listen to africa

A food shop south of Essaouira, Morocco. © Listen to Africa

Because I agree with the theory that one of the best ways to get to know a country is to shop for food in it, I thought I’d write up this completely unextraordinary food shopping excursion. It was in Safi, but it might have been almost anywhere in Morocco.

The first shop we came across was a shuttered hole in the wall, its shopkeeper leaning on a counter and half blocking our view into the dark and dusty storeroom behind her. This typical Moroccan arrangement is excellent for banter and, if you know what you want, a quick way to shop. But you have to know what you want, and how to ask for it.

In this case the shopkeeper was a middle-aged woman who spoke no French, Spanish or English (a lot of Moroccan men and younger women speak some or all of these languages – sometimes in the same sentence). My Arabic seems to be understood only by a very special (possibly telepathic) kind of listener, so we got our eggs, bread, milk and 50g of butter wrapped in a plastic bag by pointing, and clucking like chickens.

We still wanted meat and vegetables so we carried on to shop number two – another hole in the wall with a storeroom much smaller and more sparsely stocked than the first, run by a smiling young man. We just wanted to ask if there was a butcher but, out of politeness, we bought four triangles of Laughing Cow cheese (you can never have too much). Again, he spoke no French so again we resorted to clucking – with a bit of mooing thrown in this time – to ask where the butcher was. Our rendition won a huge smile and prolific directions, in Arabic.

With whole carcasses hanging from meat hooks and men waving fly swats around, butchers are usually hard to miss in Morocco. We couldn’t see one. We did see a greengrocers though – another dusty room, this time self service, stocking a box of small, ripe tomatoes, half a dozen huge red onions on their stalks, a few lemons and a dozen carrots. We took three tomatoes and an onion to the counter to be weighed.

The greengrocer – an old man in a tarbouche (a stiff, round hat also known as a Fez) and djellaba (a long, hooded robe) – called a younger, jeans-wearing man in from the street to translate. We paid and then asked where we might be able to buy meat.

The old man sells chickens, we were told. How many do we want? Not having a clue how chickens are sold by Moroccan greengrocers, we asked vaguely for “half”, so that it could be taken as either half a chicken or half a kilo – either of which would be fine. After a bit of rummaging in a back room, half a plucked chicken was plopped into a plastic bag and handed to us, ready to join the onions and tomatoes for our evening meal.