Going to the local farmer's market

On Saturdays and Wednesdays around the corner from our house, there's a nice farmer's market that starts in the afternoon and continues into the evening. This makes it much more convenient than farmer's markets we've seen in North America which tend to start at terribly early times and close early in the afternoon, so we end up going there a lot.


One interesting feature of the farmer's market is that some items are significantly cheaper than at the supermarket. Even cheaper than the relatively inexpensive "box store" near our house, which is already much cheaper than the normal supermarkets.¹

The items available vary week-to-week, but this isn't really a problem and it means that sometimes we can get great deals. For instance, this week we found pineapple for the low price of 100 yen (approx $1.07 Canadian) each or last week, I found a large head of lettuce for a mere 50 yen.

Look at the spots and colour variation!

This week, we also arrived early enough to get some eggs that were being sold for only 200 yen. They're brown eggs, which doesn't make them any more nutritious than white eggs (the only difference is the colour of the ear lobes of the hen who laid the eggs), but they are much prettier than white eggs.

An astute observer might note that there are only ten eggs in the carton. It's pretty standard in Japan to find eggs that are sold either by the half dozen or in sets of ten. I'm not sure why the options are six or ten eggs, but they are.

We also picked up a bunch of bananas for 100 yen, probably about 20 shiitake mushrooms for 150 yen, some komatsuna for 80 yen and an assortment of other goodies. We got left heavily laden with food for something on the order of 1200 yen (under $13.00 Canadian), which isn't be all of our food shopping for the week, but it's still not too bad.

It's interesting to note that while Japan has a reputation for being an expensive place to live, including high food costs, it is possible to find food rather cheaply around here. The places where food is cheap are not always obvious or easy to find (daid didn't know about this farmer's market or the box store until he moved to this apartment) and if you shop at the wrong places, the same food can cost much, much more. Indeed, the price variation from one place to another seems much more significant than anything I've seen in Canada.

Granted, there are some foods that are pretty much always going to be more expensive here, especially Western foods that are imported and not especially popular. If you want to move to Japan and eat peanut butter sandwiches all the time, you'll probably be a sad panda. There's also a reason that our taco nights are few and far between. Though they are delicious (and heavily improvised), when some taco shells cost over 500 yen, it can be a bit much to do very often.

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^{1. A box store is a store where the items are not removed from their boxes before being placed on the shelf. Instead, a box containing many packages is cut open and placed on the shelf. This presumably saves money because stocking the shelves that way is less work which requires fewer employees and the store can pass the savings onto the customers.↩}