Even though I never cooked when I was living in Southeast Asia (you..
-
Even though I never cooked when I was living in Southeast Asia (you.. really don’t need to), paying attention to food procurement and techniques helped me level up when I started cooking when I left that region.
(Eating street food there is often cheaper than buying ingredients and cooking yourself. In almost all SEA cities)
There’s a lot of stuff I felt I just ‘knew’ because I was around people who dealt with food all the time
-
How to pick fish, vegetables, where to get them. I think that’s the missing piece of information in a lot of English language books about food. There’s a lot you learn when your source of food procurement isn’t a supermarket, too. When stuff isn’t just in styrofoam and plastic and you can talk to an expert about what to get. I 100% credit my time in wet markets for my food knowledge and hate that they are maligned so much (wet markets aren’t what the racist covid coverage tell you they are)
-
Sometimes I read racist people talk about ‘how can Chinatown veggies be so cheap, must be bad’ as though Chinese aunties won’t also throw carrots and cabbages at you for going to a supermarket and getting inferior product that was much more expensive than Chinatown
-
They used to also say it was because of labor exploitation, but then Jeff Bezos bought Whole Foods and I haven’t heard that since
-
@skinnylatte I mean Boston does literally have an expired vegetable market (the stuff they clear out from the fruit and vegetable warehouses at the end of the week gets sold at the Haymarket) but they're generally not bad per se, you just have to use them right away.
-
@skinnylatte One of the main reasons Chinatown veggies are so cheap is (I've heard) because those supermarket scanner systems are outrageously expensive. When you just ring people up you can save mega overhead.
-
@carrideen Chinatown veggies also have their own supply networks that supply just Chinatowns, and focuses only on veggies Chinese / SE Asian people eat
-
@skinnylatte do you have a lot of market gardeners in your area? I'm in Australia and we have loads and they sell their excess at the markets. You can get allllll the good stuff you can't get in supermarkets at a far more affordable price.
-
@crzwdjk Chinese aunties will not go there unless it’s to get a deal. Most aunties I know are finicky about quality
-
@skinnylatte While browsing Cornell University Press' sale on history books yesterday, I saw this title. It looks interesting. Focuses on NYC Chinatown food network. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801456862/from-farm-to-canal-street/
-
@skinnylatte @Natalie I miss Brisbane’s farmer’s markets, too many of the ones here in the Northern Rivers are focused on organic/biodynamic/etc., and have priced a lot of people out.
-
@meganL this looks so good! Will order
-
@skinnylatte I was going to point it out to you yesterday, but I was afraid you'd feel like I was just pushing "anything Chinese" at you, haha.
-
@skinnylatte If you go searching for a while you can find a celebrated New Zealand case of a racist woman who insisted on shopping at the more expensive white greengrocer to avoid the garbage at the Chinese shop. She eventually found out that the produce was identical because the white greengrocer was merely an end-of-chain retailer who bought from the Chinese greengrocer for resale.
-
@[email protected] I mean, that is one thing I miss working in seafood for as long as I did in San Francisco. We don't have anything like a Fulton Market, or Tsukiji, or even a market like Pike's Place or the little one I visited in Skagen. All the wholesaling here happens in warehouses along Pier 45, or South City, or whatever and they aren't really inviting for normal people
-
@[email protected] and while farmers markets are good for connecting with local producers in general I have yet to see any seafood there that isn't cryovaced fillets
-
@pagrus yeah I don’t like those
The seafood truck at the civic center one is not bad but if they’re bringing stuff to defrost I’d rather just go to the seafood market
-
@skinnylatte the local Vietnamese grocery is ten times better than what I find in the local chain grocery. They're high turn over and always fresh. I can buy ten wilted basil leaves in a plastic box at the Albertsons or I can buy a whole bag for like $4 that's super fresh. Plus every kind of green and other veggie I want, cheaper and better. The only drawback is it's 15 miles away for me. Same for fish. I can't even buy a whole fish anywhere near me.