Recent false assertions by U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio have been stealing and eating household pets struck many Americans as bizarre. But such claims have a long, unpleasant history in American culture.

At least as far back as the 1800s, the racist trope that members of certain ethnic groups — especially newly arrived immigrants — consume pets or vermin has been common. Politicians and their supporters have sometimes amplified the claims. But more often they are spread as rumors, often boosted by uncritical media reports that cast disfavored minorities or newly arrived immigrants with unfamiliar customs as dirty or dangerous.

The latest installment in this long-running history began little more than a week ago, when Vance claimed, without providing evidence, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been abducting and eating people's dogs and cats.

Trump boosted the claim by repeating it the following day in a widely televised debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The debate moderators immediately pointed out that city officials in Springfield had said there was no evidence to back up the claim.

Over the next several days, however, Trump and Vance repeated the claim multiple times, even as Springfield's mayor denied its truth and asked them to stop. The city was forced to close some municipal buildings, including two elementary schools, after individuals citing the false stories called in bomb threats, and a local university was forced to cancel classes after a caller threatened a mass shooting.

History of demonizing food

"The U.S. has had these food-based racialized epithets from the very beginning," said Robert Ku, author of the book Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.

"The food of the Irish and their potatoes, the Mexicans with beans, the Germans with their sauerkraut, Italians with garlic have always been part of the discourse of immigration," Ku told VOA. "The 'other' brings these foreign foods, and they're ‘dangerous.’ They're ‘weird.’ "

Ku said that the charge of eating domestic animals has a particular power in the U.S. because Americans often treat their dogs and cats as "honorary humans" and family members.

In that context, “to accuse someone of consuming a dog or cat is to essentially accuse them of the most savage act imaginable that a human can commit, which is cannibalism," he said.

Presidential politics

While it is unusual for a former president and major party presidential nominee to broadcast such claims, false charges about racial minorities' dietary practices have been present in presidential politics in the past.

In 1888, while the U.S. was mired in controversy over the presence of Chinese immigrants in the country, supporters of President Grover Cleveland distributed trading cards depicting caricatures of Chinese laborers eating rats.

In the late 1920s, supporters of Herbert Hoover brought attention to the fact that Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith was Roman Catholic by ridiculing the dietary restrictions of his faith — such as a ban on eating meat on Fridays. They also criticized the diet of Catholic immigrants, often from Southern Europe, for the use of then-uncommon ingredients, such as garlic and pasta.

In 2008 and 2012, opponents of former President Barack Obama attempted to paint him as un-American by highlighting a story he had told about being served dog meat when he was a boy living in Indonesia.

More recently, right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer attempted to bring negative attention to the Democratic presidential nominee's Indian ancestry last week by saying if Harris wins the presidency, the White House will "smell like curry."

Outside politics

Food-related racist attacks have not been limited to politics, though. For generations before and after the abolition of slavery, Black Americans were often denied access to foods that white Americans viewed as most desirable. This forced them to develop a cuisine based on ingredients many whites never saw on their own dinner tables, and for which Black Americans were routinely mocked in white-dominated popular media.

As immigration from Asia and the Pacific became more prominent in the 20th century, the claims common during the Cleveland administration found new life. Urban legends circulated in many cities that newly established Chinese restaurants were surreptitiously serving dog and cat meat to American diners. The accusations peaked as waves of immigrants from countries such as Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam entered the U.S.

In one of many examples, the Los Angeles Times in 1981 reported outrage within the state's Asian community after a state legislator proposed a measure banning the eating of pets — a problem they decried as nonexistent. Gail Nakatsu of the Union of Pan Asian Communities of San Francisco was quoted by the paper calling the legislation "racist in nature and insulting to the general [Asian] community."

Such claims persisted for decades and briefly found new life very recently, when anti-Asian prejudice spiked during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Few U.S. communities, however, have been as dramatically impacted by accusations of immigrants eating pets as Springfield has in the past week. On Monday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine — who has called Trump's and Vance's claims "garbage" — revealed that the city has been forced to investigate 33 bomb threats at schools in recent days.

As a result, dozens of officers from the state highway patrol have been assigned to be present in the city's school buildings for the foreseeable future.

"Our children deserve to be in school," DeWine said. "Parents deserve to feel that their children are being educated and that their children are safe."