Stigma against Chinese cuisine in the first year of the pandemic cost Asian restaurants in the United States an estimated $7.4 billion in lost revenue in 2020, a recent study found. In a year in which tens of thousands of restaurants closed and many barely scraped by, the study — published online last week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour — reported that Asian restaurants across the country lost 18.4% more in foot traffic than other restaurants in 2020. Prominent reports of anti-Asian racism, from harassment to direct violence, flooded the country in the years after the pandemic’s outbreak. What was particularly surprising to Krupenkin, however, was that Asian restaurants that were not Chinese suffered an even greater decrease in traffic than Chinese restaurants. After investigating this spillover of consumer discrimination, her team found that many people simply couldn’t tell different Asian cuisines apart.

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