Foraging - Grocery Shopping in Gaborone

I owe thanks for this blog’s title to my friend Marion, who said I’d find shopping here a bit like foraging. Whenever the topic comes up in conversation, expats agree that there’s no one-stop-shopping. Locating a particular ingredient may require visiting three or four stores, and I’ve yet to spot some things anywhere, despite having checked out about 20 grocery outlets – and some of those multiple times -- in the four weeks since my arrival in Gaborone. I confess I've spent an inordinate amount of time browsing in grocery stores, but bear in mind that one side of my family was in the grocery business and the other in the beer and wine trade. I guess you could say that food snobbery comes naturally to me. My interrelated obsessions with food shopping, cooking, and dining are in my blood. Readers are forewarned: this blog will feature regular posts related to food.

The produce section of this store offers beautiful fresh greens.

Game City: this bland mall looks like
it could be in any town, any where.

Almost all shopping here involves a visit to a mall, either a strip mall or an enclosed mall. Near our apartment are one of each, the older Kgale View strip mall and the newer and much larger enclosed Game City, which between the two of them offer six grocery outlets. I’ve stopped at all six in search of a particular item and still come up empty. Rishi and I also frequently shop at Riverwalk, the mall closest to the University. On my exploratory forays around town, I’ve checked out several other malls plus Hyper, a warehouse store. And yes, there’s a small farmers’ market somewhere most weekends.

The grocery chains vary substantially in terms of merchandise carried and pricing, which of course is true everywhere. Most of them are based in South Africa, and that’s where most of the merchandise comes from as well. At the low end are Shoppers, Shop-Rite, and Checkers, about which I will say no more. Game, the South African subsidiary of WalMart, is not all that different from an older and smaller U.S. WalMart store, with limited food selections and the bulk of the store given to everything else ranging from housewares to furniture to sporting goods. Game is the cheapest or maybe the only place in Gaborone to find some kinds of merchandise, and thus I will be giving some of my shopping dollars to WalMart, albeit reluctantly. 

Does this picture give you a headache? The shopping experience
at Game is every bit as pleasant as a trip to WalMart in the US.  

Choppies, a Botswana-based chain, includes Indian ex-pats among its founders and management, so these groceries carry the largest selection of Indian and other Asian groceries. Moving up the scale, next are Spar and Pick-n-Pay. 

Specialty items on display at Woolworths.

Woolworths stores are at the top of the heap. Most Woolworths locations are small department stores that also contain a grocery and wine section, but some are grocery only with a slightly wider selection. At Woolworths you can find a small selection of good produce, decent looking meats, gluten-free pasta, and gourmet items like goat cheese, french jams, and prosciutto. But the prices make Whole Foods look like a bargain. Health Alternatives stores are small health food stores, with most of their inventory consisting of vitamins and supplements, sort of like a GNC. They also carry packages of various grains and specialty flours, so that’s where I’ve purchased brown rice flour, millet, and several other items for gluten-free cooking.

Enough about these chains. Let's get to the overall shopping experience. How’s the quality and the prices? What can you get and what’s difficult to find? 

The cereal section at Spar, though large, contains 
limited choices: corn flakes, bran flakes,
muesli, oatios, and weetabix (shredded wheat).
Then again, the absence of Cap’n Crunch, Apple
Jacks, and Froot Loops is probably a good thing.

First off, I’ll say that some of the stores are very clean, others, not so much. Generally this correlates with the pricing level, so no big surprise there. Many are quite large, in terms of square footage, though none are the size of a huge U.S supermarket, and frozen food sections are much smaller. Regardless of size, variety is limited and in the larger stores, the aisles are typically just stocked with more and more boxes of the same items.   

In terms of prices, staples are really cheap, but for something unusual or imported from anywhere other than South Africa, sticker shock is the rule. If you need a plastic bag to tote away your purchases, you have to pay the equivalent of about 4 cents for it. If this is intended to encourage people to bring their own bags, it doesn’t appear to be working. Nearly everyone is buying the bags.

Below are some observations, aisle by aisle, based on merchandise categories.

Produce: Selections are much more limited than in the U.S, with organic items almost totally absent. So far, outside of the farmers market, the only organic produce I've come across was bananas at Woolworth's.

In most stores, the majority of the produce is
pre-packaged, often in Styrofoam trays. 

But what’s here is generally fresh and quite flavorful. For instance, since it’s winter here, the stores have delicious, very sweet butternut and hubbard squash, but nothing like the range of squashes available back home at a supermarket, let alone Munson Farms. The tomatoes are tastier than supermarket tomatoes in the U.S., though still nothing like a home grown one. Mushrooms are white and sometimes brown criminis. Not a shitake or oyster to be found, let alone something like a chanterelle. 

Greens are delicious, fresh, and cheap,
about 33 cents per bunch.

Bunches of greens – Swiss chard and mustard -- are in nearly every store, but no kale. Interestingly, they call Swiss chard spinach here, whereas what we refer to as spinach is termed European spinach, and is occasionally available, washed and bagged. 

For fruit, every store carries Satsuma mandarins, which they call naartjies, bananas, apples (both green and red), cantaloupe, papaya,and pineapples. Now and then I’ve seen grapes, kiwis, plums, peaches, mangoes and jack fruit. Strawberries, when available, are about $3 for a small box of about a dozen.





Basics like potatoes, onions, carrots, celery, and green cabbage are for sale everywhere and are really cheap. Potatoes, for instance, cost about $0.50 per pound. Carrots that are very good are about 90 cents/pound. But a bunch of cilantro, if it's in stock at all, varies between $1 and $2.50. 

This very sweet giant cabbage, for only $1.50,
was large enough for two big pots of cabbage
soup, plus several batches of coleslaw. 

Looking for head lettuce? Iceberg is it. Or, at the
nicer stores, bags of salad mix are quite fresh, but pricey.

... a welcome alternative to that
supermarket bagged salad.

Gorgeous organic produce at Saturday farmers market...

A large portion of the dairy case is naught
but processed cheese, most likely akin to
American singles, but I haven’t sampled any to
confirm that impression, nor do I intend to do so. 

Dairy: Milk is almost always full cream, which at home would be whole milk, with a half gallon costing about $2.25 to $2.75 depending where you buy it. Only Woolworth carries 2% and 1% milk, at a premium of course. Sour cream, cottage cheese, cream cheese, and yogurt are available everywhere, but all of it, even the plain, contains stabilizers and preservatives. Cheese choices are painfully limited. So far I’ve purchased an acceptable cheddar, “gouda” that was a boring orange cheese, decent blue cheese, tolerable brie, mozzarella, and extremely salty feta. At Woolworth’s, I picked up real parmesan, cambezola, and a nice boerenkaas (a type of gouda) with caraway seeds.

Meats: Botswana’s number two industry is beef (second only to diamonds), making beef widely available and relatively cheap. Lean ground beef sells for about $3.25/lb. Chicken and pork are also on sale everywhere. Lamb chops are in most stores but other cuts are harder to find. Sausage is popular, but all of it contains fillers, usually wheat, so is off limits for us, plus they're loaded with preservatives and MSG. I’ve seen free-standing butcher shops around town, but haven’t yet checked them out.

Grains and beans: Maize (aka corn), sorghum, and rice are dietary staples of the Batswana (that’s the word for the people of Botswana), so get lots of shelf space in all the stores. Maize is available as samp, which is something like posole, and maize meal, all of it white. Besides white and brown rice, one can select from basmati, jasmine, and abrorio. Sorghum is sold as a meal that’s usually made into a porridge, but for us it’s one of the flours that can be used for gluten-free baking. Stores also carry a large assortment of dried beans and lentils.

That's a whole lot of rice and beans in a large Choppies store. 

Yahoo! Buckwheat groats and gluten-fee pasta.

Bread, biscuits, crackers. A loaf of bread is cheap, selling for about $1.25, though I haven't tried any because of Rishi's gluten-free diet. People here have quite the sweet tooth, so the variety of biscuits (cookies), crackers, and rusks (sort of like biscotti but bigger, usually eaten with coffee or tea) is quite wide.

All of the Indian spices are
available in the stores.

Condiments and spices: It’s clear that folks around here like spicy flavors too because the stores carry all kinds of spice mixtures for the brai (that’s the Afrikaans word for a grill), and a big selection of hot sauces. But that sweet tooth I mentioned above comes into play, because most of these sauces, and the salad dressings too, contain a hefty dose of sugar. I’ve found good olive oil and OK balsamic. I even spotted truffle oil at Woolworth’s. 

What’s unavailable or so expensive it’s ridiculous: I’ve yet to locate a few things that I could get in most any supermarket in the U.S. So here’s what I plan to look for during our upcoming trip to Cape Town, the foodie center of South Africa. And if I can’t get it there, it’s on my list for trips to Costco and Trader Joe’s when next in the states!

Lots of blue packages of Dairy Milk
milk chocolate bars, and oh yes,
some red-wrapped dark chocolate
bars hidden on the bottom shelf. 

• Tamari wheat-free soy sauce. Non-existent here, as far as I can tell.
• Pure vanilla extract. Every store stocks imitation vanilla “essence.”
• Chocolate chips. Well, I did see a small container of chips loaded with chemical junk. For chocolate chip cookies, I resorted to buying dark chocolate bars and chopping them up. Even dark chocolate is hard to come by here, with mostly milk chocolate on offer – remember that sweet tooth.
• Quinoa: It sells for the painfully high price of about $20 per pound and I decided to pass. We’ll eat rice and corn instead.
• Nuts: Almonds, cashews, and walnuts are only available in small packets, and the prices are way high. It’s sort of like succumbing to an overpriced packet of nuts when you’re at the airport and desperate for something relatively healthy to snack on. For example, that 200g packet of cashews costs the equivalent of about $14/lb. Pine nuts? What’s that?

I'd have to be nuts, or maybe just a bit flaky,
to shell out the equivalent of $16/lb for sliced almonds.