What It Means To Eat And Buy Locally When You’re Not A Local

Last night I met a French woman who’s just arrived in Ha Noi after spending three months in the countryside. She was in a rural province in northwestern Viet Nam studying public transportation. The only public transportation in the town today is one bus that runs infrequently and on an unpredictable schedule. Most people there wouldn’t mind having more buses or some other means to transport themselves and their goods. It’s hard, though, because up there the roads wind through the mountains, making establishing any kind of efficient public transportation system somewhat difficult. Most people rely on motorbikes to get themselves around and to transport goods within the town and from the town to larger cities like Ha Noi. All this talk about how people move themselves and their stuff reminded me of a common scene in early morning Viet Nam.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I kind of like seeing how much stuff people can fit on one motorbike–I’ve seen giant paintings, 20-foot-long metal rods, mattresses, TVs–and packing on a bunch of pigs is quite a feat, but when you see five slaughtered pigs hanging off the back of a motorbike, a cloud of exhaust hovering around them, you start to grow a little skeptical about that “fresh” pork you’re buying at the market. I realize this is a relatively minor complaint. For instance, I haven’t the slightest idea yet of what farming’s like in Viet Nam, or how much this really matters if the dead pig’s just going to be skinned and chopped up and cooked anyway, but I still do hope this French woman and others can help improve the means of transporting food within towns and into cities, because there’s something about watching dead pigs choke on exhaust fumes that’s a little disconcerting.

I asked the French woman what she did in the province when she wasn’t working, and she said she didn’t do much. I asked her what she ate for the three months she was there, and she said mostly rice and vegetables, which the lady at her hotel would cook for her each night and set out on the table for her to eat alone. I was somewhat saddened and a little shocked by this for a couple reasons. First, Vietnamese cuisine is much more than rice and vegetables, so I was surprised my new friend never ventured out into the town to find small restaurants or even people she could pay (in some form) to prepare other types of foods for her¹. Second, and more crucially, I’ve always assumed that when there are few opportunities to meet or interact or socialize with people, one of the most sure bets to do so is through food.

I don’t speak Vietnamese, so forming anything like an actual human connection with anyone here who doesn’t speak English is difficult. While I can get by performing day-to-day tasks (I know numbers and the names of different foods), I can’t carry on even a basic conversation with most of the people around me. Some of the most “meaningful” connections I have with non-English speaking people in my neighborhood, then, are with food vendors. Even though initially these people only spoke with me and Erin because we wanted to buy things from them, over time we’ve managed to ingratiate ourselves a little more. We buy meat and greens from the same people each time we go to the market. We get fair prices and decent cuts of beef. The greens lady prepares the appropriate quantity of vegetables for Erin without her having to ask. The woman who runs the bia hoi joint across the street now knows me and Erin, and smiles and sits down with us every time we come in (as she does with all her customers). She even brings us new foods, which we don’t have to pay for if we don’t like. On the surface, these are just basic producer-consumer relationships, exchanges of money for goods, but I think they go a little beyond that.

There’s a number of reasons why I think buying locally is a good thing–reasons which have been laid out by others, like the people at Slow Food and the lady who runs the Berkeley Schools Lunch program–but one of the reasons I’ve begun to think about more since coming here is how buying locally allows you to form connections with those around you. That idea has seemed a little trite to me over the past couple years–in Portland, the coffee’s all direct trade and farmer’s markets are all the rage–but I interpret this idea a little differently now. It’s hard to imagine what it’d be like to live here were I to never eat street food or shop at my local street market, but instead always order delivery from Western restaurants or supermarkets. I might save myself from getting sick from unhygenic food occasionally, but I’d be missing out on one of the best and (for now) only ways to integrate myself into my new community.

1. I’ve since learned that said French woman was able to come into Ha Noi sporadically during her stay in the countryside, so I do not mean to imply that all she ate was rice and vegetables for three months straight. I only talked to her for like twenty minutes and do not mean to single her out. [↩]