Stop Calling for an End to China’s Wet Markets
Those doing so are parroting xenophobic, racist sensibilities.
- Scientists haven’t confirmed where COVID-19 made its “jump” from animal to human, but it was likely a live animal market or farm.
- Wet markets are common across the world and throughout history.
- China’s exotic animal trade is largely a farmed industry driven by a wealthy elite who undermine regulation.
The world is grappling with the effects — death, economic contraction, anxiety and depression, social fragmentation, geopolitical insecurity — of a pandemic that has been almost universally mismanaged. People are angry and scared, desperate for somewhere to anchor blame.
That should be easy, considering the many legitimately guilty parties for how this situation became so awful.
In the chaos, some news sources have latched on to China’s wet markets, condemning them as perpetuators of disease and calling for their permanent closure.
“Abolish Asia’s ‘wet markets,’” declares an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
“Despite the huge health risks they create, these practices are deeply embedded in rural Chinese life,” writes the National Review. “There should be permanent closure of the wet markets.”
The Guardian quotes UN biodiversity chief Elizabeth Maruma Mrema:
It would be good to ban the live animal markets as China has done and some countries. But … unless we get alternatives for [low-income rural] communities, there might be a danger of opening up illegal trade… We need to look at how we balance that and really close the hole of illegal trade in the future.
But the Hill’s reporting on that same piece freely paraphrases Ms. Mrema as having called for an “international ban of ‘wet markets.’”
Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, lately arisen as a voice of reason for Americans, said: “[They] should shut down those things right away.”
Did COVID-19 come from a wet market?
The jury is still out. A widely-accepted theory that the disease came from a marketplace in Wuhan is no longer so widely-accepted.
It’s probable, though. Zoonotic diseases (such as COVID-19 and SARS, Ebola and H.I.V.) are born in settings that promote prolonged contact between humans and animals. China’s wet markets are one such setting, though in an authoritarian capitalist bureaucracy, nothing is that simple.
Vox explains it compellingly:
In other words: A food market tradition has dovetailed in China with a modern fetish among its rich and powerful to consume exotic animal products. This has been formalized into a farming industry for animals that many would consider “wildlife.”
Meanwhile, those same rich and powerful exercise political power to undermine meaningful regulation of a risky but profitable industry.
Broadly, health experts have been sounding the alarms for decades about uncontrollable disease erupting from where humans intermingle with high densities of live animals.
Modern animal agriculture, with its packed cages of sick animals and scorched-earth approach to antibiotic use, is known to be a ticking time bomb for the next superbug.
In the United States, an estimated 99% of animals produced for food comes from factory farms.
Meanwhile, the American meat lobby exercises its political power to undermine meaningful regulation of a risky but profitable industry.
Whether COVID-19 developed in a wet market or an intensive farming environment, in China or elsewhere, it’s obvious which narrative is being cultivated for public consumption.
Here’s a glance at what animals people are eating in China, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom (note the different Y-axes):
Building the narrative
Not everyone can instantly visualize what a wet market is. Fox News offers the OED’s definition, but decides it needs supplementation (note the quotation marks):
“Wet markets,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, are places “for the sale of fresh meat, fish and produce.” They also sell an array of exotic animals.
Newsweek plays more fast and loose: “Such markets are known for selling live animals such as cats, dogs, fish, rabbits and bats” — borrowing liberally from the Daily Mail (a British tabloid) to paint a scene of lawlessness and callous perversion.
To anyone who grew up Asian (or any phenotype that reads as racially foreign) in America, the eagerness of these conclusions about “strange meat” is intimately familiar.
It calls to mind classmates’ (innocent, back then) mockery, the exaggerated pinched noses and scrunched faces, our personal shame at having brought “weird” and “smelly” foods for lunch. We plea with our parents: “Can’t I have a PB&J sandwich instead? Normal stuff?”
Using a group of people’s food habits as a way to denigrate them is so predictable, it’s literally childish.
As adults, the traumas of the lunchroom are behind us. But anyone paying attention can watch that same intoxicating narrative being constructed in real time every day:
Chinese-looking people eat icky and grotesque things.
Chinese society is unhygienic, regressive, and immoral.
What is a wet market, really?
I’ve explored wet markets in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Malaysia. I’ve studied them as embodiments of food culture in an urbanizing world.
In Taiwanese, they’re called chhai chhi-a: “vegetable market.”
In Chinese, they’re called shi chang: “market place.”
I’ve called them “wet markets” in English because that’s the conventional term that developed in multilingual Hong Kong.
Many of these wet markets look just like the markets where I now live in Spain: held inside blocky buildings with easily washable surfaces, with displays occasionally spilling out onto open spaces.
The day’s produce, meat, and seafood are laid out by independent local vendors and farmers doing business outside the supermarket industry.
One of the reasons people shop at wet markets is food quality: For many, the vendor-shopper relationship is a better guarantee of freshness, safety, and value than industrial products sold in a supermarket.
In other words, a wet market is what we call a farmer’s market.
Wet markets are of the same vein as London’s celebrated Borough Market, New York City’s Essex Street Market, or Paris’ Les Halles.
But while these historical markets of the West have largely become tourist attractions or otherwise been made obsolete by our deadening culinary aptitude and the dominance of supermarket chains, wet markets still play a vital role in the daily food security of millions of people across the world.
Do wet markets offer a variety of exotic wildlife?
Not necessarily. Only a subset of markets in China do.
Do they kill live animals on site?
Some do, depending of their licensing. It tends to be fish, seafood, and (far less common nowadays) poultry. This is related to the strong preference for “freshness” in food. Though it’s tempting to talk about “freshness” in mystical terms, people in the West also share this preference, in feeling disgusted by the thought of buying or consuming fish or seafood that has been sitting out for more than a day.
If we were to condemn “wet markets” as places that take live animals and sell them dead — we’d have to add in the quaint lobster shacks of New England, or French bistros serving mussels and scallops.
(Did you know that when you slurp down a freshly shucked oyster, it’s likely that oyster is still alive?)
If we were to condemn “wet markets” as places where live animals are packed in with regular human contact — we’d have to include the entire mechanism for how the industrialized world produces meat: all of our factory farms, slaughterhouses, and livestock exchanges.
If we were to condemn “wet markets” as places where “strange” creatures are sold for consumption — we’d have to consider whether there is an inherent difference between farming and killing a pig to eat, versus farming and killing a dog or a fruit bat to eat.
I’m not sure we’re ready for that last conversation. Either way, nicer things are not going on in our domestic slaughterhouses. As for those who have more faith in the lobbyists and legislators who define what hygiene and humanity mean on America’s plates, I can only envy them that naivete.
So why blame wet markets?
“Wet market” says nothing and everything all at once.
For most people in Western society, the term is abstract but just comprehensible enough to be a little disgusting. So “wet market” neatly represents cruelty, poverty, disease, corruption, and ignorance.
These are age-old stories we tell ourselves about the Other: the dirty, the poor, the godless, vocalizing in a nonsensical tongue about unscientific and even sexually deviant things.
Why have people fixated on wet markets?
Because imprecise terms are a better vessel for our collective fear.
Because politics, economics, and history are complex and not sexy.
Because outrage about public policy is far less emotionally accessible than outrage toward a group of people.
Because the idea of the whims of a wealthy ruling class dictating the wellbeing of the rest of the population is, truly, not foreign enough.
Deflection and hypocrisy
Like anything born of the enterprising spirit of human beings, wet markets require reasonable regulation to maintain the safety and welfare of the collective good.
And of course things need to improve.
But our horror should instead be directed at a political reality that produces toothless regulations to oversee multi-billion dollar industries.
It should instead be directed at news outlets that regularly, even intentionally fail to hold our own leadership responsible.
Scapegoating wet markets and the regular people who shop and work at them is nothing more than a bigoted form of our own American denial.
