What You Want to Know about Life in Palestine: Grocery Shopping

It’s been almost two years since I moved to the Palestinian Territories, and during that time I’ve encountered lots of questions from Americans about what life is like in this corner of the world. So today, I’m starting a new series to answer some of those questions and help you gain a better understanding of a place that many Americans don’t know much about.

First up, I’ll be answering the following question submitted by a reader.

“I genuinely want to know how grocery shopping works! Similar to here [America]? More frequent? Large shops?”

Grocery shopping is both similar to and different from shopping in the States in various ways. There are dozens of “supermarkets” here, but don’t let the term fool you. Most of them are smaller than your average pharmacy in the US. There are two or three chain grocery stores that are more along the lines of a Walmart Neighborhood Market—with groceries, produce, meat, personal care products, and home supplies—but only one as big as a Publix, Harris Teeter, Food Lion, etc., and that one is in a huge shopping mall. We have one store a block from our home where we do most of our shopping, and it’s about the size of an Aldi with three checkout lanes. Self-checkout doesn’t exist here.

One of the chain grocery stores

We typically grocery shop once a week, after I make a meal plan for the week. But one difference here is that instead of buying our produce at the chain grocery store, we go to a separate produce store because the quality is much better. These small produce shops are also ubiquitous in our city, and the one we go to is a Christian family business that has wonderfully fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s one of my favorite places to go.

Our favorite produce store

We also buy our meat (beef, chicken, and our Thanksgiving turkey) from a butcher shop—another type of store that there are dozens of in the city. We typically go to the butcher every 2-3 months and stock our freezer with ground beef, chicken, and sometimes burgers, then go back if we want a special cut of beef. Because the two predominant religions in this region (Judaism and Islam) forbid eating pork, pork is very hard to find here, and when you do find it, it’s very expensive. I have to admit, I miss the variety of being able to fix a pork meal every now and then.

Our favorite butcher shop

For fish and seafood, we also go to a separate store dedicated to that type of food. While there are some frozen options in the chain grocery stores, a seafood shop offers better—and sometimes cheaper—options.

Our favorite seafood store  

When it comes to variety of products at the grocery store, there is definitely less than in America, but generally enough to satisfy. There are typically multiple brands of most items, but sometimes the types of items are limited. For example, when it comes to canned fruit, you have a choice of four or five different brands of pineapple and maybe one brand of fruit cocktail, but no other kinds of fruit. I’ve found a couple of stores that sometimes have canned peaches or pears, which are a luxury. Canned mandarin oranges I have yet to find and are one of the things I miss most from the States. The rest of the canned goods aisle is predominated by beans, olives, pickles, mushrooms, and chickpeas. I’ve only seen canned green beans once and peas occasionally. So we typically buy fresh or frozen.

Similar to pineapple, when it comes to canned tomato products, you can have your choice of nearly a dozen different brands/sizes of tomato paste, but whole, diced, crushed, or sauce are hit or miss. And since the labels might be in another language (other than English or Arabic), sometimes we have to play the “buy it and be surprised when we open it” game.

The language differences are because products come from all over the world. Many are Palestinian-made or Israeli-made, but there are also a higher number of items from other countries than what you would find in the States—countries like Jordan, Egypt, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Italy, and more. And of course, there are a plethora of American brands and products, although not all look or taste the same as they do in the States. As just one example, regular Lays potato chips come in a red bag here and are made with a different kind of oil, so they taste different. But some stores sell the yellow-bag regular Lays like what is sold in the States.

These stores are typically on the higher end of the price scale and specialize in imported products, many of which are American. When I need to find a special ingredient or product, e.g., cranberry sauce, canned pumpkin, or pure maple syrup, we go to those stores. Another item we have to venture to these stores to find is General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios. In the regular grocery stores, only Nestle Cheerios are sold, and I’m pretty sure they’re just Honey, not Honey Nut. In any case, they taste different. Before moving here, I associated Nestle with other things than cereal, but apparently Nestle and General Mills have a partnership, and both get to use the name “Cheerios.” You can look it up if you’re curious what the Nestle Cheerios look like.

One of the high-end grocery stores.

The final difference in grocery shopping is the cost. Food is generally more expensive here than in America. A 2-liter of milk (a little more than ½ gallon) is over $3.00 (as of today’s conversion rate, which changes daily). A 2-liter bottle of orange juice is $7.57. A regular-size box of cereal is between $4 and $5. The nice thing, though, is that those prices include tax.

I hope this has given you a taste of life here in Palestine. Stay tuned for next time when I’ll answer another question about what life is like. Do you have a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know in the comments below.