#1
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"What the hell is a wet market and can I please go to a dry one instead? It seems like virusses like the wet markets!"
-Joe Schmoe reading the New York Times in February 2020

The term 'dry goods store' has old-timey-vibes since food distribution in the anglosphere long ago moved to the box store model where all household products, wet or dry, come from the same building. There never was a term 'wet goods store' because you had butchers, greengrocers, bakers and etc. under different banners, forming a market, not a store. Wet goods sellers have different requirements for storage, sourcing, and handling, so what you end up with is an area with many small sellers. You dont keep raw meat and vegetables on the same table. Contrast this with dry goods which can all be sold in one place.

Even in the western grocery stores this distinction survives in a vestigal way, with the first half of the store being wet goods and the latter half being aisles of boxes, cans, bottles and bags.

Food purchasing in China is still more like the way it used to be in the west, before the Waltons.

China has 菜市场 càishìchǎng, or food markets, which most families frequent on a day to day. They have many small, independent stalls selling all types of vegetables, meats, fresh made noodles, and dry goods. Naturally small snack stores and clothes stalls pop up to sell to the foot traffic heading to the stalls. The food market becomes a nucleus for buying all sorts of things. This type of place is what you might call a farmer's market, except with fewer yuppies.

Then you have the 超级市场 chāojíshìchǎng, a direct translation from 'super-market'. These are western style grocery stores. They are increasingly common but are never the only game in town.

The epicenter of the virus is the
武汉华南海鲜批发市场 Wǔhàn Huánán hǎixiān pī fā shì cháng, or Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market. Notice that 'wet' does not appear in the name; 'wet market' is a description or synonym, not a translation. The literal term 'wet market' does not exist in China to my knowledge. The seafood market was a wet and dirty place, though. It's a massive building with many independent stalls doing wholesale to restaurants and other markets in the city. Its open to the public but not aimed at them. As witg the smaller, neighbourhood markets, snack stores, vegetable stores, glasses stores and so on attach themselves to the huge market like birds cleaning the scraps off the back of a whale.

The market had live seafood and other animals that could be butchered on site and purchased in large volumes. It was an open secret that exotic, illegal animals were housed and sold there by some sellers. Naturally the more unscrupulous sellers have very bad hygiene, and since a lot of the trade there is business to business, the standards for cleanliness were very low in general. I don't know what the local authorities thought about this place or how the black, grey and white parts of the market fit together. The place is closed now, of course, but before the virus some investigative journalists were able to pose as customers to see the back rooms with exotic animals.

So 'wet market' is not a very descriptive term. It is easy for an ignorant westerner to assume this is just how all food is sold on China.

On a linguistic note, I think the ubiquity of this 'wet market' term rose out of a real need of journalists to communicate the different style of distribution and consumption in China to westerners who have only ever known the Tescos and the Walmarts. That said, the resonance and sheer staying power the term has had in english-thinking minds is obviously from disgust. There is no denying that a 'wet market' sounds disgusting, just as a wet anything sounds disgusting. Wet is a nasty word. In truth the wuhan wholesale seafood market probably was pretty nasty to walk around if you weren't accustomed to it.

So part of the revulsion to the term is from our attachment to the gleaming, industrial supermarkets as contrasted with the chaotic and unpolished markets of China, an unfair comparison for many reasons. The other part is from a valid disgust at the way animal products are made and sold in (some parts of) China: the basic horror of killing and then consuming the flesh of other animals, especially when it is not done surgically or 'humanely'.

Everyone likes sausages but doesnt want to seem them made, and nobody eats more sausages than fat Amerikkka.
#2
UNUSUALY COOL
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the stories about it mostly just make me miss a petit-booj summer in moscow with a muscovite, because world news should be about me and people i know
#3
mt.real
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the Wikipedia page on this is pretty good it seems, tbh. even if you disregard everything added after December
#4
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I'm typing on my phone so I dont have the patience to do research but swampman mentioned to me that the term 'wet market' has been universally adopted by the US media and both government parties. So the US government wants you to die and wants you to blame China for it.
#5
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cars posted:

the stories about it mostly just make me miss a petit-booj summer in moscow with a muscovite, because world news should be about me and people i know



Humbly, my cryptic sage, I don't get this post

#6
UNUSUALY COOL
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they had open air markets there and I saw how much different stuff you can pickle, turns out it's a lot
#7
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drwhat posted:

the Wikipedia page on this is pretty good it seems, tbh. even if you disregard everything added after December



I havent been following the news much so I hadn't seen many of the English articles about the market itself.

The 'wet market' wikipedia article confuses me, I'm still trying to match up the various english terms with chinese ones with the western and asian market types.

The chinese name for wet market is given as 'traditional market', and the 'wet' part apparently came from singapore english, referring to melting ice on the floor and cleaning with water hoses into floor drains.

#8
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cars posted:

they had open air markets there and I saw how much different stuff you can pickle, turns out it's a lot



yeah they even pickled lenin

#9
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i logged in to upvote sov

#10
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also, the op forgot "dank" and "fetid"
#11
[account deactivated]
#12
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not much, wuhan with you?