Visit local markets while traveling for an intimate cultural experience

Visiting a Hong Kong wet market. Photo by @chromatograph

Skidding on a floor made slick by an unknown substance, I narrowly avoid falling. (Reminder to self: wear shoes with traction when visiting the market.) I wasn’t watching my step; there’s so much competing for my attention at the market that I can’t decide where to focus my gaze. A distinct scent of iron emanates from freshly slaughtered meat dangling from hooks, there’s the vertiginous sight of spinning devices with ribbons attached, to keep flies away from the piles of just-caught fish on ice, and it’s hard to decide what’s more vibrant—the technicolor hues or the jungle-sweet scent of the wide array of tropical fruits. In a market, all of your senses are engaged. It’s one of the best ways I know to get to know an unfamiliar place.

Whether it’s called the farmers’ market, the wet market, or the central market, it is one of the first destinations on my itinerary, no matter where I land in the world. The reasons can be practical—simply buying some fresh fruit to eat—but they can also extend far beyond that as a means of entry into a culture. Whether you can speak the language or not, food is universal. Just as you might glance into someone’s shopping cart at the supermarket (don’t you?), a look at what people are buying at a local market will also get you a glimpse into the everyday food culture.

This is a completely different experience from the sanitary, orderly, and packaged aisles of a modern supermarket. While the language on, and flavors of, supermarket products also give a glimpse into a culture, so many of these items do not belong to any one culture or place.

If you can go with a local, or a guide, that’s a luxury. But on your own, you might notice even more. Take your time and seek out the vendors with the longest line. That’s your best clue to what’s good. Words, in fact, are less necessary than you might think. Use your senses: your eyes will be drawn to the best-looking produce; your hands can tell you if something is ripe or not, and if all else fails, follow your nose! Market vendors proudly proffer their best produce, sometimes with a sample. And if you do share language in common, who better to get tips on how to prepare that unfamiliar vegetable than the person who is selling it, or the person next to you who is buying it? Breaking bread, or sharing roti or a bowl of noodles, is an act of food diplomacy. Everybody eats, and people are always happy and proud to share their local cuisine.

Exercising food diplomacy

Markets also give you a clue to other parts of the culture. Who’s doing the cooking and the selling? Women or men? Are there small children with them? What are their typical everyday clothes? And who else is there? Perhaps you’ll even hear about special events people are shopping for.

Shopping with Chef Fidel Diatta in Mbour, Senegal

On a trip to Senegal, I visited local markets with the chefs who led a cooking class that would teach me to cook two classic dishes of Senegalese cuisine: mafe (groundnut stew) and thieboudienne or ceebu jen (Senegal’s national dish of fish and rice). They took us to the fishing village of Mbour, where the beach is anchored with the sight of traditional brightly colored, hand-carved, canoe-shaped wooden fishing boats called pirogues. The market bordering the beach featured the fresh catch from the pirogues, and was decidedly unglamorous: Fish were laid out in haphazard piles, and the women selling them had to move their arms constantly in order to keep away the flies, attracted by the scent of fresh fish in hot air. The women seemed glamorous, dressed in practical yet elegant headwraps and dresses made of local, vibrantly colored batik wax cloth.

In the stalls surrounding the fish vendors, you could buy the ground peanuts for mafe, and netetou, the fermented locust beans used in thieboudienne, as well as the essential vegetables—onions, tomatoes, and leafy greens. Nothing was labeled, so my Wolof-speaking companions helped me to navigate the stalls. But I could not find fonio. I had learned about this highly nutritious, native ancient grain from Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam, who has made it his mission to reintroduce this sustainable crop.

Since our somewhat conspicuous arrival as non-locals at the market, we had been followed at close distance by a man who offered to be our guide. The cooks waved him away and ignored him during our meanderings around the market, but he proved useful when he understood that I was seeking fonio. While he could not locate it at the market, either, he had an ultimately useful piece of advice: “Perhaps in Cote d’Ivoire… or the super-marché.”

Above and beyond the market

Markets also offer a great introduction to the seasons of a place. Visit Trinidad at Christmas, and you’ll see piles of red hibiscus blossoms just in time to brew for sorrel, the sweet and tart beverage most consumed for Christmas celebrations. In cities with Chinese populations around the world, including in my home in San Francisco, you don’t need to follow the lunar calendar to know that the Lunar New Year is approaching—mounds of tangerines, some with leaves still attached, give it away. In Marrakech during Ramadan, you’ll find piles of sweet, sticky dates, a favorite way to break the fast.

While food shopping and cooking can be thought of as “women’s work” and tasks we might take a break from while on vacation, I value them as a way to get deeper into a local culture, especially if you are staying in a rental property with a kitchen. As I did in Senegal, one of my favorite things to do when travelling is taking a trip to the local market, followed by a cooking class. Cooking classes can be fancy (in cooking schools, hotels, or in restaurants) or very simple (in people’s home kitchens). Anywhere you take them, merely following a recipe pales in comparison.

Authenticity is more than a buzzword

Classes offered in official cooking schools, hotels, and restaurants boast the advantage of translation and fancy equipment. But I prefer home-based classes, for several reasons. The journey to get to them will often take you off the beaten tourist path and into purely residential areas that you would not have otherwise seen. And the act of cooking together is intimate and requires trust—the teacher needs to welcome strangers into their home, and the student is entering the home of a stranger. Whichever you choose, these are social activities. You might mingle with other travelers from around the world, learning about their cultures, as well as picking up travel tips.

Learning to cook mafe and thieboudienne with Nabou at Les Manguiers de Guéréo in Guéréo Senegal.

In Senegal, it was a privilege to have a chance to cook in the kitchen of the hotel’s restaurant. The chefs spent an entire afternoon proudly and carefully teaching me how to make traditional dishes the correct way. They made sure I understood the provenance of all the ingredients. They transcribed and translated recipes for me in painstaking detail, so that I could recreate them when I returned home. They also told me about their families, and about the different parts of Senegal they came from, and taught me much more about their country and culture than just the food. In Hong Kong, I had to find my way in the dizzying maze of a residential neighborhood to a nondescript apartment block to the cramped apartment where I would be taught how to make dim sum by a master, who was quite unimpressed by my xiaolongbao pleating skills.

But the most memorable cooking class I took was in Oaxaca, in 2006. This class started off on a bad note, which clued me into local events which were just starting. At first, my chef instructor was quite displeased with me: "You're late," she spat, glaring at me, and threw a chili pepper-decorated apron in my direction. "And if you had called me last night to confirm your arrival, as I had instructed you to, you would not have worn white."

It was not a promising start, but it wasn’t entirely my fault. I may not have called my instructor when we arrived the previous day, but I did do my duty as a conscientious student the evening before. Wanting to make sure I could make it to my class on time, I had located the restaurant where the class was to be held, and traced a route there from our hotel. The next day, I arose early and left our lodging while my husband and daughters were still sleeping. I strode off confidently towards the zocalo, a little nervous but really excited for the cooking class. Once I got there, everything looked different.

It wasn't just the light, or the large crowd of people going about their daily routine and peddlers doing their business. Without knowing it, my family and I had stumbled into what would end up being a seven-month period of protests and violence, resulting in at least seventeen deaths, including that of an American journalist. It had started simply as a local teachers' strike. The zocalo was unrecognizable to me, with barricades set up, large placards being hoisted in the air, and tarps draped across streets, forming makeshift shelters for the ever-increasing number of protestors. I didn't know enough to be scared at the time, though. I was anxious about being late for my class because I couldn't find the landmarks I had memorized from the night before. The sign for the restaurant, previously visible, was now covered by one of the tarps. Over the morning, my anxiety gradually dissipated as we roasted chiles, combined a dozen ingredients into a rich and complex mole, and made a flan using local Mexican vanilla beans. As the violence dragged on through our departure and into the months to follow, I kept a correspondence with my instructor, who became my local contact on the news.

How to bring it all home with you

The Oaxacan backdrop was by far the most fraught of any of the classes I took, but all cooking classes leave me with textured memories. Long after returning home, I can conjure the feeling and mood of a place I’ve visited by cooking from one of the food-stained recipe pages from a long-ago cooking class. It’s even better when I am cooking with a food souvenir from one of those trips. While customs prohibits fresh food items from being brought back home, many key ingredients are non-perishable, like spices and dried herbs. With them, I can recreate the flavors I tasted and cooked at the source, and give me the confidence that my flavors are correct. The vanilla beans from Ile de la Réunion can be used to make a vanilla-scented banana jam. I blend the dried chiles and chocolate from the mercado in Oaxaca into an authentic mole. And the netetou from Senegal, with such a funky fermented scent that they need to be triple-wrapped in plastic, allow me to make a more flavorful thieboudienne than I can find anywhere.

Travelers understand that the best things in life are not things, but experiences. For me, experiences can be made indelible by flavor memories. Just a taste, and I am transported back.

Aside from durian and bitter melon, Linda Shiue hasn’t met a fruit or vegetable she doesn’t like. She studied the culinary arts at San Francisco Cooking School and did fieldwork in rural Sichuan, China and Singapore. Linda is a physician in San Francisco and the founder of a teaching kitchen that inspires people to cook for health. Her debut cookbook Spicebox Kitchen: Eat Well and Be Healthy with Globally Inspired, Vegetable-Forward Recipes will be published in March 2021. Follow Linda on Twitter and Instagram @spiceboxtravels.