By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI, Taiwan — Movies about food fetishes, chefs and food bloggers make for popular fare worldwide, from Mexico to Manhattan. And when Julie & Julia hit the silver screen last year, foodies across the globe were in some kind of Seventh Heaven. And as everyone knows, as the old saw goes, you don’t have to be Jewish to love food!
You rememer the story, of course, about a New Yorker named Julie Powell, a blogger who spent a year cooking every recipe from Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking‘. The Nora Ephron film takes Child’s memoir, ‘My Life in France‘ and magically and seamlessly merges Julie’s blogging life and Julia’s real life into one funny, laugh-out-loud flick.
But laugh no more. You might be shocked to know that on the other side of the planet — and here I am talking not about tasty and tantalizing Israel and its gaggle of boisterous food bloggers, but about tasty and tantalizing Taiwan, that other food paradise in the Western Pacific — a blogging foodie has been jailed for posting a ”lousy”
review about a cockraoch-infested beef noodle restaurant. Her recent’ conviction’ has gone viral now in the Chinese-language media all across Asia, from Taipei to Tokyo, from Singapore to Shanghai. Who knows, the story might already have made the American and Israeli press, too!
I’m based in Taiwan, and have been for a number of years, and I love it here. Living on this newly-democratic island nation sometimes feels like being on another planet, where the rules of the democratic road do apply, but in a very different and
novel way. Whatever, it makes life interesting here, and sometimes comical and always relaxing.
Case in point, is this gone-viral story about a blogging food critic who was recently thrown in jail for 30 days and fined
a hefty little sum — US$6,000 — for writing a bad review. I am not making this up. The fine is to compensate the eatery’s owner for lost business.
You think America is awash in lawyers — and lawsuits? Come to Taiwan!
It happened like this: On her popular Chinese-language blog, a 30-something Ms. Liu wrote that a particular restaurant’s food was “too salty”, the place was “unsanitary” due to a few cockroach sightings and that owner was a “bully.”
Of course, the blogging foodie posted all those words in Mandarin, but I am sure you can smell the odor that her stinky review
caused in some quarters here.
The legal upshot was more or less routine: A local branch of the Taiwan High Court sentenced Ms. Liu to 30 days in detention with two years of probation for posting a nasty review and ordered her to pay US$6,000 in compensation to the restaurant.
While this malodorous sentence was just recently handed down, the brouhaha all took place in 2008. Our blogging foodie went to a beef noodle restaurant and noshed on some menu noodles and a few side dishes. Her complaints were not confined to the menu. She said that the owner was a “bully” who let patrons park their cars every which way on the street outside, leading to “traffic jams”.
When the restaurant’s owner, a Mr Yang, learned about Ms. Liu’s post, he filed charges against her, accusing her of
defamation. Three years later, here we are.
The court ruled that the blogger’s criticism “exceeded reasonable bounds.” She has appealed and is counting on international public opinion t0 come to her aid.
The ”cockroach rant” was ruled to be ”a narration of facts”, and not intentional slander, according to local media reports.
But the judge said that the foodie blogger should not have criticized ”all” of the restaurant’s food as ”too salty” because she only sampled one dish on a single visit.
Enter some local health officials, who duly inspected the restaurant and said that the joint was clean and not unsanitary at all. The fine was imposed to compensate Mr Yang for lost revenues due to Ms, Liu’s pan post, the judge said. And even though Ms Liu later apologized to Mr Yang, he told reporters that while he accepted her public apology, he nevertheless hoped the legal case would help teach her a lesson.
Now enter the lawyers. A Taipei lawyer unconnected to the case told reporters that online bloggers who post food reviews should strive to be ”truthful” and make sure to post photographs of the food dishes in order to protect themselves
from accusations of ”making things up”.
Got that, restaurant bloggers of the world, and future Pulitzer-winning food critics in Los Angeles and San Diego? When you come to Taiwan, be very careful and what you say and to whom. Someone might take issue with your taste buds, and you could end up in the slammer.
Is there a funny foodie movie here? Calling Meryl Streep! Calling Meryl Streep!
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Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at danny.bloom@sdjewishworld.com. To purchase the DVD of Julie & Julia on DVD, via Amazon, click below:
And now, welcome to the adventures of the ”Disgruntled Diner” in, of all places, Tel Aviv…… She is, she says on HER foodie blog, just a regular person who has been fortunate enough to have worked internationally and have eaten in many establishments around the world. This blog is an adventure in finding great restaurants in Tel-Aviv. The blog is also a light-hearted observation of life and society in this unique and exciting country (warts and all). Enjoy ”The Disgruntled Diner” – google for exact website address – or see :
Follow the culinary adventures of the Disgruntled Diner searching for a good restaurant in Tel Aviv, Israel. Laugh and cry at the humorous social observations of the people who make up that unique city. The blog is updated once a week with new funny and culinary experiences. thedisgruntleddiner.blogspot.com
EDITORIAL in the Taipei Times today notes
Court ruling leaves a bad taste
Jun 25, 2011
The Taiwan High Court decision this week to uphold a 30-day jail sentence given to a blogger for criticizing a restaurant is a chilling reminder of how young the concept of free speech and a free press is in this country.
The court’s Taichung branch sentenced a woman to 30 days in detention and two years of probation, and ordered her to pay NT$200,000 in compensation to a beef noodle restaurant over a July 2008 blog post saying the food was “too salty,” the place had cockroaches and was unsanitary and that the owner was a “bully” because of parking issues. The restaurant owner sued the blogger for defamation. The case went to the High Court after the blogger appealed a 30-day detention order handed down by the Taichung District Court, which said her criticism had exceeded reasonable bounds.
While the High Court found the cockroach complaint to be factual, not slander, it said the blogger should not have criticized the restaurant’s food as too salty because she had only visited the restaurant once and eaten just one dish.
Leaving aside the question of whether anyone would want to return to a restaurant where you found the food inedible and the place unclean, to be more empirical, the blogger’s criticism of what she ate was subjective. She found it too salty. She did not say that there weren’t enough noodles, or the beef wasn’t cooked right or it did or did not have certain ingredients. Her crime boiled down to a question of taste. That is what critiquing is all about. It is also why people read blogs.
People would read restaurant reviews in traditional media — if there is such a thing in Taiwan. However, most of the articles about restaurants in the popular press are little more than dining guides that cite location, operating hours and menu options. The same void can be found in the worlds of film, theater, music, dance or literature. This is one reason blogs have become so popular.
This nation suffers from a lack of critical thinking and analysis that can be attributed to an education system that does not encourage independent thinking and debate, and to the scars left by the draconian laws of the Martial Law era. These impediments to impartial, reasoned analysis hamper everything from higher education to political debate and efforts to build a better civic society.
The Taichung restaurateur is not the first to sue a critic over a bad review; there have been cases filed in the US, Australia and elsewhere — though none carried the risk of a jail term. In 2004, the review of an Italian restaurant in Dallas led the owner to file suit, upset because the critic gave him four out of five stars, but then was scathing about the food. He said it was the contradictions between the star rating and criticism he found hard to swallow. In 2007, the Australian High Court found, on appeal, a bad critique and a low rating from a newspaper restaurant critic to be defamatory because it attacked the restaurant as a business. What was interesting about that case was that in the initial court case, the jury found that the review was not defamatory — it was the appeals court and high court judges who thought it was.
Which brings the issue of food (or art) criticism back where it belongs — with the public. A good review can make a restaurant, a production or an artist and a bad one can hurt, but that is the risk one must take when creating a dish, a dance or any other product that is offered for sale. People either read reviews or they don’t. They learn whose opinion they feel they can trust and whose they don’t.
The threat of a lawsuit over a review is chilling enough. The threat of a jail term is even more overwhelming and out of proportion to the alleged crime, especially where no overriding issue of public interest is involved.
Follow up, AFP, aka Agency France Presse reports from Taipei today:
The lousy food review panning the beef noodle shep was the latest of a number of controversial rulings involving Internet commentaries, after a Taipei teacher was ordered to pay her dentist US$35,000 for calling him a “rat’s dropping” in March, according to local media.
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