BigLilacs' Apiary

Strange things are happening over on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. A video of a middle-aged British man assembling the ham and tomato sandwich he will have for his lunch has been liked more than 12 million times.

“Is this real??”, one commenter demands to know. Another watches the butter being smeared onto his brown bread and suggests: “This is what it feels like to die."

Videos of “Keith” leaning over his chopping board are posted by his wife—who is from North East China—almost every day. Some days, he’s making avocado toast. Others, it’s smoked salmon or scrambled eggs on toast. The meals have become known as “Dry Lunch,” and are sparking a wave of outrage, confusion, and morbid curiosity in China, with hundreds of thousands of people making staple Western bread-based dishes and posting them online, to a response that is equal parts opprobrium and disbelief.

According to Yaling Jiang, a Chinese journalist living in the UK, there are two key elements of a dry lunch: The temperature—cold—and the presence of some kind of bread. Beyond that, the parameters are pretty loose. “Anything can be a dry lunch, as long as it’s in an open-sandwich form, looks healthy-ish, and is seemingly unappetising,” he says. Dry lunch, Jiang explains, is less defined by what it is than what it isn’t—namely “anything that’s either nourishing or tastes good.”

It’s not the first time millions of Chinese people have spent time pointing and laughing at the meals eaten in the West. In June last year, “báirén fàn” (AKA “white people food”) started trending among Chinese workers—who flooded social media with cold, spiceless dishes as a form of self inflicted suffering. “The spirit of ‘white people food’ is that it’s supposed to be NOT enjoyable,” one TikTok user explained. “The point of the white people’s meal is to learn what it feels like to be dead, but I’ve taken two bites and it was so bad it made me realize how alive I am,” another user wrote on Weibo.

pure individualism is a disease that kills communities, isolates individuals, and leads to things like the anti-vax movement.

you are not so important that you aren't bound by social responsibility and decency.