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How To Find Cheap Food on the Road -
The third largest expense for travelers is food. Here are three tips that will help you trim that expense and will also help you eat healthier while you are on the road.
First tip.
When you first arrive in a village, city or gargantuan metropolitan area, the first thing you should do is ask around. Talk to the locals. Ask them where and who serves the best cheap meals in town.
If the first local you talk to seems biased, like he or she may have a vested interest, simply move on and talk to someone else. Use your intuition about the answers you get. Try talking to cashiers in the local stores. They don’t make much money and so aren’t likely to tell you about the latest haute cuisine, big cash, private chef trendy restaurant. They are most likely to tell you about some cozy café run by a sweet and motherly cook. The kind of good-food-cheap place you are looking for.
If they tell you McDonalds, well, McDonalds is everywhere. But, you don’t want McDonalds – you could have stayed at home for that. Move on and ask more people.
Second tip.
Find the farmers market. The place where they sell farm-fresh produce out of market stalls. Every major city in the world has such a place. If you are having trouble locating one, call the Chamber of Commerce. Sometimes they are called stallmarkets, or produce markets. Make sure the person you are asking understands you want to buy fresh vegetables.
You will meet interesting people at the market. You can buy super fresh – just picked – produce from the people who grew it. It’s cheap. It’s fun, an extra element of local culture for your trip.
One word of caution. Don’t eat anything until you’ve had a chance to thoroughly wash it with detergent and water. Especially in third world countries. In fresh produce markets such as these, the produce may have been handled by anybody. And everybody. Or it may have bits of microscopic fertilizer clinging to it. You don’t want to come down sick do you?
If you’re not in the mood for street crudités, try looking for restaurants near the produce market. Almost always you will find the nearby restaurants serving up the local produce in delicious ways and cheaply!
Third tip.
This is really just the same as the second tip. Only instead of produce markets look for the fish market or sometimes, depending on the city, look for the fresh meat market.
In first world countries this doesn’t always work so well because our fish and meat is packaged in huge sterile (we hope) plants. But in other countries there is always one area of the city where people bring their animals to be slaughtered and sold. Again, the same principle applies – the restaurants surrounding the area will serve fish or meat dishes at great prices.
Also, if you are visiting an area famous for a particular type of food - to be mundane, I will give the example of Spaghetti in Italy - you can find restaurants that practically wholesale the stuff to their patrons. Think bread in France, goat cheese in Greece, etc. Find the restaurant that is going for the volume business. Most of the time you’ll be eating the same stuff that the people down the block in the Michelin three star restaurants are eating – but you’ll be paying much less. Granted the atmosphere will be less grand, but hey, who are you trying to impress?
Happy Travels!
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