Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance's recent false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are stealing and eating pets struck many Americans as odd. But such claims have a long and troubled history in American culture.
Since at least the 1800s, the racist trope that certain ethnic groups—especially recent immigrants—eat domestic animals or vermin has been common. Politicians and their supporters have sometimes exaggerated these claims. But more often, they have spread as rumors, often reinforced by uncritical media reporting that portrays disadvantaged minorities or recent immigrants with unfamiliar customs as dirty or dangerous.
The latest installment in this long story began a little more than a week ago, when Vance claimed, without providing evidence, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were kidnapping and eating other people's dogs and cats.
Trump amplified the claim by repeating it the next day in a widely televised debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The debate moderators immediately pointed out that city officials in Springfield had said there was no evidence to support the claim.
But over the next few days, Trump and Vance repeated the claim several times, even as Springfield's mayor denied it was true and asked them to stop. The city was forced to close some municipal buildings, including two elementary schools, after people citing the false stories called in bomb threats, and a local university was forced to cancel classes after a caller threatened a mass shooting.
The History of Food Demonization
“The U.S. has had these racist epithets associated with food since the beginning,” said Robert Koo, author of Questionable Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Asian Food Consumption in the United States.
“Irish food and their potatoes, Mexican food with beans, German food with sauerkraut, Italian food with garlic have always been part of the immigration discourse,” Koo told VOA. “The ‘others’ bring these foreign foods, and they’re ‘dangerous.’ They’re ‘strange.’”
Ku said the pet-eating accusation has particular force in the United States because Americans often treat their dogs and cats as “honorary humans” and family members.
In this context, “to accuse someone of eating a dog or a cat is essentially to accuse them of the most cruel act a human being can commit, namely cannibalism,” he said.
Presidential politics
While it is unusual for a former president and a major party presidential candidate to make such claims, false accusations about the eating habits of racial minorities have occurred in presidential politics in the past.
In 1888, when the United States was engulfed in controversy over the presence of Chinese immigrants in the country, supporters of President Grover Cleveland distributed trading cards with cartoons of Chinese workers eating rats.
In the late 1920s, supporters of Herbert Hoover drew attention to the fact that Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith was a Catholic, mocking his faith's dietary restrictions—such as a ban on eating meat on Fridays. They also criticized the diet of Catholic immigrants, often from southern Europe, for using ingredients that were unusual at the time, such as garlic and pasta.
In 2008 and 2012, opponents of former President Barack Obama tried to portray him as un-American by citing his story of being served dog meat as a child in Indonesia.
As recently as last week, right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer attempted to draw negative attention to the Democratic presidential nominee's Native American heritage by claiming that if Harris wins the presidency, the White House will “smell like curry.”
Outside of politics
But racist attacks related to food were not limited to politics. For generations before and after the abolition of slavery, black Americans were often denied access to the foods that white Americans found most desirable. This forced them to develop a cuisine based on ingredients that many whites never saw on their dinner tables, and for which black Americans were regularly ridiculed in white-dominated popular media.
As immigration from Asia and the Pacific Rim became more prominent in the 20th century, allegations circulated during the Cleveland administration took on new life. Urban legends circulated in many cities that newly opened Chinese restaurants were secretly serving dog and cat meat to American diners. The allegations reached a peak when waves of immigrants from countries like Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam arrived in the United States.
In one of many examples, Los Angeles Times In 1981, the newspaper reported outrage in the state's Asian community after a state legislator proposed a measure banning the eating of pets, an issue they decried as nonexistent. The paper quoted Gail Nakatsu of the San Francisco Pan-Asian Community Alliance as calling the legislation “racist in nature and offensive to the general [Asian] community.”
Such claims have persisted for decades and have recently taken on new life as anti-Asian prejudice has surged during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But few American communities have been as deeply affected by allegations of immigrants eating pets as Springfield in the past week. On Monday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who called Trump and Vance’s comments “garbage,” said the city had been forced to investigate 33 school bomb threats in recent days.
As a result, dozens of state highway patrol officers have been assigned to have a presence in the city's school buildings for the foreseeable future.
“Our kids deserve to go to school,” DeWine said. “Parents deserve to feel like their kids are getting an education and that their kids are safe.”