Supposedly helping people to see the specialties of different regions and spread food culture, vloggers will do anything to get more viewers. And that includes eating things which are either dangerous or which it is illegal to do so, they being protected animals.
In recent years, food broadcasting culture has emerged. Indeed, eating and food is one of the most popular categories on short video platforms such as Douyin and WeChat Channels. However, in order to attract more views, anchors are increasingly crossing the legal red line in the sand.
Recently, a celebrity food vlogger posted a video of them eating shark. Alert viewers suspected the shark in the video to be a national Class II Protected Species of China. With public opinion raging, so the video attracted the attention of the relevant authorities. The shark was confirmed as a protected species and the blogger banned. Other related persons were also put under investigation.
In another case dating from July 2020, a food vlogger with more than 3 million fans cooked an endangered Jellyfish Snow Rabbit with instant noodles in their video. They were criminally detained, again for eating a national Class II Protected Species of China.
In this regard, experts pointed out that not only do the anchor and relevant personnel bear legal responsibility for disseminating videos showing the consumption of protected wildlife, but the platform involved also has an inescapable responsibility.
Elsewhere, as this publication reported just last week, China has recently seen a proliferation of the ferocious alligator eel, or gar. Its eggs are highly toxic, and dangerous if eaten, even by mistake. But in the vlogging ratings war, some anchors went so far as to make it into sauerkraut fish.
Ding Zhaochen is Technical Specialist for the Nanjing Pufferfish Protection Association. “Female alligator eels have highly toxic ovaries during breeding; the very idea of eating them is dangerous”, Ding said, reports The Paper.
But it cannot be denied that the novelty of the ingredients in such vlogs is their main selling point. Many vloggers will also spice up their broadcasts with extreme descriptions in the titling thereof, such as, “One in a hundred years”, or, “First meal on the whole network”, to attract users to click to watch.
Back when food vlogging was a novelty, anchors would generally chat and interacted with fans while eating live. Then, with the introduction of fan rewards, live streaming, product placement and other mechanisms, so food broadcasting became an emerging industry.
But then things started to get out of hand in the competition for viewers, which led, somewhat inevitably, to phenomena such as “big appetite king” and “overeating” food broadcasts. Industry chaos, including on-air vomiting, followed.
In April 2021, the Anti-Food Waste Law of the People’s Republic of China was officially promulgated, strictly prohibiting the production, publishing and dissemination of the waste of food, mostly by overeating.
Then, in June of this year, the State Administration of Radio and Television and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism jointly issued the Code of Conduct for Network Anchors. Zhu Wei, who is Deputy Director of the Communication Law Research Centre of China University of Political Science and Law, noted that the Code has a clear provision for overeating. “Videos that may cause the physical discomfort of others are not suitable for dissemination on the internet, so they may also be judged as illegal videos by the platform”, said Zhu.
Among the Code’s many other stipulations, network anchors should “adhere to a healthy style and taste; consciously abandon low-level interests, such as vulgarity; and oppose adverse phenomena, such as traffic supremacy and abnormal aesthetics”.
