The Food Chain
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.
-- Orson Welles
Buying chicken at Abastos Mercado, Oaxaca de Juárez.
In Oaxaca, as in most of Mexico, there exists a wide range of options for food shoppers: everything from the hole-in-the-wall tiendita to the colossal megastore. You can find pretty much anything you want, but the more that the commodity in question is something you’re used to having in your pantry back home in, say, Seattle, the further up the food chain you’ll have to go to find it.
Here’s a basic run-down on the types of food stores we’ve frequented here in Oaxaca, ranging from the small to the large, from the nearby to the expeditionary.
Tiendas. Okay, virtually any retail shop can be called a tienda, but for me tiendas are the tiny stores sprinkled throughout the barrios with barely enough room for the customer, the proprietor and a sleeping dog or two. (In some cases, you must order and pay through a small gap in an iron gate.) At a tienda you can expect to find the basic emergency supplies of daily life—water, milk, juice, soda pop, snacks, a few pastries, cigarettes, toilet paper, beer, candy, etc.—but not much else.
A typical neighborhood tienda.
Mini-Supers. Some neighborhood tiendas audaciously refer to themselves by this name, but mini-supers tend to be larger variety stores, similar to our 7-11s, that are open late and feature a wider range of staples and services at convenience store prices—including wine, meats, spirits, lottery tickets, personal banking, a few assorted household items and produce of wildly varying quality and freshness. Mini-super chains such as Oxxo and Piticó seem to be everywhere in the city, and look to be trying to put the tiendas out of business.
Two Mexican mini-super chains found in Oaxaca.
Mercados. Every city and town in Latin America has its mercados—the centralized, open-air, traditional markets where growers bring their goods to sell every day. These are typically housed in some sort of permanent, covered structure at least a century old and ranging in size from 1/2 to upwards of 5 city blocks. In addition to the countless stalls overflowing with strange and familiar fruits, flowers, vegetables, meats, breads, seafood, tortillas, dried beans, chilis and, occasionally, live animals, there are also dozens of vendors selling everything from handmade belts to costume jewelry to iPhone cases to toreador paintings. In addition, there is usually an entire section of the market devoted to restaurant stalls which, though very informal and less than perfectly hygienic, are sometimes the best place to go for a really good tlayuda. Some mercados can be smelly and fly-infested, and for a non-local, buying a cut of meat from an open-air butcher in such a mercado requires a held nose and a heroic leap of faith—but see below.*
You can’t beat a mercado for freshness and variety.
Supermercados & Hípermercados. Big-box stores that carry all manner of housewares, appliances, TV sets, furniture, baked goods, dry goods, sporting goods, automotive & tires, painting supplies, meat, poultry, produce, seafood, pharmaceuticals and more. Oaxaca boasts several of the major national chains like Chedraui and Soriana, but there are already two Walmarts in the city which threaten the dominance of these established Mexican brands. When your shopping list grows to more than a dozen or so items that you can’t find in any of the other above-described stores, head to one of these places and plan to take a taxi home.
Two big-box supermercado brands.
Inside the Soriana Híper.
* True Story. At first we bought our meat only at the supermercados, thinking that it would be fresher and more hygienic, only to discover more than once that when we got it home it had already gone bad. One of my Mexican friends was horrified to hear that we were buying our meat there, and told me in no uncertain terms not to trust them. Henceforth we have bought our meat from the neighborhood mercado, where they butcher their meat and poultry fresh daily—with no ill effects reported to-date.
