To Figure Out How China Eats, This Anthropologist Spent a Decade Browsing Wet Markets

We seem to love talking about wet markets more than ever.

Travellers browse wet markets as a must-do; wet market photography and guided wet market tours are trending on social media; coffee shops, florists and comedy clubs are moving into newly renovated markets. Wet markets are becoming a kind of urban landscape, even an entry point for young people to rediscover “the nearby” – their own neighbourhood.

Ten years ago, the anthropologist Zhong Shuru began studying wet markets. Over that decade she visited more than 200 wet markets in cities across the country, chatting with stall-holders, market gardeners and fishers, documenting how food moves and how the people in those markets live and change. This year, she has distilled years of fieldwork and reflection into her new book, China’s Wet Markets, attempting to understand China’s vast and intricate food system through the gateway of the wet market.

In this episode of Food Talk, we invite Zhong Shuru and Foodthink’s old friend qiran to enter the food life of contemporary Chinese people through the wet market: how does one market capture a city’s migration history? Why are wet markets increasingly eye-catching, yet not necessarily thriving? What has become of the so-called “star wet markets” – Zhuanxin in Kunming, Wuzhong in Shanghai, Shuangjingtou in Wenzhou – once staples of social media feeds? When e-commerce can deliver seasonal produce from every corner of the country, do we still need wet markets?

The changes in wet markets are bound up with our own ways of living. Shopping for ingredients and cooking are, after all, a chain of labour that takes time. These days, takeaway delivery, fresh produce e-commerce and community group buying handle more and more of those steps, and the labour involved in eating is constantly outsourced. We save the time once spent shopping and cooking, yet somehow find no extra hours to fill – and a stroll through a wet market has become a kind of “luxury” and reward.

When food has never been easier to come by, do we truly understand it any better? the wet market leads us to a more everyday question: in life’s ever-faster rhythm, how should we go about “eating well”?

In Zhong Shuru’s view, “eating well” has no single standard answer. Perhaps more important than “how to eat” is having a bit more understanding of the food you eat each day. That knowledge can be quite concrete. The same lychee – where does it come from, who grew it, what journey through the supply chain brings it to your table? Where you live, which fish is in season, which fruit is just hitting the market, how the flavours differ between varieties – these bodily experiences and this kind of knowledge are hard to glean from a “product detail page”.

A wet market is precisely an entry point for getting to know food and place. When Zhong Shuru first began researching wet markets ten years ago, she had little knowledge of the local phenology; it was through repeated encounters with stall-holders, ingredients and the seasons that she built up a body of food experience all her own.

Beyond filling the belly, what other relationship can we have with food? And how much time are we willing to set aside for food, for place, and for one another?

If you, too, want to understand food and wet markets, pick up Zhong Shuru’s new book, China’s Wet Markets. Start from a single stall, a single ingredient, a single market, and reach out to the larger food system behind them – to see where the food on our plate comes from, and what people and places it connects to.

📚 For those wishing to purchase a signed copy of Zhong’s new book, China’s Wet Markets, please add Foodthink’s assistant on WeChat, personal ID foodthink2, or join our listener group.

01:14 China’s Wet Markets, written over a decade: by the time the book was finished, some of the wet markets it documented had already disappeared

02:05 A wet market is a slice for observing society, and a door into China’s vast food system

05:15 What “attributes” should a contemporary wet market possess?

09:34 Beyond gentrification, is there a better way forward for wet market upgrades?

11:33 When e-commerce starts learning wet market “localisation” and “differentiation”, why are wet markets still irreplaceable?

13:05 How does e-commerce shape consumption through manufactured discourse, changing the way we understand food?

16:24 Does browsing a wet market really need a guide? When daily life turns unfamiliar, we become tourists in our own city

18:16 No two wet markets in the world are exactly alike – a wet market can even be a kind of museum. As a bonus, two Guangdong-based guests share a little know-how: what is diaoshui (hanging to air-dry)?

20:44 A city’s changing face and culture, told through the history of its wet markets: Shayuan Market in Guangzhou, the Wenzhou wet market in Dahongmen, Beijing

24:10 With no “boss” to answer to, is running a stall truly “free”?

26:22 The one place fresh produce e-commerce can’t crack: Hainan – why do young people there still visit wet markets?

29:59 The “Three Mountains” facing wet markets

33:14 Life gets faster, we get better at saving time, yet why is there no time left to eat properly?

40:28 Eating well may not be a solo affair: Huizhou black pepper pork zongzi, and the taste of home

43:32 “Paying tuition” at the wet market – a way of getting to know the real world

46:15 Writing a doctoral thesis for a public audience: how does an anthropologist write for everyone?

49:51 Bonus: is a homestyle restaurant the wet market of the dining industry? Two Guangdong-based guests share a second bit of know-how: Gongzhuang vegetables.

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