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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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"So this is our wet market, it's like a farmer's market except there are live animals and bits of dead animals everywhere, all crammed in together and all of it is wet, perpetually wet."

I think you're missing my point. According to that Wikipedia article, "wet market" doesn't mean anything different from "farmer's market"; it's just the term used for the concept in that region. So you get the message of "the stupid foreigners have this weird exotic type of market that's a bad idea" instead of "China has laxer health and safety regulations on their farmers markets; they should enforce regulations more like the ones in the US/Australia." (and, related, a reminder that those regulations in the US/etc. are doing something useful).

Yeah man, sorry I wasn't clear - that's what people think when they hear wet market, it's like a farmer's market but they think "it's like a farmer's market except revolting". And you say "not really, hygiene standards are laxer but they are at Western farmer's markets too" and they say "but there's exotic meat and live animals for sale" and you say "yeah but it's from local butchers and farmers selling their goods, like markets in the sixties and seventies before we got such stringent standards", but in their heads they still imagine people wandering around grabbing livers out of buckets and putting them in baskets next to fish heads they got from another bucket and bat brains from the bargain bin. Or they think there's a flower stall, and then a stall selling cannolis, and then a store selling lettuces, and then a fucking nightmare of blood and flesh, and then a guy selling avocados...

I have been to farmer's markets in the US and in Europe, and at precisely none have I seen live or dead wild animals for sale. No one breeds bats (I think, maybe in China) so the market was selling wild animals - dead I presume, which is pretty weird.

The eating of weird wild animals is as traditional as Chinese medicine. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao invented both:

it is said that the Chinese started ‘eating anything that moves’ after the great famine of 1958. The Chinese government allowed people to even poach wild animals and eat them.

China banned bushmeat in 2020, so obviously, they agree with me, and you are the only one left defending the indefensible. Don't buy roadkill from a roadside stall.

In early 2020, soon after the breakout of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, the Chinese government swiftly outlawed the consumption and trade of bushmeat on 24th February. The decision was hailed as "the symbol of an era without bushmeat" by the Chinese media.

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