WoW

[lsanderson]

I just stopped at Cub Foods to pick up a few things. Dropped enough for the Dinh family to live on for half a month or longer and was surprised by the sterility and lack of selection at Cub Foods. In the market by the Dinh house in Vietnam, I could walk a block and pick from a wide variety of tropical fruit, some of which I'll never see here, and I can buy potatoes, carrots, and tons of herbs that I'd only get at the Farmer's Market. The pork selection at Cub is pretty pale compared to Vietnam, although the beef is waay better. Chicken, well, maybe. Other poultry is available, and it's all fresh. Eggs -- the Vietnam markets have at least 6 or 7 varieties all of the time. And rice, a wide variety. Fish and seafood? Forget about it. In Vietnam, there's at least 4 varieties of live snails, lots of live and dead fish, shrimp, prawns, crab, lobsters. Sigh. OK, so the orange oranges are imported from America, the Asian oranges (bright green) are not that bad, and don't get me started about mangosteens, cherimoyas, mangoes, and the wide variety of other fruit available there -- and it's all ripe (unless you want green mangoes). OK, so our green onions are more regular... And they have about 20 kinds of fresh noodle available at the markets there as well...

One fruit stand in one market in Saigon







If you look very close to the vendor's left arm, a picture of custard apples

Comments

Fruit

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

The fruit in Vietnam seems incredible, although I did have to convince them to not serve me things I was familiar with. They thought it interesting to buy expensive American oranges (not very good after shipping to Vietnam).

Re: Fruit

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You can get most of those in Toronto, though of course not as fresh and tasty. I think we don't allow importing of them because of fears of some pest or parasite destroying the tropical and semi-tropical fruit production in the US.

I ♥ mangosteens.

K. [that's charming of them, buying American oranges for you]