Before we left the UK in 2002 we used to do our shopping at a big new Sainsburys supermarket near the Millennium Dome by the Thames in Greenwich. I remember walking round the aisles and thinking that it was a cornucopia of foods from all over the world and how lucky we were to have such quality and choice. Had I seen Saratok market then it would have appeared to me a hot, confusing and fly-blown place, smelling of open drains and rotting fish. But it's been a long journey since then and that Sainsburys seems to me now like a tomb for dead food, shrunk-wrapped, frozen, labelled and bullied into uniform ranks. A place where words have taken over from taste, where we are endlessly told how good things are and the same head of broccoli can be badge-engineered as "basic" or of "taste the difference" quality.
My education began in the food markets of Italy, especially our weekly market in Locorotondo. It took me two years to begin weaning myself off regular 100 mile round trips to the nearest hypermarket and to start buying local stuff in season and to learn some basic techniques for cooking the same things week in week out. After a few years I began to enjoy the seasonal round and to get pleasure from anticipating the arrival of the first clementines, oranges or artichokes. But Saratok market is a step even further back in time - a daily market used by practically every family in the area every day, where goods are bought and sold by local people for local people. There is a fast food section run by stout Malay ladies slaving over woks and ovens; a main market dominated by Chinese and Malay stallholders and run on Halal principles and; a section where Iban people from the local longhouses come and sit and display whatever they have picked that morning in exchange for a few ringgits. Off to one side there is also a pork butchery section run by Chinese men in aprons who furtively dismember their pig carcasses as if doing something not quite respectable.
Everything is open to be smelt and inspected. Half the things I still don't recognise and I'm sure if you compared the product range to the average Tescos, Saratok market would win hands down. You certainly can't get fox meat at Tescos, or live sago worms for that matter. The whole place is an assault on the senses where you know you are buying real food, often picked or killed that day or about to be killed. It's pretty classless too, everyone comes and you can buy enough stuff to feed a family of four for perhaps ten ringgits (£2) or fifty (£10), depending on your pocket and your taste for fresh fish and chicken.
I really feel privileged to know that I will be coming here for the next eighteen months and that so far I've hardly scratched the surface.
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