the Chinese according to your intrepid reporters.

This is where pigswill and hogwash converge.

Three years ago the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (Seac) advised the Government that, in the wake of BSE, feeding species to species was not a good idea and that pigswill should be banned. Instead, the Government brought in an order licensing a number of pigswill processors and compelling them not to use mammalian meat. Presumably they would filter out molecules of animal matter and syphon off any BSE prions present. You know how easy that is.

So the practise of feeding decaying leftovers to our future dinners continued until the outbreak.

FMD antibodies have been found in sheep raised in isolation in Wales and exported to France on 31 January, pointing to FMD having been around way before the official outbreak date in February (Farm virus 'lay undetected for months', The Independent 3 April). If, as is widely believed, FMD did not start in February but has been around for much longer, that would mean Newcastle was no longer the epicentre of the outbreak and the Chinese connection will fade from view leaving in its wake the battered corpse of race relations and the tattered remains of the Chinese catering trade. (Dear Media, when I wrote "battered corpse", I didn't mean ... Oh, never mind.)

And as for "illegal meat" jerky, one more time - THIS IS FOR PERSONAL CONSUMPTION AND IS NOT PART OF CHINESE CUISINE. Got that? Now cut me a line of your finest meat jerky, barkeep, and don't be stingy.