So another story that hopefully lends color and perspective to the coronavirus. I lived in Shenzhen which by most every standard is a pretty normal first world type city. I lived across the street from a mall with Starbucks, McDonalds and all kinds of shopping. I give you 1/n
this information so you can understand what comes next. In addition to the large super markets, every neighborhood has tons of the little fruit, vegetable, and meat shops. They are actually popular with people because people feel they have greater trust in the vendor 2/n
(whether they should or not being another matter). When my kids went to Chinese preschool, they went to a school that was in the next building development over from ours. We would walk in a nice tree lined street next to all kinds of small shops and restaurants. 3/n
The restaurants would get deliveries in the morning and they would sit outside on the ground some times entirely unexposed, mesh bags, plastic bags, cardboard boxes with people walking by on the street spitting with one restaurant delivery being in a parking lot sitting 4/n
for hours as cars drove by and around the food on the ground on the sidewalk. Near the actual school was a pork butcher. He would get large sides of pork that he would cut on the side walk with enormous knives and not infrequently the sidewalk would look like a horror movie 5/n
The pork would be cut into individual family portions and hang from meat hooks or on metal trays outside in Shenzhen in the summer all day. In front of his store he had what looked like an old Honda motor cycle with chrome pipe handles. A couple times a week he would have 6/n
filleted pig head cut down the middle hanging from a meat hook off the right side handle bar of this Honda motorcycle. Once the morning rush of customers had been filled, he would sit on a gas tank and take an acetylene blow torch to the skin side of the filleted pig head 7/n
and spend I'm guessing about 15-30 minutes blackening the whole thing. Why? I have no idea but he did. What was so funny is walking past all this as a I took kids between the ages of 3 and 5 to pre-school. Why do I tell you all this? When we talk about these health and virus 8/n
problems in China? Hopefully this provides some background to the type of meat, hygiene, and sanitary standards that give rise to these types of problems. Done.
