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.”
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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.
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.
This article was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. It is republished here with permission. See the sources for these fact checks here and more of their fact checks here.
