How Do You Eat? No. 2
From Istanbul to Taiwan to Phoenix, how three food writers do groceries.
The particularities of the mundane! We adore knowing how other humans do the dull tasks of daily life—and perhaps how they imbue them with a bit of novelty and joy. That’s why I started this now-quarterly series where I talk to three food writers in different cities around the world about how they get their groceries.
If you missed the first edition, read No. 1—with missives from Brooklyn, Venice, and Chennai.
This installment of “How Do You Eat?” features Vidar Bergum, Clarissa Wei, and Devin Kate Pope.
Vidar Bergum, author of “A Kitchen in Istanbul” and three bestselling cookbooks published in Norway
Location: Istanbul, Turkey
Household: 2 adults
On how he landed in Istanbul:
I did a business degree, and then I worked in finance for a long time in London. My partner did the same—well, I did a different degree. He’s much more intellectual than me, like philosophy and economics, but both of us working in finance. We both were the kind of types who didn't necessarily want to spend the rest of our lives in an office in front of a spreadsheet, or just flying from meeting to meeting, right? So we got an opportunity to—he's Turkish—so with the link to Turkey and Istanbul, we decided, you know, rather than buying a flat in London, we bought a house here in an old neighborhood. It's a 130-year-old house, probably for the price of, you know, like a little shed in London somewhere. And, well, it was a lot of work restoring it, of course.
I wanted to do something with food, and it seemed like a good place to do it, because the cost of living is lower, so that gave me some time and space to sort of figure things out. Writing about food wasn't my first thought. It was more like starting some sort of food-related business here. But then when I came, it was 2015, so it was a bit of a tumultuous time here. We had a few terror attacks happening, a coup attempt. It was exciting times for my mother—a bit too exciting for her. But I started the blog, and everything sort of rolled from there, very, very quickly.
On his grocery habits:
I've found my source for everything. Because we don't have any kids and stuff, I don't do one big supermarket haul: I get my honey from here, I get my chocolate from there, and those sort of things. So it's a mixture, to be honest.
When I came here, I used to go to the market every week. We have those weekly markets everywhere in Istanbul. I think there are more than 100 of them. We have a local one on Tuesdays. And then I live, actually, just down the road from the Fatih Mosque, which is the central area of the old town, very conservative, actually, but they have the biggest markets in Istanbul on Wednesday. I used to go every week to one of them, and then Covid came, and everything went online. And then I didn't fully switch back, to be honest. In summer, I go more. In winter, I go less. If it's raining, I'm like, No, I'm just gonna order this week.
Each neighborhood basically has a day. The markets are most vibrant and most lively in the sort of less well-off neighborhoods. While wealthier people do enjoy them, they want to go to the supermarkets and they eat out a lot. They have people who do shopping for them anyway. So actually, in the sort of more upscale neighborhoods, it is more difficult to find the proper market.
On availability of food:
I cook mostly Turkish-style stuff, partly because it's my job, and I enjoy it as well. But also, when it comes to access, one of the things we don't have access to, which surprises a lot of people, is things that are not part of Turkish cuisine, because there isn't really much of an international foods scene. It is slowly changing. I would definitely love to have a shop that has more international, fresh ingredients that aren't the Turkish ones, because it is a bit of a rotation of the same. There's like, two different types of meat, and then there's chicken, and then there's ten vegetables, and they're more or less the same.
There's some seasonality, of course. But it would be nice to be able to make a proper curry from scratch, which I can't. I try to actually go to Asian stores when I'm in Oslo, and I bring it here and I freeze it—lime leaves or curry leaves and these sorts of things. But it's quite limited. I've never seen a shop here which has fresh Asian ingredients.
I met a lady who is half Thai, and apparently there's a small network here, and they have this WhatsApp group, and occasionally someone will bring, like, sacks of something from Thailand. And they’re like, Okay, we'll meet at this point, and there will be a trade or a mini market, because someone will bring 10 kilos of fresh stuff. But you need to be in the know—it’s not available to the rest of us.
On the economics of food:
I don't know if you know anything about Turkey, but we've had quite a serious economic crisis going on, with inflation around 50 to 70 percent for several years now. Food prices have gone up a lot, and even though they made large increases to the minimum wage, many people are struggling. It's been a big topic here. The price of potatoes and onions have been part of the election campaigning for the last couple of election seasons—that speaks to how important it is. And potatoes, many people don’t think about them with Turkish food. But actually, potatoes, onions, bread, chickpeas, pasta—this is what many people more or less subsist on. They make amazing things with them, but when prices go up, there isn't much room to trade down to cheaper things.
Turkey is probably closer to the U.S. in terms of income inequality. So you have a big part of the population that has less to spend on everything. So when prices on food go up, it's really noticeable for them. For example, dairy – I'm now paying the same price as I would in Oslo, which is one of the most expensive cities in the world. And I've always said, Istanbul is a major global city. I don't think for that, that the prices here are unreasonable at all. But of course, for the local population, who have been used to dairy and basic groceries being relatively cheap—I mean, it's noticeable for us, but it's much more noticeable for people with less means.
On diasporic influence:
Turkey is one of the biggest recipients, if not the biggest recipient, at the moment, of immigration. But it's not the sort of global picture you see in the U.S. or in Europe. It's Syrians. It's Afghans, Iraqis, you know, Yemenites—countries that, of course, bring their own things as well, but a lot of it is very similar.
For example, coriander—or cilantro, you say in the States, right? Turks can't stand it—I think they all have this genetic disposition for hating it. But, of course, Syrians, they use it a lot. So around here was one of the few places you can actually get cilantro on a regular basis, because there are many Syrians living there. So that's something that's come in through that route.
On locality:
A very good friend of mine is from southeastern Turkey, the Hatay region, which is where they produce all the best pomegranate molasses. They do a sort of Aleppo pepper, they do the tomato paste, red pepper paste—all this sort of stuff. They have their own deli shop. They produce all that stuff and they sell it to some of the top restaurants here. Now, one of the family members is a butcher. They're almost self-sufficient in many ways. Basic groceries, I buy from them. We get it online, of course. They were very badly affected by the earthquake last year. I don't know if you remember, there was a big, big earthquake that basically flattened the whole city. It's been good to be able to support them after that, as well.
You have those suppliers where you know them. Olive oil is another one: It's quite common here to have a family friend somewhere who produces their olive oil, that isn't part of the sort of general market. They make basically for friends and family and that's it, and you still pay almost the same price as you would, because that's just the price of olive oil. It's an expensive thing to produce. But we buy four or five five-liter cans once a year.
So we have those sources as well, which is really, really nice. I think it has a touch where, you know where the food is coming from, and that it is made in a way that is sustainable and in line with the nature that we would like to see continue. I think Turkey, like everywhere else, is moving more and more into this sort of large-scale farming becoming a bigger part of the global trade in food as well. I think imports were basically banned here before, and now they are not. It's part of the equation, too.
On seasonality:
I think the bigger difference I noticed from London as well, and especially from Norway, is the seasonality of things. Because here, I mean, yes, there are many things that are sort of available all year round. You can get tomatoes and aubergines and zucchinis and whatnot, all year round. But everyone is really aware of when their season is and fruit is extremely seasonal. I think the seasons are getting a bit longer than when I came here, because I remember one of the first years I came, figs were available for three weeks or whatever. Now we have them for at least two months. So I think they really extended the season, but there's a lot more seasonality in the cooking here and in the culture, whereas in Norway, I can say for sure that people have—beyond Norwegian strawberries—they have no sense of season whatsoever.
Clarissa Wei, author of Made in Taiwan: Recipes and Stories from the Island Nation and “Dear Clarissa”
Location: Taiwan and Sweden
Household: 2 adults, 1 child
On her grocery habits in Taiwan:
Because I have to test so many recipes and get receipts, the easiest thing is to just go to a big supermarket. And I think people have this misperception that everyone in Taiwan is going to the traditional markets and buying food from their local vendor, and all the food is straight from the farm. But that's actually quite far from the truth, and these wet markets, they source from a central marketplace. It operates exactly like a grocery store, if you will. These are not farm to table. Most of the wet markets in Taiwan are not farmers’ markets: They're just outdoor grocery stores, and quality is really inconsistent, and the food, all the fruit, looks exactly the same as you would get at a grocery store.
When I first moved to Taiwan, I had this very American, romantic notion of, I'm gonna go to the wet market and know my vendors and stuff. And now that I've been living in Asia for over six years, my husband and I will go to Costco twice a month to just load up on the bulk foods, and then we'll go to the local grocery store to get any specialty things or vegetables.
There is this really cool thing in my neighborhood, because I kind of live in the suburbs, where I'm part of a WhatsApp group, and it's just these random guys who text, Oh, I have this vegetable, I have this fish, and it's just this massive group chat. It's not an app or anything sleek and I get 200 notifications every single day where people are like, I want this. And they place their order publicly. I ordered it once, and he, basically a guy, drove up to my house and dropped it off, and I was supposed to just pay him online afterwards, which I thought was really interesting. The whole appeal is that it's slightly cheaper than if you go to the wet market, and because I kind of live on the outskirts, it's difficult for everyone to go into town and get it. So that's definitely what's unique about Taiwan.
On grocery habits in Sweden:
In Sweden, everything is the grocery store. But what I love about Swedish grocery stores is that, in the produce section, they label where all the produce comes from. So you get a choice between Swedish leeks or like leeks from Spain, and so you know where things are coming from, and they also label whether things are organic or not. It's just very clearly labeled, you know? And it's not the brand that's labeling it; it's the supermarket that's labeling it, so it's consistent labels. So you're not having to figure out whether or not the brand’s marketing is truthful, or having to deal with those mental gymnastics—it's just very straightforward.
I'm in the countryside, so 30 minutes away from where I live, there's, again, in the middle of nowhere, somehow there is a German guy who opened his own pig farm, and he butchers everything himself. And it's the best sausages and pig products I've ever had before. And I don't love eating big slabs of meat, but there's just so much care put into this. In that same little town is an ice cream factory and a bakery where they bake their own bread. It’s just so random because I'm literally in the middle of nowhere.
On food economics:
What's been really interesting about this trip is that, every time we go to a local producer in Sweden, they'll be like, Oh, sorry, we're, like, understaffed. The cost of labor in Sweden is very, very high, and so that's what they struggle with. People just can't afford to have these little shops. Before, the butcher, he had lunch service, but they're so understaffed that they can't run that anymore, whereas in Taiwan, labor is really, really cheap, but there's just not a lot of entrepreneurship, because young people don't have enough money to sell their own products.
One thing that I was really interested in was locally grown rice, or just small-scale rice. And I was talking to a friend, she's American, and she moved down to a rice farming community in Taiwan. She's like, “A lot of these young people, they love to grow their own rice, but they have a really hard time marketing because the economics of it just doesn't make any sense.” And in order to buy that, most of it, you just have to do it online. So again, I think with Taiwan, with a lot of East Asian countries, people have this romantic notion of going into a physical market with, the aunties yelling at you, but we're in 2024 and I think the vast majority of people just get the specialty things online and go to the grocery stores. As you know, when you're in the tropics, at a traditional market, they leave the meat out all day long, and produce wilts really quickly. And so having an air-conditioned space makes sense. That's how I see things progressing in Taiwan.
On parenting changing her cooking habits:
Ever since I became a mom, we tend to cook and plan ahead. Before this all happened, it was just, if I needed something—before I moved far from the city—I just stopped by the local grocery store on the way from the metro and picked something up. But now everything is planned. I have a grocery list. And especially now in Sweden, when we're in the countryside, we meal plan and then we'll do a bulk buys and everything, which I think is very—it's like you're running your house like a restaurant. It's a very nice way to live, and you save money like that. And especially with recipe testing, you really just have to write down what you need exactly.
A thing about Taiwan is most young people don't know how to cook at all, because it is actually cheaper to eat out than it is to cook at home. So it's way cheaper to go across the street. You can get a full meal for less than $3 in Taiwan. So people have no incentive to cook at all. When I was living in the midst of the city, we didn't really think ahead for meals. It was like, Okay, we'll cook. Both my husband and I cook a lot, but it wasn't something that we talked about or planned. But now that I feel like I'm living a suburban American life in Taiwan: It's all about planning ahead, and we've kind of gotten into the rhythm of things and just things that are really quick and easy to whip up. Again, I never really got the appeal of those quick and easy recipes until I became a mom.
Our kitchen in Taiwan, one part of the wall is glass, and we realized you can just write on it, so we meal plan there, and our son's babysitter thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Like, why would you do that? And it's just because of the circumstances. I don't have time. We don't have time to cook. We don't have time to brainstorm or be creative. I used to just be like, Okay, what do we have? And like, let's use up everything in the fridge. But now it's just, we have the meals that we always do, and we go from there.
On the particularities of Taiwan:
In terms of self-sufficiency, I think we're only 40 percent, which could change if there is conflict with China. The geopolitics of it: You know, people always talk about, Oh, is China going to attack? And when they think about attack, they think of bombs and guns.
But honestly, I think the biggest threat is if China does a blockade of our food shipments from around the world. That would be absolutely devastating. As someone who's sort of more tuned into this, I think about this all the time. So when we had our baby, my husband and I actually bought a chest freezer, and we've started to plan shelf-stable pantry goods to always have in our garage, and we try to have at least one month's worth of supply in case something happens. And again, I think this was just a reality of, Oh crap, I'm responsible for another life. I need to think ahead.
I live in a standalone house, and we don't have a water tower. Most apartments in Taiwan have a water tower. So if the water is cut off, you have water, and that's my next big project when I get back—to figure this out. So I am very much well aware, as you probably are, too, that we are on an island that has tons of typhoons and the threat of geopolitical conflict. So even though it seems like we have an abundance of food, and we really do in Taiwan, and even though we do produce a lot of our food, there are vulnerabilities by virtue of being an island.
Devin Kate Pope, author of “The Good Enough Weekly”
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Household: 2 adults, 4 children
On the typical week:
Our closest grocery store is called Fry’s. It's a Kroger brand grocery store, and it’s a conventional grocery store: They have some organic stuff, some local stuff. I really don't like the produce, but that's the closest place. We do some shopping there.
We've been switching to buying our produce more from Anita’s Area Farms, a group that collects food from different farmers and then drives it around and drops it off, because there's no really close farmers’ market. There's a triangulation, and you have to drive 20 minutes to get to a farmers’ market. So we'll do that for produce. I'll buy some things, like onions, carrots, potatoes, at the conventional Fry’s, and then we'll usually go to H Mart for rice, soy milk, tofu, and their produce is generally better quality and better priced than Kroger's store. So I think those three are the ones that we hit most often.
On the Phoenix metro area:
There are small pockets of Phoenix and Tempe that are walkable, but very small. One is really close to university, and the other one is an arts district, or where all the older homes are, and it's become really expensive because it's walkable.
As I've started to lean into focusing on writing about food, it has changed how—basically, I’m getting more selective and going to more places, because for a while it had been, just go to Fry’s and Costco, because I was of the mind that farmers’ markets are too difficult. And to be fair, there's not one down the street from me.
Writing and really knowing what's happening locally with local, independent people, that has changed my habits—it's become way more piecemeal, to get different things at different places.
Two examples of bulk purchasing are—you are probably familiar with Dave's Killer Bread? They have an outpost here and you can go in and get their bread for like $3 a loaf, because it's slightly old or something. So we'll go up, buy five loaves of bread, put them in freezer, and that kind of thing. It's a random industrial building in Mesa, which is 10 minutes east of us.
I just went to for the first time—there’s a local flour and grain Company, Hayden Flour Mills, and they do bulk days where you bring your containers, and they have a selection. They had three flours and a pancake mix available for bulk pricing. And I got way less than a lot of people—people were bringing in the giant buckets. Hayden Flour Mills is also where I buy nice sourdough from Barrio Bread.
But I think that’s probably the biggest shift. It's gotten a lot more piecemeal because I realized that, no, it really does matter. Also, the vegetables and produce, especially at Kroger, are just so not good. It feels like the quality is lower. And what I'm learning about how they're grown is, like, what nutrients are here anyway? And there isn't a lot of local produce, so I need to kind of get over myself and figure out how to get local produce, even though the farmers’ market dream that I love is not happening. I've lived by an amazing farmers’ market, and I really miss that.
One of the longest established ones is in Phoenix, Central Phoenix. It used to be at this great public market that got shut down and demolished and a giant apartment building was built where it used to be. It's moved to an area close by, but I think it's lost some of its—it’s just in a vacant lot. I don't know if it's as strong as it used to be. That one goes back ten-plus years, to when I was in college, it was there every Saturday.
There's the Uptown one, which is definitely in a wealthier area; there's one in a town southwest of me, and that's also a wealthier area. Tempe, where I live, is kind of more diverse, and it's also a college town, so it's pretty in and out all the time.
The city is trying some food initiatives, one connected to making a space available for a farmers’ market. So I really just don't know. I think Tempe would be a great place for a farmers’ market. I don't know why it hasn't happened. There are some community gardens in Tempe that do CSA pickups. There's the Sun Produce Cooperative, and they run a lot of the CSAs in the area. Farmers can plug into them and get their produce distributed that way. I’ve kind of been on and off again with the CSAs, because sometimes I just like to go when I need it, instead of always having stuff coming in.
We have so much access to so much here. I'm able to make decisions about shopping—very privileged in that regard. There are a lot of food apartheid, food desert pockets in Phoenix, and people are working on that.
On local foods:
Ramona Farms grows tepary beans, which are beans that are indigenous to Arizona. They grow three kinds of them, white, brown, and black. Those beans are culturally significant to the Tohono O'odham and Pima peoples. They've grown here for thousands of years, and they are higher in protein and minerals than other beans, and they grow them traditionally on their farm. I really like buying those beans.
I like to get produce as it is seasonally available. It's been on my mind because prickly pear fruit are edible and an Indigenous food, and they've been around forever here, and people have prickly pear and they don't do anything with them. I saw a neighbor who has one that's really ripening, and I think I need to finally—because I've almost asked people a few times, like, Can I just pick some? because I've never done that; I'm not from Arizona in that way. I have no idea. You know, I'm learning—apples are $3 a pound, and then here's this prickly pear fruit that's going to fall on the ground and be rotten and no one can eat it.
On what she always has on hand:
Fridge is eggs, tofu, soy milk, and usually yogurt or cottage cheese, kimchi or sauerkraut. I have a wide range of condiments, olives, and sweet and spicy peppers are always there. The Japanese barbecue bottle that's kind of everywhere—like, everyone loves that. We’re doing less and less dairy. No milk at all, because it just doesn't agree with some of us and many reasons.
In the pantry, we have oils, primarily olive oil, spices, some different salts, canned beans, canned tomatoes, usually. I'll have extra jars of olives and pickles and things like that. I'm not eating meat, but I still have some canned fish. Some of it is kind of hanging around.
I realized I had a problem holding on to too much food in my pantry, and I’m really trying to just have less. I grew up partly in rural areas where food—it was a little harder to shop, and my mom was a big bulk purchaser, which made more sense there. But I really don't need to do that.
Now where I live, I'll always have a jarred marinara sauce, even though I really tend to make sauce. I just always have that dried pasta, dried beans, usually something sweet that's shelf stable, like some cookies or something kind of sitting there, not that they sit there forever. I like to have rice, oats, and polenta in there, as well. I just finally picked up chickpea flour because I really want to start cooking with that.
Oh, when I said pickles, there's All Pierogi Kitchen, a restaurant that also has a small grocery store attached to it, so I go buy pickles. And when I want natural wine and fancy snacks, I go to Monsoon Market in Phoenix.
Join me today for the Weekly Salon. I will open up a thread for a paid subscriber chat at 3 p.m. EST this afternoon to discuss what we’re reading, working on, watching, and more.
This Friday, I publish the October edition of From the Desk Recommends… a roundup of what I’ve been reading online, watching, and listening to, with my latest playlist.
On Friday, October 25, we will have the second part of the Desk Book Club discussion of Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction. We are reading this one in three parts because it’s long, but quite relevant to conversations on writing the weather. For the second session, we’ll read through page 256. Pick it up from Archestratus, the 2024 Desk Book Club partner.
News
Come join me for the Newsletter Workshop. There are upcoming sessions scheduled for October 8 (tomorrow!) and November 12. If you’d like to gift someone who’s interested in starting a newsletter a workshop, gift cards are available. Paid subscribers, the discount code is in the header to this email, or just reply to email me for it.
My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.
Reading
Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels by Caroline Eden (forthcoming in the U.S.)
Such a diverse array of stories about daily food engagement!! Living in the Pacific Northwest I feel as though there is easy access to locally grown organic foods… but perhaps this also has to do with some of my privilege to afford those foods and have the mobility and time to find them! Feeling curious.
Loved this. Please do more!