I travel halfway around the world and one of the first things I look for is the organic market. I honestly figured Lima wouldn’t have one, being a city with a lot of poverty and an abundance of inexpensive food. Why would people here want an organic market? What’s the demographic for it?
Well, it turns out there are two organic markets here (at least) and the demographic is the slightly more affluent people (same as Montreal and the rest of North America) who want to avoid all the pesticides and low-cost labour involved in most of the food available. There’s a reason that stuff is so cheap, and working conditions are not quite as regulated as in North America…So buying inexpensive silver, gold, fruit, vegetables, meat, and cotton seems like a bargain until you think about the fact that there’s no minimum wage or strict workplace safety regulations.
But even when you buy organic here it’s very affordable. If a mango costs you 2.50 soles it’s still under $0.85 Canadian, and that’s probably going to be the best mango of your life. The olives…don’t get me started on the olives…
Jungle fruit, things that look like spinach but aren’t, VERY long-beans that are actually fruit with small pits and covered in sweet, white fuzz inside the green, hard exteriors, enormous zucchini (zucchini flowers are in season now), herbs I can’t pronounce so there’s no use buying them not knowing what they’re used for, and so many kinds of potatoes and corn take up the long one-block stretch of market stalls at the Bioferias.
I bought a yacon thinking it was…well, I wasn’t sure what it was. I thought it was a fruit but it looks like a sweet potato, and I figured (once I decided it definitely wasn’t a fruit) that maybe it was a yucca. So I boiled it up like I would a sweet potato, and it was white/yellow inside…definitely not a sweet potato. When my host figured out that it was a yacon I had to look it up…turns out yacon i used for diabetics because its incredibly sweet but has a low glycemic index. So it’s a natural sweetener that you can even find in powdered form. That meant, however, that when I peeled it and took a bite, it was sickening sweet, because you’re only supposed to have a little. Turns out that the sugars aren’t digested so they leave the body without adding a bunch of calories or being absorbed into the blood stream. It also turns out it’s prebiotic, so take that Bio-K. Actually, if Bio-K was made with yacon syrup I might actually think it was a decent, though overpriced, product, since tons of added (digestible) sugars are not how I want to start my prebiotic/probiotic day.
The cotton and dried spices at the organic markets are less of a financial steal, but the quality…wow. Achiote, paprika, oregano, rosemary…$60 soles for a pillowcase that’s supposed to help you sleep because…well, my Spanish isn’t that good so I’m not exactly sure how that works. I gave myself a pat on the back for figuring out that it has health benefits at all. Insert awkward “smile and nod” conversation here where the required answer should be a little longer and involve a few more syllables…
Aw well. Next time, full sentences and more education. Same amount of lucuma.
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