Foraging for food in Papua New Guinea

Foraging for food has been a part of PNG life for thousands of years, and is a custom I have become quite familiar with… My foraging however takes place not in the mountainside, off a canoe or in the village, but in the aisles of Alotau’s various ‘supermarkets’.

Food shopping in Alotau is… different to say the least.

For an itty bitty town it seems to have more supermarkets per capita than anywhere I’ve ever been.

The problem is that no one supermarket stocks everything, so I find myself zigzagging amongst them non-stop just to get basic food items.

The stock is also completely unpredictable. Alotau relies heavily on imports which means that all of a sudden random products disappear from the shelves for long periods of time.

Finding fresh foods in the supermarkets can be really challenging. You can generally rely on being able to scrounge up some browned cabbage and some blackened carrots for extortionate prices but that’s not terribly inspiring day to day.

One of the supermarkets plays top 40 music really loud, so whenever I’m in there I feel like I’m shopping in some kind of really well lit PNG night club.

The stores are almost exclusively owned and run by Filipinos (there is quite a large Filipino community here) and a large percentage of the food available in the supermarkets is Filipino.

There is also a range of products that look deceivingly familiar to what we would be used to on the shelves back home (twisties, coke, etc) but they all sport the logo ‘PNG Made’ which means they taste completely different and are much worse for your health. There is also heaps of Malaysian knock offs (Tim Tams, Oreos) which means that a lot of these foods have the comfortable familiarity, mixed with mild disappointment.

Some things I have found about food shopping:

1)      Absolutely nowhere in this town can you buy fresh milk, yet you can buy lavish items like cocktail strainers and (if you’re willing to shell out 400kina) TEN KILOS of Mozzarella.

2)      The meat here makes a very compelling case for vegetarianism.

3)      No item is too small or too minor for a plastic bag.