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Claim: Taiwan's hottest restaurants offer grilled and barbequed fetuses.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]
Origins: One of the downsides of a burgeoning Internet is it fosters the delirious spread of misinformation as revealed fact in the blink of an eye. That was the case when a widely-circulated photo which showed a large Asian man eating what 
appeared to be a cooked baby was taken by many at face value. The picture was later teamed with the
breathless news that roast fetus was now the hottest dining craze in Taiwan, with outraged The truth proved far less horrifying than the rumor. Taiwan maintains the same attitude towards cannibalism as the rest of the world; the practice is as abhorrent there as it is anywhere else. Yes, the cultures of China and Taiwan are vastly different from those of North America and Europe, and yes, eastern attitudes towards many things differ from western attitudes. (That is certainly true in the case of organ harvesting from executed Chinese prisoners — the Chinese view the matter as a reasonable use of what would otherwise be discarded assets, whereas the western viewpoint fixates on the humanity of the executed man and laments his being picked over and recycled against his personal wishes.) Nonetheless, it's a measure of our cultural credulity that people can still be so easily led to believe that inhabitants of another part of the world regularly violate mankind's strongest taboo, cannibalism (by eating dead babies, to boot), based solely on a picture of unknown origin. Our knowledge of the existence of cultural differences (even if we don't know exactly what those differences are) helps prepare the soil for wild rumors like this one to sprout in, because this tidbit of "information" seems to fit so well with what we think we know about a deeply mistrusted foreign culture. One could not successfully kite the same tale about Canada, for instance, because folks would immediately reject it as wholly false. But set it in China, and it begins to sound if not plausible, at least possible. The Chinese treat bodies of executed wrongdoers as piles of recyclable parts lying there for the taking; why wouldn't they view aborted fetuses as something that could be added to a lunch menu? (We note that it is the People's Republic of China, not Taiwan, which has a policy of harvesting organs from executed The taboos against eating one's own are universal, and rumors about violations of these taboos are used to vilify members of competing cultures. Think of them as peacetime atrocity rumors, because they serve the same purpose, albeit on a smaller scale. The photo shown above was taken seriously by a number of important agencies who viewed it, and both Scotland Yard and the FBI investigated this matter, trying to determine when and where the picture was taken and the identities of those appearing in it. Its origin was quickly uncovered: The man in the photo is Chinese artist Zhu Yu, who performed a conceptual piece called "Eating People" at a Shanghai arts festival in 2000. The controversial photo has since been part of a number of art exhibits. As for the "baby," it was most likely constructed by placing a doll's head on a duck's carcass. The rumor about the Chinese eating dead babies did not begin with this "work of art," however. In 1995, U.S. Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia raised a short-lived media ruckus by asserting he'd encountered credible reports of Chinese hospitals' selling human fetuses to be used as health food. Citing a Nothing apparently came of this call to arms, leading us to believe those "credible" reports turned out to be not so reliable after all. Just like this latest scare, in fact. Barbara "cry wolf" Mikkelson Last updated: 3 February 2007 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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