But there are several things locals get right about their own communities–food chief among them.  For example, locals don’t eat at overpriced “authentic” restaurants. Heck, they don’t even eat out all that often for fear of bankrupting their monthly budget and health. 

What do they do instead? They mostly eat from grocery stores. Just like you and I do ate home. But the brilliant thing about eating from grocery stores while abroad is that they’re usually nothing like home. They are peculiar, delightful, easy to got lost in, and often nothing like the market foods you can get at home. 

Call it “shelf discovery” or an inside peak into what a city really consumes, prioritizes, values, and has easy access to. No fancy lighting. Usually fluorescent. No rustic wood menus. No waiter upselling a cut of meat that will surely fall short of good ole beef. Just shelves. Endless, democratic shelves.

I’m not the only one in on the secret. Nearly a third of international travelers seek out grocery stores as a way to experience regional culture and save a grundle on their food budgets. A double whammy of winning travel hacks. 

On top of that, a foreign grocery store is the only place where a country forgets to perform for you.

That’s because tourists restaurants are theater. Even the good ones. They are rehearsed smiles, curated spice levels, and dishes subtly calibrated to your fear of foreign foods. But a supermarket? A supermarket is where a nation eats when nobody is watching. It is unfiltered anthropology in aisle form.

Walk into one in Spain and you learn more about Spanish life from the €1.20 tomato paste pyramid than from any tapas tasting menu. In Japan, the precision of convenience store egg sandwiches tells you everything about national obsession with perfection disguised as simplicity. In Mexico, the salsa aisle alone is a theological argument with heat.

And unlike a tasting menu that costs roughly the same as a minor medical procedure, grocery stores are low risk. You can afford to explore. You can buy all four packs of $.50 cookies. Worse case scenario, you end up with a mysterious yogurt drink that tastes like fermented disappointment. Best case, you discover your new favorite candy and spend the next six months trying to smuggle bulk amounts of it via airmail.

There’s also something deeply interesting in how packaging speaks. In Italy, the pasta aisle is not a product section. It is a regional identity crisis organized by shelf height. In South Korea, the instant noodle wall feels like a curated museum of spice tolerance. In the UK, the tea aisle is less grocery inventory and more quiet national coping mechanism.

And then there are the people. Locals moving through the aisles with the effortless confidence of those who have never once Googled “best supermarket near me.” Watching them is better than any historical tour. You learn what “normal” actually looks like. A teenager grabbing three identical bags of chips. An elderly woman inspecting cucumbers with the seriousness of a diamond appraiser. A father negotiating with a child over colorful cereal as if his life depended on it.

No guidebook includes this. Of course, I’m not saying you should skip nice restaurants entirely. There is a time for memorably multi-course meals and meticulous plating. 

But the real foreign souvenir might not be the meal you were served. It could be the snack you didn’t understand, bought anyway, and ate on a hotel bed while watching local television with subtitles that still didn’t make sense. 

That’s a country speaking in its native language. And once you’ve heard it from a grocery store aisle, the five-star restaurant begins to sound a little less exciting.

Blake Snow contributes to fancy publications and Fortune 500 companies as a bodacious writer-for-hire and seasoned travel journalist to all seven continents. He lives in Provo, Utah with his wife, five children, and one ferocious chihuahua.