Food and Grocery Shopping in Buenos Aires

As mentioned in earlier posts this is a HUGE city. Its like living in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and other big cities on planet Earth. There are 12 million people in greater Buenos Aires. The place I just moved from, southern California has 20 million people, but its spread out and lots of people live in houses with yards etc. In the Capital Federal section of Buenos Aires its mainly high rises and densely packed humans.

One of the big advantages to this is you DEFINITELY do not need a car. In fact, you don´t want to have a car. I am assuming, that the people that own cars in BA are people clearly with means, but there are a lot of cars here, actually there are cars every where unfortunately. Imagine a world with no cars. There were no cars in Isinlivi, see my earlier post from Ecuador. That was way out in the rural Andes of Ecuador and if you saw a car once a day it was a big deal. But any way, back here to Argentina.

The food is really nice. I am enjoying picking up a bit of fresh produce each day after work on my walk home. And not just fresh produce, but also fresh meat and chicken, fresh bread, fresh chocolates, fresh cheese, etc... This is a cooker´s paradise, and I have been cooking up a storm, no pun intended for those who know me as Storm.

One of the main items I have been cooking is the produce stores actually cut up the vegetables for you and put them in a package. So, they all sort of cut up vegetables in all sorts of different varieties so by the time I get home I just throw it into a stir fry and I am up and running. No need to cut all of the vegetables when I get home and put the waste in the compost. Yeh right, no compost in the big city, but out in Placitas we have a nice compost pile and we also have a nice compost pile in Silver City. In Silver City I throw out the compost every day and then at night the deer come and eat up all of the compost. I know that because in the morning there is usually fresh deer droppings. Enough about the droppings and on to what is hard to find here in BA.

First of all there is certain stuff I have just not seen. In fact the guide books mention this as well, and it appears to be true. This was not the case in Ecuador, I am obviously talking about peanut butter. I have not seen it any where, if someone reads my blog and knows about a place in Buenos Aires to buy peanut butter please let me know by posting a comment.

Also, mayonnaise is really expensive and probably not that good. It comes in a teeny weeny plastic bottle, probably enough for a couple of sandwiches and it costs, get this, about FOUR dollars. Also, it appears that potato chips are very pricey as well. A huge bag of chips at Trader Joe´s is like three bucks, here a tiny bag of chips is over four dollars. So those are just some of the items I have noticed so far in my short almost two week stay in Argentina.

Today, after a two week search I found a really good source for hot cereal, especially instant oat meal. You know in the states you can find Quaker Oats in both the traditional and instant variety, well here I found a small shop at 1928 Vidal in Belgrano that sells a nice mix of hot cereals for a very reasonable price. So, I plunked down 10 pesos and got me a really big bag of instant oat meal, and I will be all smiles for many, many mornings just before spring hits here south of the equator.

On a side note, since I am in the big city, I haven´t seen the southern cross yet, one of these days or nights I will emerge from the big buildings and head out into the country and hopefully see the southern cross. More later on food stuff, but for now that was a good start about food.