To Understand How China Eats, This Anthropologist Spent a Decade Wandering Wet Markets

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

Visiting the wet market has become an essential part of travel. Wet market photography and guided market tours are trending on social media, while cafés, florists and stand-up comedy acts are moving into newly renovated markets. The wet market is becoming a feature of the urban landscape — even a gateway for young people to rediscover ‘the nearby’.

Ten years ago, anthropologist Zhong Shuru began researching wet markets. Over the decade since, she has visited more than 200 wet markets in cities across the country, talking with stallholders, vegetable farmers and fisherfolk — documenting how food flows and how the people who work in the markets live and change. This year, she has gathered years of fieldwork and reflection into a new book, Chinese Wet Markets, in which she uses the wet market as an entry point to understanding China’s vast and intricate food system.

This episode of Food Talk, we have invited Zhong Shuru and qiran, a long-time friend of Foodthink, to explore the food lives of contemporary Chinese people through wet markets: How does a single market record a city’s history of migration? Why are wet markets becoming ever more eye-catching, even as their business doesn’t necessarily keep improving? Zuanxin in Kunming, Wuzhong in Shanghai, Shuangjingtou in Wenzhou—these ‘star wet markets’ that once featured frequently on social media—how are they doing now? When e-commerce can deliver seasonal ingredients from all over the country, do we still need wet markets?

The changes in wet markets are also bound up with the way we live. Shopping for groceries and cooking have always been a series of time-consuming tasks. Today, food delivery, fresh-food e-commerce, and community group buying are taking over more and more of those tasks on our behalf, and the labour of eating is steadily being outsourced. We have saved time on shopping and cooking, yet we have not actually gained more time as a result; browsing the wet market has instead become a kind of “luxury” and reward.

As food becomes ever more readily available, do we truly understand it any better? At this point, the wet market leads us to a more everyday question: in an increasingly fast-paced life, how should we ‘eat well’?

In Zhong Shuru’s view, there is no single right answer to ‘eating well.’ What matters more than ‘how we eat’ may be simply knowing a little more about the food we consume each day. That knowledge can be very concrete. Take a single lychee, for instance—where does it come from, who grew it, and what supply chain brought it to us? Living in a particular place, which fish are in season, which fruit is just coming to market, how different varieties differ in flavour—these are embodied experiences and knowledge that are hard to find on a product listing page.

Wet markets happen to provide an entry point for understanding food and place. When Zhong Shuru first began researching wet markets a decade ago, she was not yet familiar with the local natural calendar. Through repeated encounters with stallholders, ingredients, and the seasons, she gradually built up a body of food knowledge entirely her own.

Beyond simply keeping us fed, what kind of relationship can we build with food? How much time are we willing to set aside for food, for place, and for one another?

If you, too, are curious about food and wet markets, pick up Professor Zhong Shuru’s new book, *China’s Wet Markets*. From a single stall, a single ingredient, a single market, it leads you into the larger food systems that underpin them all — revealing where the food we eat every day comes from and what people and places it binds together.

📚 If you’d like to get a signed copy of Professor Zhong’s new book *China’s Wet Markets*, add Foodthink’s assistant on WeChat: foodthink2. You’re also welcome to join our listener community.

01:14 A book ten years in the making, “Chinese Wet Markets”: by the time the writing was complete, some of the markets it had documented had already disappeared

02:05 A wet market is a slice of society on display and a doorway into the vast, complex Chinese food system

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

09:34 Beyond gentrification, is there a better way to renovate and upgrade wet markets?

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

13:05 How does e-commerce manufacture discourse to steer consumption, reshaping the way we understand food?

16:24 Do you need a guided tour to visit a wet market? When everyday life becomes unfamiliar, we start becoming tourists in our own city

18:16 No two wet markets in the world are exactly alike; a wet market can also be a museum. Our two guests from Guangdong offer a bonus fact: what is “dàoshuǐ”?

20:44 Understanding a city’s transformation and culture through the history of its wet markets: Shaguan Market in Guangzhou, the Wenzhou Wet Market at Dahongmen in Beijing

24:10 No “boss” — is being a market vendor really so “free”?

26:22 Hainan, the stronghold fresh e-commerce cannot crack: why do young people in Hainan still visit wet markets?

29:59 The “Three Great Mountains” facing wet markets

33:14 Life gets faster and faster, we grow ever more adept at saving time — so why do we have no time left to eat properly?

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

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

46:15 Writing a doctoral thesis for the public: how does an anthropologist approach public writing?

49:51 Easter egg: is a local-style restaurant the wet market of the restaurant system? Our two guests from Guangdong offer a second bonus fact: gōngzhuāngcài.

▼