Eating Well Abroad: Navigating Food, Diet, and Grocery Shopping in a New Country

Food is one of the dimensions of daily life that expats most consistently underestimate as a source of both joy and friction. The people who move abroad partly for the food experience — and there are many of them — find that the reality of eating in a new country is richer and more interesting than they anticipated. The people who move primarily for other reasons and arrive with specific dietary habits, health requirements, or comfort food attachments often discover that food adaptation requires more deliberate effort than they expected.

Both experiences are normal, and navigating them well produces one of the most underrated rewards of expat life: a genuinely expanded relationship with food, built through years of eating what a specific place produces and knowing where it comes from.

Markets vs. Supermarkets: The Infrastructure of Eating Locally

Most expat-destination countries have a food retail infrastructure that is organized differently from the US model of large supermarkets as the primary food source. In Portugal and Spain, weekly or daily municipal markets (mercados) are where locals buy fresh produce, fish, meat, and cheese, often from vendors who have occupied the same stall for decades. In Mexico, tianguis and mercados serve the same function. In Thailand, fresh markets open in early morning and again in late afternoon, selling produce, meat, and prepared foods at prices that are a fraction of Western grocery equivalents.

Learning to shop at local markets — understanding what’s seasonal, building relationships with specific vendors, learning enough language to negotiate and inquire — is one of the most rewarding early investments an expat can make. It produces better food at lower prices than supermarkets, provides regular contact with local community, and develops a knowledge of the local food culture that makes cooking at home genuinely interesting rather than a workaround for unfamiliar restaurant food.

Finding the imported items you genuinely need — specific medical foods, particular baking ingredients, products that are not locally produced — is a separate skill. Most expat-destination cities have at least one international grocery store that stocks items from multiple countries, and expat community forums are often the best source of information about where to find specific products that aren’t readily available in local markets.

Dietary Restrictions and Health Requirements

Managing dietary restrictions abroad requires more advance preparation than most people anticipate. Celiac disease, severe food allergies, diabetes-related dietary requirements, and other medical dietary needs all require a clear strategy in a country where food labeling may be in a different language, cross-contamination standards may differ, and the cultural understanding of dietary restrictions may be limited.

The most important preparation step: learn the vocabulary for your dietary restriction in the local language before you arrive, not after. A celiac traveler in Portugal needs to know how to explain gluten cross-contamination to a restaurant kitchen, not just how to order a gluten-free dish. An expat managing diabetes needs to understand how local carbohydrate-heavy cuisines affect blood glucose in ways that their US experience with different foods may not have prepared them for. Connecting with local expat communities around specific dietary needs — there are Facebook groups and forums for nearly every combination of destination and dietary restriction — provides practical, current information about what’s available and what to avoid.

Cooking Abroad: The Equipment and Adjustment

Most furnished apartments abroad are equipped with European-style cooking infrastructure: typically a smaller refrigerator (reflecting the local habit of shopping more frequently for smaller quantities), a gas stovetop, and sometimes a convection oven rather than the larger American-style oven. Learning to cook in a smaller-scale kitchen with different equipment is an adjustment that most expats make within a few weeks — the food culture in most expat destinations is deeply connected to home cooking, and the local ingredients available make excellent cooking accessible even in minimally equipped kitchens.

The items most worth bringing from home: a good knife (quality kitchen knives are expensive everywhere), any specialized cooking tools that you use regularly and that are genuinely difficult to find locally, and any medications or supplements that you take regularly and that may not be available in local pharmacies without significant effort.

Eating Out: Navigating Local Restaurant Culture

Restaurant culture varies in ways that catch many Americans off guard. In Southern Europe, dinner doesn’t begin until 8 or 9pm; arriving at 6:30pm to find a restaurant empty is not a sign that it’s bad but that you’re operating on American time. In Portugal, the “menu do dia” — a fixed-price lunch menu that includes soup, a main, dessert, and often wine — is how locals eat lunch affordably, and it’s usually the best value at any restaurant that offers it. In Thailand and Vietnam, table sharing with strangers is normal and refusing it odd; in Japan, slurping noodles is correct and not finishing your bowl is impolite.

These are learnable norms, and learning them quickly produces a qualitatively different experience of a place than remaining anchored to American restaurant habits. The expat who eats on local time, orders what locals order, and engages with the social norms of local dining culture is having a genuinely different experience from the one who finds the Western-facing restaurant and orders the familiar item.