This photograph is taken in Guangzhou (the city once known as Canton) at a wholesale clothing market. Most of the people in the market are not from Guangzhou. The market traders are a mix of people from China and from a number of different nations in Africa. The customers are primarily Africans. It is an international place, drawing all toward a common goal: to escape poverty through the international circulation of cell phones and clothing. Continue reading
Dim Sum. Photo taken at street food vendor in Mong Konk.
This photo is of steamer baskets containing dim sum. Dim sum are roughly translated as little bites, and can be savoury or sweet. My favorites are Char Sui Bao, Shu Mai, and Jin Dui. Char Sui Bao are white buns filled with bar-b-que pork. Shu Mai look like a large thimble or very small basket out of some sort of yellow dough and filled with either shrimp or pork filling. Continue reading
“Yes, getting people to eat healthy vegetables and fruits and other products from wet markets is important; but the sanitation side is complex and you face all the horrors of these markets coming from China. … But so much about these wet markets depends on what is grown and how and where. In Europe and the US where the movement toward markets is huge but with high sanitation controls and with farmers with some honesty, it is simple.”
I was recently having an email discussion with an American food scholar, who has written quite a bit on the nutrition transition. He was offering advice and sending helpful information and was broadly sympathetic to my argument about the importance of maintaining the wet markets. However, as you can see from the quote above, there are some real stumbling blocks of the discursive kind that bear further discussion and consideration. I was troubled by these words for a couple of reasons particularly. Continue reading
In this morning’s South China Morning Post there is an article about how the poultry trade is the likely mechanism through which the H7N9 strain of Avian Flu is spreading. The article cites Professor Malik Peiris, an Epidemiologist and specialist in Zoonosis, as its main source of information. Prof. Peiris is no doubt an expert in his field of clinical virology. He has written hundreds of papers on the science of animal to human viral transfer. He is probably right. You put infected animals in close contact with humans the disease will spread. One way that humans come into close contact is through the movement of infected animals to markets to be sold. Where I disagree with Professor Peiris’ assessment is when he proposes a solution that involves closing the wet markets. Continue reading
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