Let's See It All

Everyone loves the farmer’s market, right? Everything is fresh. Everyone is friendly. The atmosphere is leisurely and little...bourgeois.

That’s definitely NOT how a farmer’s market works in China!

Let me introduce you to my hometown. First of all, the town doesn’t have a grocery store so everyone has to shop in a farmer’s market. When I call it a farmer’s market, it’s just a street or several street blocks where vendors and farmers gather. Imagine a one-way only beat-up street in Manhattan, lined by dimly-lit restaurants, deli shops, and convenience stores. On the curbs in front of the shops, vendors sit by their stalls densely loaded with sacks of colorful spices and dehydrated foods such as marinated squids, smoked quails, or cured pork. Along the curbs in the street, farmers stoop over their baskets or vinyl sheets, guarding handfuls of freshly picked vegetables. The customers, also stooping over the baskets or vinyl sheets, pick through the produce and stand up from time to time to make room for bicycles, motorcycles, pedicabs and occasionally cars that are worming through the crowd.

Here in the US farmer’s market shoppers and stall owners act as if they were best friends. They exchange the latest recipes, chat about the year’s harvest, and share information about each other’s family members. They don’t haggle. People in an American farmer’s market are not there for the prices--neither the farmers nor the customers--or so they pretend. They are there because they share resentment and contempt towards grocery store products laden with chemicals and straining to appear fresh through dubious injections and frequent sprinkling. They are there because they share the belief that cooking and eating are not just necessity but an art form. They are there for a lifestyle they consider priceless. Therefore, haggling over money is forbidden.

In a Chinese farmer’s market, the typical customer and the typical farmer or vendor are enemies. They bargain, cajole, intimidate and plead to try to wrangle a few cents from each other. They are like Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong sitting at the negotiation table, each calculating his own chips and scoping out the other’s bottom line. Here’s how they talk to each other:

Customer: How much does your bean sprout sell for?

Farmer: Five Jiao (about six cents) a kilogram.

Customer: What? You’d better rob me! It’s getting dark. Your stuff is not that fresh anymore, and the market is going to close soon. You would have to take your sprouts back and let it rot if you don’t sell it to me. How about Four Jiao?

Farmer: You are kidding me! Look how crisp they are! I picked them fresh from the field this morning, and walked three hours from the Shuangxi village here. The market is just getting busy. Five Jiao!

Customer: You are from Shuangxi!? I grew up there! See, we are from the same place. You have to give me some discount.

Farmer: Then you know how tough life is there in the rural village. I work year round and can barely feed my two children. Now one of them is going to college.

Customer: Ok. How about four and a half Jiao? It’s more than fair! Farmer: No. I know the prices around, and I can’t go below five.

Customer: (Walking away tentatively) I’m sure I can find better deals from someone else.

Farmer: All right, all right! Four and a half...only because we are from the same village. Don’t tell others that you got this deal from me. What a crummy deal. My whole day’s labor won’t even pay for our dinner tonight...

Now let’s go to the meat and poultry section.

I know what you have in mind--neatly packaged meat under clear plastic wraps showing the perfect pinkish hue--deep enough to demonstrate the freshness yet light enough to avoid association with blood. So it reminds you that it’s cut from some animal that’s moving and chewing until most recently, but it doesn’t prod you to think how that animal becomes those chunks of meat stacked on the stall. Actually those packages look so innocent that you might as well think they are “harvested” somewhere like apples plucked from the tree.

Chinese meat is not packaged. Slabs of pork or beef or lamp dangle from steel hooks. They are fresh all right, because some are dripping blood. You tell the seller how much you want from which section of which slab. He or she grabs that slap, whacks a chunk off, slits a hole in that chunk, puts a straw string through that hole, ties a knot and hands you your purchase. Right besides the meat, livers and kidneys are also hanging from hooks. On the counter, it’s an assortment of pig heads, bones, and tails. So when you take your purchase into your hand, whether it’s a chunk of meat, a liver, or a pig ear, you know you are taking home a part of a recently alive animal, and the brutal evidence of the murdering and dismembering of that creature is lying right in front of your eyes.

There are chicken, ducks, and rabbits, too--carcasses hanging down from wooden stakes right besides cages of live ones waiting to become carcasses. You want your food to be fresh? Here’s the real deal. Say you are thinking of a spicy rabbit stir-fry for dinner. You stare into the cages at those long-eared creatures huddling tightly together, some still munching grass, maybe stick one of your fingers into the cage and poke at some to feel the thickness of their meat underneath their white or gray fur. You’ve made up your mind and point out your chosen one to the vendor. He lifts the hatch on the cage, grabs your choice by its ears and pulls it out, its legs kicking in the air. I won’t go into further details for the sake of the faint-hearted, but at the end of the story is your chosen rabbit slaughtered and skinned in front your eyes and you going home with a warm rabbit carcass for your rabbit stir-fry.

The thing is, I don’t feel there’s anything morbid about the whole thing. We eat meat. We crave rabbit stir-fries, steaks, and chicken soup. WE are calling for the death of all the animals we consume. We are as much their murderers as those who slit open their throats. So let’s witness the murders. Let’s see the blood. Let’s watch how lives are taken. We don’t need to be shielded from our guilt. We know what we are taking home. And we’re going to swallow our guilt along with the meat.

In Chinese, “pork” is “zhu rou,” which is literally “pig’s meat.” “Beef” is “niu rou,” which is “cow’s meat,” and so on. So it’s given to you straight: meat comes from whole animals! Don’t even try to think it’s something else.

Because we know we are taking lives away, we honor the lives by consuming almost everything from the slain creatures--meat, organs, intestines, heads, feet, ears and eyes.

But there are side effects from being life-long murder scene witnesses, too. When Americans see ducks and ducklings filing through highways, they stop and wait and say: “Look, how cute.” Chinese stop and wait (if they are in the US), and think: “Mmmm, duck soup.”