Stand up for the facts!

Misinformation isn't going away just because it's a new year. Support trusted, factual information with a tax deductible contribution to PolitiFact.

More Info

I would like to contribute

Ciara O'Rourke
By Ciara O'Rourke June 9, 2021

No, Anthony Bourdain didn’t tweet about bat soup in Wuhan

If Your Time is short

  • Anthony Bourdain didn’t tweet this.
 

The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who traveled the world as the host of "No Reservations," and "Parts Unknown," visited Sichuan, China in 2016, eating duck-intestine hot pot and a spicy chicken specialty called lazi ji

But he didn’t tweet about bat soup in Wuhan, as an image now spreading on social media makes it appear. 

"This might be the best bat soup I ever had in my life," the tweet says. "Someday everyone’s gonna be talking about Wuhan." 

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The image of the tweet looks like it was sent from Bourdain’s verified Twitter account at 5:40 p.m. on May 22, 2018. 

Featured Fact-check

But we searched his account and found no tweets even mentioning Wuhan, where the first case of COVID-19 was reported in December 2019. 

Bourdain tweeted six times on May 22, discussing director Spike Lee’s response to a speech Bourdain’s girlfriend had recently made and criticizing Rudy Giuliani, but nothing about food, China or bat soup. (He died June 8, 2018.)

We couldn’t find anything confirming that Bourdain visited Wuhan or ever tried bat soup.

In the early days of the pandemic, a video circulated online of a woman eating a bat. The clip was wrongly described as showing a meal in Wuhan, but it was filmed in Palau, Micronesia. 

We rate claims that Bourdain tweeted this False.

 

Our Sources

Instagram post, June 7, 2021

Travel Channel, No Reservations: China, visited June 8, 2021

IMDB, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, visited June 8, 2021

Eater, ‘Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown’ in Sichuan: Just the one-liners, Oct. 16, 2016

Anthony Bourdain tweet, May 22, 2018

Anthony Bourdain tweet, May 22, 2018

PolitiFact, Vegan Instagram accounts spread misinformation about COVID-19, March 18, 2020

The Guardian, Bat soup, dodgy cures and ‘diseasology’: the spread of coronavirus misinformation, Jan. 30, 2020

France24, Is bat soup a delicacy in China? We debunk a rumour on the origin of the coronavirus, March 2, 2020 

 

Browse the Truth-O-Meter

More by Ciara O'Rourke

No, Anthony Bourdain didn’t tweet about bat soup in Wuhan

Support independent fact-checking.
Become a member!

In a world of wild talk and fake news, help us stand up for the facts.

Sign me up
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jun/09/viral-image/no-anthony-bourdain-didnt-tweet-about-bat-soup-wuh/
www.politifact.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-39
113480
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5GZ5IRINFERKALHERMS3YPZG5FODDVJP
<urn:uuid:29efee70-d13e-46d4-ae4f-c3bdcae07ed4>
2021-09-26T00:51:28Z
104.26.10.134
text/html
sha1:5MCZTIWVPJAJP5PNH3YKELIQBWYTNQD6
<urn:uuid:3b3135ef-512f-4847-939d-d75e8c7399c1>
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jun/09/viral-image/no-anthony-bourdain-didnt-tweet-about-bat-soup-wuh/
response
<urn:uuid:75721a77-c109-446c-b0cc-552a13a729d9>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-43
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/