Shanghai Street View: Chicken Chatter

Local chicken lovers are clucking with a collective sigh of relief these days, after Shanghai formally ended its 2-month ban on live poultry sales in the city’s dozens of wet markets. I have to commend the city for its rational, even-handed approach to the situation, which forced it to find a middle road in balancing local tastes for live birds with the health threat raised by the outbreak of H7N9 in April.
Still, now that the crisis has passed I have to wonder if perhaps the city might have been better served by keeping these live bird markets closed permanently. While that might deprive Shanghai of some of its local color, such a switch would also be more in line with the international image the city is trying to cultivate.

The original ban on live birds dates back to early April, when the city formally ordered a halt to all trade in chickens and other foul over concerns that the markets had become breeding grounds for the spread of H7N9 bird flu. As a chicken lover, I found the citywide paranoia over chickens in any form, shape or size rather frustrating over the last couple of months, even though the city’s steps certainly looked prudent considering that 37 people ultimately died from the bird flu.

My favorite Cantonese diner and just about all other restaurants took all chicken off the menu during that period, even though there’s no evidence that bird flu spreads through eating properly cooked meat. My lone attempt to buy chicken at my local supermarket also came up empty, as the only poultry on offer was some sickly gray frozen meat that looked like it had probably been in deep freeze for the last few months.

The ban on live bird trade formally ended in late June with the resumed sale of live chickens at seven markets citywide. That number is being slowly expanded, though the sale will be more controlled than in the past. Live bird lovers will also be happy to know that pigeons that were removed from People’s Park during the outbreak have also been reintroduced into the area, providing some local color and a target for little children to chase and feed with food scraps.

With the crisis now past, the discussion is turning to the longer term issue of live bird sales, and what place, if any, they have in Shanghai’s future. For now the city seems content with tighter scrutiny of the smaller number of markets, though it does plan to temporarily suspend all live bird sales during flu season next year. Local housewives also seem content, with all markets reporting brisk business since reopening.

The city has made a general pledge to close down all the live bird markets eventually, but the timing remains vague and such a move anytime soon could be politically unpopular. The new status quo seems to be an attempt to balance the traditional preference for freshly killed meat among many older Chinese with the health dangers posed by live bird sales. But with the bird flu threat now in the past, I’d like to take the bolder step of proposing a complete ban on live bird sales in the city.

I’m certainly not the first to propose such a ban, which the city also weighed before coming to its final decision to reopen some markets. I’ll also openly admit that my view is somewhat stereotypical for foreigners in China, even though I don’t usually like to be stereotyped that way.

As someone who grew up in a place where you brought all your groceries and meat in a supermarket, the sight of wet markets with their live animals and fresh vegetables was very new to me when I first came to Asia more than 2 decades ago. Any meat that we ate in the US was always slaughtered in an abstract place far away, helping to separate the idea of what we were eating from the reality that it was something that was once alive.

Of course animal rights activists would probably say there’s something unhealthy about this divorce of these two concepts, but that’s the way it was. Perhaps part of the reason for this separation was psychological, but a big part was also purely for sanitary reasons, as we saw when these traditional bird markets became breeding centers for disease during the bird flu outbreak.

I know that many people in China believe that freshly killed chicken and fish is tastier and it’s certainly fresher than what we get in the west. But that said, I do think much of this view is due to conditioning, and I don’t usually taste any big difference between a live chicken that’s just been killed at the market versus a chilled one I’ve bought at the grocery store.

Regardless of the case, I do think the recent bird flu outbreak has emphasized that live bird markets may have been necessary in the past to guarantee freshness, but perhaps they need to be retired in the present as part of Shanghai’s drive to become a modern, cosmopolitan city.