London Recap Part I - The Markets

Shefali and I spent four days vacationing in London on our way to Mumbai. Whenever we travel to a new place, we make it a goal to eat our way from one end of town to the other. This four-part series will highlight our experiences.

After landing at Heathrow Airport and riding the tube into town, we visited Borough Market in Southwark and quickly learned that London has a vibrant local food scene. The city's diversity brings products from all over the globe, and the food vendors fill three city blocks. Many foods, like fish, eggs, dairy and veggies, are produced locally, but there were dozens of other booths offering goods imported from the regions of the world that know them best.

For example, heavily-accented Europeans handed us samples of blood orange and lemon-infused olive oils from Sicily, white and black truffle oil from Bologna, red-chile hummous (made locally by an Israeli family), and chorizo from Spain, quartered and served with arugula, roasted red peppers and tomatoes in a bun.

In addition to the classics, we stumbled upon less iconic treasures like ostrich burger, Croatian olive oils, zebra meat and vats of chicken and seafood, simmering in Vietnamese, Madras and Thai curries. In short, Borough Market was incredible. If you're ever in London, don't miss it.

Towards the end of the week we visited Shefali's cousin, Priya, in Fulham. Located west of London proper, Fulham has its own farmer's market. Open every morning, Priya explained, its booths cater to the ethnicities--Jewish, Indian and Slovak, for example--that have helped make London famous. Though foods like papad and matzo, produced and shared by families from places other than London, may or may not use ingredients from nearby farms, it definitely challenges the way I think about local food. In a city as historic and diverse as London, perhaps the people decide what's "local" just as much as the geography. If I've learned anything from traveling, it's that people will do anything to recreate the foods they ate at home. As a result, community-supported markets rely on the palates of the residents in addition to the land itself.