Mobile Market

John is a grocer.  In our village he supplies the makings of the evening meal for a fair share of the households.  At 7:30 in the morning John goes to a large market beyond the range of people on foot or with bicycles.  He buys about 5000 baht ($150) worth of perishable vegetables, meat, confections and a small amount of fruit.  He loads this onto his motorcycle side-car in packets and sacks and into his ice chest.  He includes sacks of ready to eat lunches as well, because customers looking for lunch and snacks are his first sales.

When he is ready he starts out on a regular route where customers are waiting at usual times.  Stop by stop he works his way through 6 villages toward home.  During the morning his customers are buying things to eat for lunch.  By about 3 he is ready to unload his remaining produce onto a long roadside table in front of his house.

Even before he is finished, customers begin to pedal and walk over to decide what they will fix for supper.  A few bring things to sell or trade from their gardens or orchards, but most of what he sells comes from the central market and is bought for cash.  This season fish are plentiful.  Many households will eat fish twice or more a week.  Pork and chicken are other mainstays.  Those are almost always added in small amounts to a dish that contains a preponderance of vegetables, either boiled or stir-fried.  It only takes a few herbs or spices to turn one set of ingredients into a variety of dishes.  As often as possible, a family will dine on something from their own yard or orchard.  Pumpkins, melons, jack-fruit, green beans, sweet corn, lemon grass, mangoes and bananas are sometimes just out the back door.  [In a blog later this year I will report on “Hunting and Gathering Right at Home”.  Throughout 2015 there will be essays on “Thai village life: see it before it disappears”.]

Most families expect to spend about twenty or thirty baht (less than a dollar) cash per person on the night’s meal with enough left over for breakfast.  If money is scarce a meal can be cooked for less than that.  Bamboo shoots and mushrooms still come from the woods.

Rice is naturally the staple.  Most families grow the rice they eat.  Steaming the day’s supply of sticky rice or cooking the “pretty” rice is a routine task in every home.  Families who stick with traditional Northern Thai steamed, glutinous rice eaten with the fingers, will inevitably have one or another sort of chili-paste which they either make at home or buy.

In our village there are also a couple of stores that sell non-perishable necessities for daily living.  [An essay will feature this function of village life in a blog, later.]  John’s mobile market does not provide meal ingredients that come in cans or bottles.

A few things are delivered to houses.  Most homes have drinking water delivered; a woman brings eggs on demand from her chicken farm in the neighboring village.  Ice cream comes by motorcycle, too.

John’s customers do not regularly travel to and from the city or distant work sites.  In the city or in towns, people tend to shop in super markets or from the same sort of market that John buys his produce.  More often salaried people stop on the way home and buy supper items from cooks who offer pots and pans of a dozen stock dishes they sell in front of their homes.  Some villages have enterprising cooks that do this, too, but not our village.  John used to supplement his produce with 3 or 4 pots of curry, but he gave it up as not cost effective.  In our village about half of the households consist of older people and folks who stay around their homes and farms full-time.  They are John’s customers. 

John’s roadside table closes by about 7:30.  That’s a 12 hour day.  Minimum wage in Thailand is 300 baht per day (about $10).  John’s profit if people are hungry is about that.