DOS/ Tiendas y Almacénes (Shops and Stores)

Just a few blocks from our hostal on Pérez Rosales, toward Lucy’s from downtown Valdivia, we found a tiny, neighborhood carnecería (butcher shop), with great slabs of hanging beef and, just before Christmas, whole lambs with the tails on; fresh brown eggs; strings of house-made sausages; local cheese; and local butter. These kinds of shops feel like survivors from an earlier era, before my time, really, as they no longer exist in the U.S. I kept finding reasons to stop in there and pick up a little something—four eggs, a quarter-kilo of cheese, or three sausages.

I tried, once, to explain to a group of young Chileans why I eat more meat in Chile than at home. I think they understood the feeding with maíz part, even though it went against what they know about pastos (grass) being better for cows. But "feedlot" was a more difficult translation. I didn't have a word for it in Spanish, and it didn't make sense to them. The practice of factory farming has been most visibly applied in Chile, so far, to exported agricultural products like grapes and kiwis and trees rather than to meat, which is consumed locally.


A small tienda that sells only harinas (flours), in Villarica.

I also ducked into El Vergel for the first time, the tiny fruit, vegetable, egg, and yogurt shop on General Lagos, an old shack, really, just a block from Lucy’s. I had imagined an old woman running the place, but actually it’s tended by a stooped old man. Most of the neighborhood women who stop by are just as old, pulling rickety shopping carts to haul home their piles of potatoes and other veggies. “Vergel” means yard or garden or orchard, which accurately describes the source of the store’s products: nothing much packaged or processed, just veggies and fruit arrayed on open wooden shelves, without refrigeration. This ancient tienda has so far survived the newer, more convenience-store-like shops. The new stores, to be fair, often sell fresh-daily Chilean breads, onions, lemons, and maybe a few other fresh veggies, along with the typical array of packaged food-like substances: soda, candy, helados (ice cream popsicles), beer, cigarettes.

El Vergel, in Valdivia.

But El Vergel always displays my favorite, a gigantic cut-open zapallo, just inside the door where you can’t miss it, even walking past. Zapallo is the word for Chilean winter squash (calabaza is the more general Spanish word). It’s a huge squash, the size of a very large pumpkin, with pale-green skin, glowing golden-orange flesh inside, and gigantic seeds. Zapallo is sold by the vertical wedge, cut by the storekeeper with an old, large-toothed carpenter’s saw kept nearby for this purpose. If you ask for a kilo de zapallo, they cut just that much—I’ve seen the weight come out a perfect kilo on the scale. In “Touching the Void,” a documentary about a mountain climber stranded on Siula Grande, a peak in the Peruvian Andes, there is a scene inside a village shop: you can see a cut-open zapallo in the corner.

A small fruit and vegetable tienda in Santiago, with two stacked, whole zapallos on the left.

The taste of zapallo is unlike any other winter squash I’ve tasted: strong, smooth, a little nutty, and the flesh browns wonderfully in the oven with a rubbing of olive oil, adding the roasty taste of caramelization. It’s delicious; I would cook some today if I had it here.

—Jane


While technically not a shop but a big box store, I love Sodimac, the Home Depot of Chile. It’s even more fun than the hardware stores in the U.S. because everything is labeled in Spanish. We made two trips on this visit. The first time we bought gardening tools—un azadón escardillo (a weeding hoe) and un desmalazador (a weeding stick)—for Lucy, Eduardo, Felipe, and Paola’s first kitchen garden. And hardware and glue to fix a refrigerator door that wouldn’t close properly. We went a second time to buy composting containers.

Shopping at Sodimac is like walking into a living, 3D version of an illustrated language dictionary (Duden has published many titles) in which all the items in a complex illustration of an everyday scene are tagged and labeled at the bottom of the page with the objects' names. The Chilean big box version comes complete with interpreters of the exhibits who can explain things in Spanish en vivo. Definitely a vocabulary builder.

I also like Unico, a large supermarket in Valdivia. While there is considerable overlap between foods available in the U.S. and those in Chile, new items stand out and familiar ones appear in different packaging: fresh quail eggs by the dozen, unfamiliar dairy products, mounds of carne (meat, especially beef), Chilean olive and grape oils, regional sausages, breakfast cereals engineered by multinational corporations especially for South America, rows of cheap Chilean and Argentinean wine, and condiments in plastic bags (mayo, jam, mustard, ketchup) that usually come in glass bottles here. Some supermercado names indicate largeness, even if the individual stores aren’t very large. A good example is Bigger (pronounced bee-gair, accent on the last syllable). Beyond supermercados are hipermercados, like Hiperunico (ee’-pair oo’-nee-co), the hypermarkets of el futuro.

A smaller Bigger, al centro, Valdivia.

Speaking of carne, attitudes toward meat are different in Chile. It’s quite a sight to watch a man heft a side of beef onto his back from the rear of a truck, walk in the front door of a butcher shop, down the main (and only) aisle, and into the back room. The customers move ever so slightly to the side to make a way. I saw this in Santiago, several times: no unloading the flesh out of sight at the rear of the store, no sir.

Although I never saw it happen in Unico, elements of the scenario persist in the way meat is displayed and handled in the supermercados. On the day before holidays, Chileans congregate at the meat counters waiting to have their carne cut, right then, for their holiday meals. The beef itself is excellent, grass-fed, and usually grown in southern Chile or imported from the pampas of Argentina. Yum.

—Michael