It
was nice, it really was. Good food, in the form of wicker baskets
full of baguettes and chèvre,
handcrafted decorations, people milling around enjoying themselves,
doing their best to appreciate an outdoor market in the viciously hot
Thai summer.
And
yet something seemed off.
No
more than a mile to the Southeast is the Khlong Toei fresh market,
probably the largest in a city full of fresh markets.
Little-touristed, it's probably what you imagine when you think of an
outdoor market in Asia. Barrels of more varieties of rice than you
knew existed, seabass and groupers gutted into drains, pig carcasses
dragged by their hooves over the asphalt, appliances of dubious
origin in mismatched cardboard boxes, bunches of shallots wrapped in
twine hanging from eaves, technicolor-bright piles of mangoes,
eggplant, and sweet potatoes. When Émile
Zola called Les Halles the belly of Paris, he was referring to a
place with all the energies and odors and frantic movement of humans
and machines that Khlong Toei has to this day.
The
Bangkok Farmers' Market, on the other hand, struck me as having less
to do with the ideal of the farmers' market as I've always known it
then a self-conscious imitation of the aesthetics and gastronomy of
Brooklyn and San Francisco, transplanted, via the city's cosmopolitan
classes, to its poshest sections.
Whereas
the farmers' markets in America attempted to recreate the local
cuisine and close relation between producer and consumer that
characterizes the great markets of Europe and Asia-- the
aforementioned Les Halles, Tsukiji in Tokyo, Covent Garden in
London-- Bangkok never fully lost that. The pork that's in your
noodles there was probably merrily squeaking in a smallholding in
Ratchaburi a couple days ago.
Slapped
with a comfortably English name, the open-air market only becomes
acceptable to young Bangkok wealth when refracted through a North
American sensibility.
Although
more than anything, I'm reminded of the French House of Bourbon, most
notably Marie Antoinette, and their habit of building so-called
hameaux
around the countryside. In these idealized peasant villages
predicated largely on the floaty idealization of nature proffered by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the harsh, feudalistic political economy of
François
Quesnay, the great men and women of the twilight years of the ancien
régime
dressed in rustic clothes and built palaces in imitation of cottages.
We
build our holograms, and come to accept them as normal. This is how
hegemony functions. And while I'm trying my best to enjoy my bread
and cheese, I can't shake the sense that I'm doing so within a
mirage.
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