A reminder of life in the raw, buzzy friends and all

Monday, 2 March 2026

Meat is prepared for sale at a roadside market in Cambodia.

James Bush is a fashion designer from Wellington, currently based overseas. He is a regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: Every day for the past three weeks, I have sat in a tuk tuk and driven past a table of raw meat, sitting in the sun.

The meat itself is rich in colour, and of course it attracts a certain devoted breed of buzzing wildlife. The weak desk fan positioned just above it blows a meagre gust of cool air onto the produce for sale.

The cart itself does a brisk trade, and by the middle of the afternoon it is nearly empty. The remaining cuts will disappear in the next few hours, and it will be replenished early tomorrow morning, ready to repeat today’s trading.

I am writing this column from Siem Reap, Cambodia, where I have sought respite after going through the uncomfortable process of closing up a business and high-tailing it out of town. Walking away from something you’ve spent years building requires a certain shift in headspace.

It’s easy to view it in the negative and it can take a moment to reframe and look at it positively. And so I must become Julia Roberts and live my Eat, Pray, Love moment. Look, it is what it is, don’t be mean about it.

The cart sits on a dusty corner and the vibrantly coloured soil, so prevalent here, quickly turns everything a soft shade of orange. It could not be more different to the vacuum packed product and neon lighting of New World or Woolworths.

The supermarket is an extraordinarily sophisticated machine for making you forget you’re buying a dead animal, writes James Bush.

It was a shock on day one, which is really quite ridiculous given this is how people have traded meat everywhere, since forever. I peered over my designer sunglasses, like some pasty-ass ghoul, quite unaccustomed to such… naturalness. Is it really possible that people might eat that? Yes James, it is. Grow up.

My reaction stayed with me. I’ve seen some things in my time, so why was I so shocked by the sight of large clumps of meat for sale in the warming sun? The answer, no doubt, is that I’ve been so thoroughly conditioned by Western design, marketing and product curation that an entirely normal, functional and ancient way of trading meat read as transgressive.

There was no design element or curated experience to how it was sold. It wasn’t packaged, presented or enhanced with artificial lighting. It was just there. Doing its thing, with its buzzy friends on board.

A sidewalk market in Siem Reap, Cambodia, where discomfort and friction haven’t yet been expunged from daily life.

This sounds ridiculous now that I’ve written it down, but it raises the uncomfortable question: have we designed our way out of reality? After all, the supermarket is an extraordinarily sophisticated machine for making you forget you’re buying a dead animal.

But I guess that’s the point. We have removed discomfort and friction from just about every element of life. Our meat comes on trays and our grapes in plastic boxes. We outsource birth, sickness and death and we worry about the growing “problem” with rough sleepers in our cities, because it makes us uncomfortable to be faced with poverty when we’re trying to buy a latte.

And yet, if the stream of articles is to be believed, we are hitting record levels of anxiety and alienation. Despite our curated lives and designed experiences, we are more uncomfortable than ever. The screens, the swiping and the voyeuristic consumption of the lives of others, through reality TV and social media, seem to have further separated us from reality. Unsurprisingly, we’re struggling.

I cannot speak to what it’s like to live in Cambodia, and I am in no way suggesting that the obvious poverty and hardship of many of its citizens is picturesque. But from the outside, there is a visible texture and friction to public life which, in our own society, we have quietly, and expensively engineered away.

By my last day in Siem Reap, the meat cart had become normal. It no longer looked shocking or unhealthy and I’d even become used to seeing the odd tail, still attached and hanging from the table.

In Eat, Pray, Love Julia Roberts learnt to appreciate the art of doing nothing – dolce far niente, and through pizza and carbohydrates she found Javier Bardem. For me, although the meat cart in Cambodia didn’t solve anything, it did at least challenge my perspective. Fair to say she won that one.