The first supermarket visit is a mapping exercise more than a shop

A different kind of shopping trip

A traveller eats out. Someone staying for months has to feed themselves most days, and that means the supermarket is not a curiosity but a piece of infrastructure they will use several hundred times. The first visit is therefore worth treating as reconnaissance rather than as an errand, because what you learn in that hour will shape the next several months of eating.

The disorientation is real and it catches people who consider themselves seasoned. You know how to buy food. You do not know how to buy food here, and the two skills are less transferable than they feel, because the categories, the packaging conventions and the assumptions about what a household keeps are all local.

Go once without a list. Buy almost nothing. Walk every aisle.

What the layout is telling you

The amount of shelf space given to a category is a fairly honest statement about how central it is to ordinary cooking in that country. A wall of one ingredient and a single sad shelf of another tells you which is the staple and which is the import, and that is the most useful piece of information available to a newcomer trying to eat well cheaply.

The same applies to the fresh sections. Where a country has an active local agriculture, the produce is seasonal, cheap and good in its season and expensive and mediocre outside it, which is a rhythm you will only notice if you shop repeatedly. Where produce is largely imported, prices are flatter and the quality is more uniform across the year.

Pay attention to the freezer aisles and the tinned goods too, because they show what people rely on when they are busy. That is the part of a national diet that is never in the guidebooks and always in the kitchens.

Substitution is the skill worth acquiring early

Most homesickness about food is really a substitution problem. The dish you want requires an ingredient that is either absent, expensive or sold in a form you do not recognise, and the instinct is to hunt for the exact item in a specialist shop at four times the price. Sometimes that is worth it. Usually the better move is to learn what plays the same role here.

Dairy is the classic case, because the fat percentages, the cultures and the naming conventions differ enormously between countries, and a product that looks identical can behave differently in a pan. Flour is another, since the milling and protein conventions vary and a bread recipe that worked at home can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with technique.

The reliable route through this is to ask, and the person to ask is whoever is stacking the shelf. Shop staff answer this kind of question constantly and are generally happy to.

The shops that are not supermarkets

In a lot of countries the supermarket is not where the good food is, and discovering that late is a common regret. There may be a market that operates on particular mornings, a butcher who sells cuts the supermarket does not carry, a bakery whose product bears no resemblance to the packaged version, or a shop serving a particular community where the ingredients you thought were unobtainable are ordinary and cheap.

That last category is worth seeking out deliberately. Whatever else a city has, it usually has shops serving people who moved there from somewhere else, and those shops are where you find spices, pulses, rice and vegetables at prices the mainstream chains never approach.

Finding them takes a while because they are rarely well signposted online. The fastest route is asking people, which has the secondary benefit of being an easy conversation to start.

Cooking equipment and the kitchen you were given

A rented kitchen abroad will be equipped according to local assumptions, and those assumptions can be startling. An oven may be small, absent or of a type you have never used. A hob may be induction, gas or a solid plate that takes ten minutes to change temperature. The pans that come with the flat were chosen by someone cooking a different cuisine.

It is worth waiting a few weeks before buying anything, because the thing you think you are missing on day three is often something you would only need for the way you used to cook. People who adapt their cooking to the kitchen and the market tend to eat better, and considerably more cheaply, than people who reproduce their old menu at import prices.

And there is a quieter benefit, which is that learning to cook a few local dishes properly is one of the fastest routes into a place. Ask someone how they make the thing you liked. Almost nobody has ever been annoyed by that question.