To find the soul of another country, head to the supermarket
My favourite thing about travelling abroad isn’t the sun, the sand, nor the sea – it’s going to the local supermarket. Walking through the doors of a foreign grocery store is like passing through the looking glass into a place where everything is both familiar and alien, a fairground mirror that reflects a strange, distorted take on your weekly shop.
I would forsake the Parthenon for the produce aisle, the Taj Mahal for the trolley, the Colosseum for charcuterie. As the slightly metallic air of the store lingers in your nose, you pass such delicacies as ketchup and oregano-flavoured crisps, something called “salt lychee”, a selection of melon and mascarpone cheeses, sweet potato flavoured Kit Kats, and a tub of what might be yogurt or cream cheese or after-sun (I cannot read Greek). Into the trolley they go.
I can spend hours slowly perusing strangely-shaped vegetables, excitingly cheap fruits and bizarre confectionery, much to the chagrin of whoever is unlucky enough to have come on holiday with me. A foreign supermarket is a liminal space, an uncanny valley where you are thrown off-kilter, your expectations confounded. One man’s groceries are another’s treasure trove, these aisles of food and drink so mundane to locals yet so novel to visitors.
In Cape Town, the welcoming red and blue arms of Pick n Pay offer a banquet of biltong and boerewors, boulder-sized watermelons, spicy crisps that look like ET’s fingers, and chocolate bars filled with marshmallow. I could wax lyrical about South African jelly tots for hours — they’re better than ours in every way.
In a backwater town in Queensland I fawned over TimTams and Wimmer’s portino-flavoured soda. In a teeny family-owned store on a Greek island it was vast swaths of shimmering gold kataïfi and deep purple, velvety tapanade. Anyone who has ever driven through France will know the glories of the Big Carrefour, packed full of jars containing whole ducks and the worst-smelling yet most delicious cheeses you will ever come across.
In Berlin, I stared saucer-eyed at currywurst sandwiches, oat biscuits called “Hobbits” and a Percy Pig knock-off called “Fred Ferkel”, while a billion schnitzels steamed in the heated section nearby. Flavours of yogurt I haven’t seen before or since were housed in glass jars rather than plastic buckets. In grocery chain Rewe, if you’re lucky, you might even find a packet of cigarettes featuring a picture of what looks like a German boy I used to date gazing sadly at a gravestone.
The foreign supermarket is a window into the soul of a country. It contains everything locals need to live their lives: the ingredients for the meals they like to cook, the treats they guiltily consume during their lunch break, the little gifts they pick up for a loved one. When you shop in a supermarket abroad you’re living, just for a moment, like a true local.
• Jess is a freelance science writer