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Published: March 16th 2009
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One day last week, Lori and I rode our bikes to the local market at 6:15 am. I wasn’t quite up for going at 4:30 am, when we could have watched everyone set up by candlelight, but it was pretty interesting even once it was in full swing. Hundreds of food vendors convene along the highway and in a labyrinth of side streets and dirt paths, laying down straw mats or setting up makeshift tables and spreading out a variety of food to sell.
Along the edge of the highway, dozens of women spread out displays of produce: piles of eggplant, cucumbers, peppers, garlic, squash, cabbage, carrots, banana blossoms, tomatoes, chilies, onions, bushels of cilantro, water lily root, galangal, and all sorts of other unidentifiable greens. Weaving their way between all these vendors, shoppers on foot and on motos and bicycles pick their way through, lugging the ubiquitous plastic bags or hanging them from their handlebars. The local restaurants come here to stock their kitchen for the day with produce that has been picked the evening before, as do everyday folks stocking up for the day.
Working our way into the side streets, more produce was arranged on both
sides of narrow alleyways where we had to sometimes step between displays to allow other shoppers and motos to pass by. (I can only assume that the dusting of exhaust on the food adds to the flavor…) At a certain point, the predominance of vegetable matter gave way to tables arranged with various cuts of meat. Women squatted on or next to their butcherblock, cleaver or machete in hand, identical green tin scales ready to weigh it all up. The best way to identify the animal of origin was to look for the telltale hints: a pig’s head smiling up at us from a pork vendor’s table, a trio of cows’ legs (with hooves) arranged on the edge of another. Many of the butchers were Muslim women, identified by their headscarves. And many of the cuts of meat were completely unidentifiable, as they sported no plastic wrap with printed labels.
There were baskets of freshly plucked ducks and chickens, artfully arranged with their feet in the air. Their freshness was obvious by the fact that some of their cohorts lay in the dirt, tied together at the feet, watching the butchering and plucking of their brethren while waiting their
own turn. While the women chatted with their friends and fellow vendors, they casually picked up a chicken, held it to the ground with their foot, slid a teacup under its neck, and slit its throat, never pausing in their conversation and rarely doing more than glancing at the process. The deed done, the carcass was passed to the next woman, who plunged it into a large bowl of hot water and began plucking. I never did notice what they did with all the blood they caught in the teacup, but I’m reasonably certain it didn’t go to waste.
There were large sacks of rice, and sacks of dried beans in various colors, conjuring up the bulk food offerings at the natural foods stores at home. There were stalls containing nothing but leafy greens and herbs, which smelled fresh and clean and tangy - a lovely respite from the dried and fermented fish stalls just down the path. There were a few stalls where women set up small coal cooking fires and produced ready-to-eat foods. I sampled a thin wok-fried egg, folded into a plastic bag with bean sprouts, crushed peanuts, herbs and a tasty sauce for dipping.
Let me just comment on plastic bags: I truly hope that someone finds a way to help convince Cambodia of the wisdom of re-usable shopping bags soon! Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING is sold in its own plastic bag, and if you buy two different kinds of fruit, each kind will be placed into own bag, and then those two plastic bags will be put into yet another plastic bag so you only have one bag to hold. Sauces and liquid condiments are sold in plastic bags. Take-out food is presented in plastic bags. If you buy one item in a grocery store, they will put it in a plastic bag - except when I remember to bring my reusable cloth bag, and then they look at me kind of funny and reluctantly put away the plastic bag they’ve just whipped out for my convenience. I know some plastic bags get re-used - they line the trash baskets at the guesthouse with them - but far too many end up on the side of the road or floating in the river or blowing down the street. In other sections of the market there were the fruit sellers. Pineapple, oranges,
mangos, longans, watermelon, mangosteens, rambutan, apples, and bananas and more bananas and even more bananas. Whole shacks stuffed full of bananas. Little yellow fingerling bananas, mid-sized stubby fat bananas with a tinge of green, stalks of bananas of every size and shade. And let me just say that while I feel like bananas are one of the reliably edible fruits to buy at home, they pale in comparison to those here. The mid-sized bananas taste like candy. Yummy, potassium-rich candy, three bites’ worth, in a biodegradable package. (Until they put them in a plastic bag, that is.)
The marketplace includes ice sellers - men sawing huge blocks of ice into somewhat smaller blocks of ice and loading them into carts for delivery. I wonder if any of them can imagine what it’s like to live in a place where the roads and trees are sometimes covered with a layer of ice…
There were egg sellers offering up brown eggs, white eggs, even some strange crusty-looking black eggs in baskets or in cardboard flats. One seller had broken a couple of eggs into - what else? - a plastic bag, presumably so one could see the color of the
yolk, which was a bright sunny orange rather the anemic yellow of our poor cabin-fever-suffering hens at home.
In the middle of all these outdoor vendors is a big building used as a more permanent market for mostly non-edible goods. There you can buy shoes, bras, nail polish, false eyelashes, skin-lightening creams, gold jewelry, toddler’s clothes that look like something a baton twirler would wear, incense, incense, and more incense. The smell of incense is pervasive everywhere you go, but particularly as you pass temples or Buddhas or spirit houses. Sometimes I like it, sometime I don’t. Sometimes I think it smells like marijuana - or maybe I’m actually smelling marijuana. Who knows?
So shopping for food here is quite a different experience than at home. Shopping for what you need every day makes sense when you have no refrigeration. While there may be what seems to me an over-use and abuse of plastic bags, on the other hand, nothing is packaged in anything more: no styrofoam trays, no plastic bottles, no cellophane wrapping and waxed paper bags hermetically sealed inside cardboard boxes. You can go to “Lucky Food” in the “Lucky Mall” and find all those packaged
things, but they look strange to us here. I see families walking around in there, pointing and talking, probably asking themselves the same kinds of questions we ask ourselves at the fresh market: “What on earth is that?” “How would you eat it?” “Why is does it look so funny?” (I love how the “Lucky Food” store has a section of pasta and a section of pasta sauce, and they are three aisles away from each other. But of course I certainly wouldn’t know how to arrange the vendors in the market with any logic!)
If you want to see the other 85 or so photos, click here!
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Mike
non-member comment
Thanks for the trip...
Hi folks, I really cannot express how much I enjoy my virtual trip back to Cambodia with your writing and images of daily lives in the country. I was born in Cambodia and now live in Philadelphia, PA. I was back in Cambodia in 1999. One of the many things I missed the most about being in Cambodia is exactly what you are experiencing. You are on the ground touching, smelling and sensing many aspect of common Cambodia life. You are unassuming as an observer from the outside. In reading your blog - I feel that you are more of a Cambodian than some of the Cambodian I know. Oh BTW - there's not much that can compare to what you are doing for the children. Thanks again for taking me along.