A Return to Markets

My family is enjoying a lovely vacation at our favorite beach locale in Wrightsville Beach, N.C., this week, where we often eat at a beautifully decorated and superbly delicious restaurant called Indochine. While there on one visit, I read a description of a market in Vietnam that Solange, the woman who owns the restaurant, had frequented with her mother in the '60s. After a trip last year, I found the latest addition of Saveur magazine waiting for me, the entire issue devoted to markets of the world, past and present. And I started thinking...

It is so easy for us in this country who have grown up shopping at grocery stores to miss the fact that probably 80 percent of the world's population still shops instead at outdoor markets — every day in some cases — and that this is such a part of their existence than no one questions the time it takes or the inconvenience it may entail. It is just part of everyday life across the globe where people buy everything fresh at the market — including live animals which are butchered on site and often milk straight from the animal — whether it be a cow or goat or yak.

How did we manage to move so far from this to grocery stores where everything is wrapped up? Even the produce has been removed so far from the very people and processes that grow or cook or create our food and made so sterile that much of it is no longer food as we knew it in our own youth. We buy milk whose molecular structure has been changed by homogenization into something other than the original product. We buy meat that has been pumped so full of antibiotics and hormones that our own health is endangered. We buy produce that is inspected by myriad public and private entities but which still sickens thousands of people every year.

How did we reach this point where our food is just as likely to make us sick as it is to make us healthy? All that sterility, and food-borne illness is on the rise.

I know that there is no return for us to the world of sprawling open-air markets with sounds and smells and the people who produce everything we eat, but somehow there must be a way back to a time where we at least knew who grew our veggies and fruits and who butchered our meat and who baked our daily bread. Just read what Solange wrote in her menu notes.

Scenes from a scrapbook, Vietnam, circa 1960...

I tagged along the muddy streets behind my mother, distracted by all the sights and sounds of the vendors and farmers.  This was the festive trek of our Vietnamese culture; rich with clatter and tantalizing aromas. The market place was as varied as the patterns in my mother's flowing ao dai; it was as colorful as my grandfather's kois, for which I cared each day after school.

The simple life, mixed with jaunts to the Phunhuan Market in Saigon, planted a seed in my heart ... and what grew there was deep gratitude for the earth's blessings, the love of cooking, and the reverence with which I was taught to prepare ingredients.

We should all be so lucky as Solange.

Visit our website for more information about our Oakton market. See you at the market!