They say an army travels on its stomach. So do tourists. Margaret Hanna

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Traveling to a foreign country entails learning about the culture, and culture involves food. What a feast for the senses!

Mexico: The best place to find food is in the market. Sounds, sights and smells assault you at the entrance. You enter, dazed and confused at what at first seems like a maze of stalls and people and “stuff.” Take heart. The adventure awaits.

The pineapple vendor selling thick, juicy, sweet slices for pennies apiece. I bought one. Juice ran down my chin as I ate it. It was so good I had to have another. And another.

The lady selling blue corn tortillas. She patiently sorted through her stock to find ones without any holes. If you have never eaten a blue corn tortilla, well, you don’t know what you’re missing. They are so flavourful and aromatic, not at all like the packaged tortillas you buy at the supermarket.

The fruit vendor had piles of large green “things” I had never seen before. I asked my friend, “Is that a squash?” “No, that’s a papaya!” (That was in 1987, before such exotic fruit appeared in Saskatchewan supermarkets.) What a taste treat I was in for. I think I ate half the papaya myself.

The mole vendor (“mole” is a paste that you make into a sauce). Red, green and black mole, ready to serve over chicken, enchiladas, fish, chilis rellenos, or whatever else. Eat your heart out, ketchup.

Some places, like the meat market, are not for the faint of heart. Sides of beef or pork and freshly killed chickens with feathers, heads and feet still attached hang in conditions that would give a Canadian food inspector a heart attack. But you know that the meat you cook for supper was freshly killed that morning.

France: Just around the corner from our little hotel was a little plaza with an open-air market. Fresh fruit and vegetables, good cheeses, crunchy bread and bottles of unlabeled but extremely drinkable red table wine, all relatively inexpensive. We often created our lunches from these vendors.

We saw open-air markets everywhere. Some operated every day, some only once a week. But everything was fresh. Tomatoes smelled like tomatoes; peppers like peppers.

And the bakeries. Oh my! The smell of freshly baked bread, the CRUNCH of a buttery croissant that disintegrated into a thousand delectable crumbs, exquisitely decorated petit-fours – how could one resist? Calories? Who’s counting?

Indonesia: An array of vegetables and fruits we had never seen before. Alas, we spoke little Bahasa Indonesian; they spoke even less English. We never did learn the names; that did not lessen their taste. Or our enjoyment.

Ah, but coffee! Powdered, not ground. Throw a handful or two thrown into a pot, pour boiling water over. Let steep. Inhale the aroma. Drink. Hot, black and strong, but never bitter. We have yet to find coffee that good anywhere else.

Newfoundland and Labrador: A food and cultural experience of a different sort. We were traveling through Labrador with our truck and camper, and arrived via overnight ferry at a small outport. We needed to restock our fridge so we headed to the nearest grocery store. What a shock! There was nothing fresh, only ancient vegetables and fruit – wizened apples, black and shriveled cabbage, – and frozen meat encased in layers of frost. It brought to mind the limited stocks we had grown up with in our small prairie town groceries stores – one variety of apples (usually Macintosh), cabbage, head lettuce (who knew it was called “Iceberg”?), onions, potatoes, maybe turnips and parsnips, and four wan tomatoes in a cardboard sleeve with a cellophane window. And we thought this was just fine because we knew nothing else!

How spoiled we have become, with access to almost every variety of food in our grocery stores, even if it wasn’t picked just yesterday.

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My grandmother, Addie, wasn’t sure what she would find the first time she went to Mr. Haddad’s store in Meyronne, for everything had to be freighted in, a two-day wagon trip if coming from Morse or three days from Moose Jaw. As you can imagine, there was little that was fresh. Here’s what she saw (from Chapter 7 of “Our Bull’s Loose in Town!” Tales from the Homestead):

“I knew better than to expect shopping like in Toronto or even Dundalk; even so, my heart dropped when I saw the Meyronne store. A false front wooden building with a sign on the front that said, “General Store,” plopped out there in the bald prairie, no side-walk, no street, not even a hitching rail for the horses, just trails leading off in all directions.

We walked into the store and when my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I was quite surprised at what I saw. Oatmeal, flour, sugar, salt, tea, dried beans and peas, dry mustard, some canned goods – I remember canned sardines particularly, – crackers, pails of lard, and some dried apples, although they looked as if they had arrived last century. A barrel of pickles and another barrel of salt pork sat in a corner. One shelf held tin plates and cups, lamp chimneys and wicks, saucepans, frying pans and matches. Underneath were pails, kegs of nails and bottles of kerosene. Behind the counter, there were shelves of lye soap, liniment, Perry Davis Pain Killer and Dr. Thomas Eclectic Oil.”