One of my favorite YouTube channels is Chinese Cooking Demystified. They are a married couple; the husband (Chris) is an American that has lived in China for more than a decade with the wife (Steph), a native Cantonese from Guangzhou. Being on YouTube, they cater towards an English-speaking audience, whether that is in the States or not. Most of their videos are about making the many pockets of Chinese food culture visible to the West.
Remark
Their videos have also made me more cognizant of sinophobia, nipponophilia, and koreaphilia (terms used loosely) that I’ve noticed in my own cultural environment.
Given how intertwined cuisine evolution is with the socio-politico-economic state, the channel frequently dons a historian hat and tries to explain why things are the way they are. For example, why a sauce recipe from Yuanjiang, a city in the Yunnan province, uses lemon instead of lime. Yuanjiang has a tropical climate like the nearby Southeast Asian countries, so lime would be assumed to be readily available. However, the recipe comes from the village of Ganzhung which is less tropical and is well-connected to the trade network.1
Chinese Cooking Demystified infrequently uses their platform and desire for nuance to address non-food topics. This is where Gutter Oil: The Real Story lies.
I will paraphrase, but I implore you to watch the video in full:
A Chinese-national posted a video on Douyin (CN version of TikTok) about him aggressively interrogating people that were seen scooping oil from an in-street reservoir, presumably for use in cooking. The video was reposted on Reddit, which I assume was to rage-bait the majority English-speaking users. What the video doesn’t show is “gutter oil” as a historical concept and how cooking oil is regulated, managed, and recycled in China.
CCD’s video constructs a relationship between the consumer, government regulations, profit-seeking businesses to hone down that consumer risk must be managed by the individual themselves. One cannot bring a chemistry lab into a restaurant and test the exact oil being used to cook their food. A concerned consumer must have some trust in their regulatory bodies, the restaurant managers, the oil suppliers, and themselves to comfortably eat a meal.
Yes, the video is about Gutter Oil and explaining why that term exists in China, but what stuck with me was this quote at (28:05):
Because if you believe something wildly off about China, if you're sitting there in your basement in America -- it's costless. You don't have to weigh the deliciousness of the hotpot against the probability of crummy oil. It doesn't matter if you wrongly believe that there's some giant social credit system, it doesn't affect you. You don't live there, you don't have any skin in the game.
So much of the discourse I see on the Internet (specifically YouTube, Twitter and Reddit) can be disregarded through the lens that the commenters don’t have any skin in the game. Whether this dismissal is justifiable or not is an exercise left for the reader.
Narrowing in on what games I actually have skin in has also been a nice thought exercise. Should I care about bad drivers on the same road as me? Should I care about local politics? What about national, other countries’, and international? How emotionally invested am I in a certain hobby and what does it take to divest? What issues actually matter to me and what can I do about it?