A video of Canadian celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson appears to show him making disparaging remarks about Chinese cuisine.

“I am not eating Chinese food again because they literally put rats in it,” he seems to say in an Aug. 25 Facebook video. “I am talking like 25 pound rats, like they shouldn’t be alive at all and they are mixed into the chicken and given to you.”

The Facebook video was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.)

Peterson never said this. A close examination of the video shows that Peterson’s mouth movements don’t match the words in the audio.

The footage of Peterson is from a July 25 interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. The show’s transcript shows Peterson never discussed Chinese food or rats.

The voice-over is close to Peterson’s voice, but it did not match his natural speaking timbre heard in other interviews and speeches. The dubbed voice-over appears to have been produced using artificial intelligence: We used Parrot AI, a tool which includes an AI model of Peterson’s voice and other celebrities’, and it produced two similar voice-overs.

The Facebook video directed viewers to purchase a book promoting herbal tablets. The video’s rodent remarks reflect racist tropes about Asian cuisine.

Fact-checkers at LeadStories debunked a similar video from a different Facebook account claiming to show Peterson telling viewers not to eat certain foods including popcorn, crabs and pork. That video also promoted the same book about herbal tablets.

We found no evidence on Peterson’s website and social media accounts that he promotes a book on herbal tablets. We contacted Peterson for comment but received no reply. 

We rate the claim that this video shows Peterson making disparaging remarks about Chinese food  Pants on Fire!