If you’re vegetarian or vegan, you might want to skip
this post entirely and come back tomorrow for the last Hong Kong post. I’m a
carnivore and even I almost converted as I faced the visual reality of seeing
the live or nearly live versions of the protein I consume. But that’s looking
at things from a very Western lens where we are used to our proteins in nice,
flat, cellophane-wrapped packages in neat rows lined up in refrigerator units
housed inside large, well-lit supermarkets.
In Asia, they’re a little closer to protein in their
natural forms. They aren’t necessarily nice, neat, shrink-wrapped packs but
they’re definitely very fresh. Culturally, they’re also not as squeamish (as
me) and are more pragmatic. Less affluent populations literally cannot afford
to forego cheaper sources of nutrition (fish harvested from the sea, poultry
and pork, etc).
Our last full day in Hong Kong was a team-building
activity where we gathered as a group to be taken on a tour of Kowloon’s “wet
market”. In the Philippines, we would call them “palengkes”. In the US, they’re
like farmers’ markets on steroids where not just produce is for sale but also
poultry, fish, pork, beef, etc; some cooked and ready to eat, some raw and
available for purchase in family-consumable sizes.
Our guide said he wouldn’t call himself a food guide but
he had spent years learning about the history of food and its culture in Asia
and he had some interesting stories to impart about where certain practices
came from and what those common practices were. For instance, he showed us a
stand where selections of freshly cooked pork was laid out on a table.
Customers can come up and choose what they wanted and walk away with their
selection, the meat ready to eat and to supplement a family’s dinner.
Ovens are not common in Hong Kong (as they aren’t in the
Philippines) and certain meats were rarely cooked by a home chef but were
instead always purchased from vendors who had developed the expertise and had
the facilities and sources to prepare the meat. It was easy for consumers to
stop by on their way home from work to purchase parts of their dinner. This is
the same in the Philippines so the practice wasn’t foreign to me. It’s no
different than Europeans picking up a baguette on their way home from work to
include as their dinner. There are many bakers who produce superior bread and
have the facilities to do so and it’s culturally appropriate and easy to buy a
fresh loaf than to spend the hours making it yourself.
We walked through various parts of the wet market. There
were rough groupings of types of food; some were stalls, others were more
traditional stores. The stalls were mostly the freshly cooked meats and poultry
or raw seafood while the more traditional stores sold fresh produce. We did go
to a particular building that housed 3 stories, the first two floors of which
were stalls upon stalls of fresh seafood or produce. And when I say “fresh
seafood”, I actually mean “live fish” you can select. Some were freshly killed
and keeping in water. This was the umpteenth time I considered going vegetarian
even though I don’t eat a lot of vegetables. But I could definitely understand
why people go vegetarian and vegan.
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| Chinese doughnut |
But I wasn’t there to judge (or be a hypocrite). It was
an interesting, close-up look at Kowloon’s wet market, an exposure to a
different type of “foodie” experience, one that is more real than I usually
get. It gave me a huge appreciation for the amount of work that goes into
providing a food supply for the population and it’s probably normally thankless
work.
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