‘They’re eating the dogs’ was the political soundbyte of the year. It’s also loaded with centuries of colonialism, dehumanization, and white supremacist violence.

When Donald Trump, on the most central political stage of the moment—the U.S. Presidential Debate—claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “Eating the dogs…eating the cats…eating the pets of the people that live there”, the only response was to laugh. To laugh in horror, in disbelief, in fear, in confusion, in shock at the audacity. 

The ensuing response was to disprove the claim — and that’s exactly what the moderators of the debate did. They reached out to the city manager of Springfield, who reported that “there were no credible reports of pets being harmed”. Sources later concluded that Trump’s inspiration for the statement had come from a far-right online conspiracy theory. 

So it wasn’t true. But that’s not the point. What was truly insidious about that sentence was its ability to convey, without mincing words: “immigrants are outsiders and subhuman”. In one simple statement, the violence of white supremacy and colonial rule, and the infinite lived experiences of immigrants to the United States, flashed in the minds of immigrants and white supremacists alike. Because this pet-eating trope is as old as time. 

The weaponization of food judgments as cultural erasure dates back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The European conquerors had a theory that the types of food they ate made them biologically superior to the indigenous Mesoamericans, which shaped their categorization of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” foods to eat. Even plants indigenous to the Americas like corn/maize, beans, squash, cocoa, and tomatoes were viewed as inferior and inedible. 

Human beings eat other animals. Which ones they do and don’t eat comes down to cultural differences and geographic access, and as long as a culture isn’t entirely vegetarian, some moral judgment must be made about which ones to eat. Hindus choose not to eat beef since they view cows as a holy animal, while beef is a staple for special dishes in Arab cuisine. Muslims choose not to eat pork for religious and historic sanitary reasons, while many of Latin America’s most popular meals contain pork products. Western culture rejects eating insects, but they are a widely available and protein-packed snack in Southeast Asia. 

The majority of the Western world decided in ancient times, when dogs were first domesticated, not to eat them, creating a distinction between dogs as members of the family, and other animals like pigs and cows as a source of nourishment, similar to the Hindu distinction between sacred cows and edible chickens. When Buddhism reached Japan in 675 C.E., the Emperor made a decree prohibiting people from eating cows, horses, dogs, monkeys, and chickens. Leaning towards vegetarianism but not entirely forbidding meat, this distinction permitted pigs to be eaten, but not chickens. 

All this to say that cultural judgments about meat-eating are arbitrary and diverse. The prevailing modern notion that “eating pigs, chickens, and cows is acceptable, but eating cats and dogs is barbaric and inhuman” is the result of food imperialism. Demonizing people for their choice of food is a call-back to colonial degradation of nonwhite peoples. It directly implies “barbarism” and the dehumanizing stereotypes that subjugated people have suffered under for centuries.

When ‘nonwhite’ immigrants began arriving to the United States, the tactic of using food to belittle their cultures and discriminate against them in the legal system, employment, and public spaces re-emerged. Italians were degraded for cooking with too much garlic, Indians for using curry and other spice blends, and Mexicans labeled with an ethnic slur for their staple food of beans.

African Americans, too, were ridiculed for elements of ‘soul food’, like fried chicken, although the history of this food culture emerged from the suffering of slavery and the innovative creation of tasty meals from scraps and leftovers that enslaved people were given, like ‘chitlins’, a dish made from the pork intestines left over after butchering a pig.  

Many children from immigrant families in the United States recall being ashamed of their cultural food in their lunchboxes growing up. The all-too-familiar sting of feeling like the odd one out for the delicious, aromatic spiced food in warm thermoses. East Asian-Americans, in particular, have been targeted with decades of hatred over references to East Asian dishes that included dog meat, a result of the food superiority complex discussed earlier in the article. East Asian food has been demonized as unhealthy for the use of MSG in takeout restaurants, despite traditional East Asian food being some of the healthiest in the world. 

To many East Asian-Americans, Trump’s sentence about ‘eating the dogs’ was a reminder of the anti-Asian hate and violence that has racked the country, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the surge in hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. One California restaurant owner had to shut down one of his restaurant locations over threats of violence and constant hate calls regarding fake allegations that the restaurant served dog meat. 

The most effective, and cruel tactic of racism in modern politics is to create simple, ridiculous quotations that go viral on the internet. For every person who watches the video and laughs at its absurdity, there will also be people who watch it and are emboldened in their hatred of immigrants. This rhetoric is violent. It’s time we start treating it like the threat it truly is.