Spillover: the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

by David Quammen

IN A CROWDED country with 1.3 billion hungry citizens, it should be no surprise that people eat snake. It should be no surprise that there are Cantonese recipes for dog. Stir-fried cat, in such a context, seems sadly inevitable rather than shocking. But the civet cat (Paguma larvata) is not really a cat. More accurately known as the masked palm civet, it’s a member of the viverrid family, which includes the mongooses. The culinary trade in such unusual wild animals, especially within the Pearl River Delta, has less to do with limited resources, dire necessity, and ancient traditions than with booming commerce and relatively recent fashions in conspicuous consumption. Close observers of Chinese culture call it the Era of Wild Flavor. One of those observers is Karl Taro Greenfeld, who served as editor of Time Asia in Hong Kong during 2003, oversaw the magazine’s coverage of SARS, and soon afterward wrote a book about it, China Syndrome. Before his editing role, Greenfeld had covered “the new Asia” as a journalist for some years, giving him opportunity to see what people were putting in their stomachs. According to him: Southern Chinese have always noshed more widely11 through the animal kingdom than virtually any other peoples on earth. During the Era of Wild Flavor, the range, scope, and amount of wild animal cuisine consumed would increase to include virtually every species on land, sea, or air.

The Era of Wild Flavor