Eating out is priced as the standard Southern European. Buying raw material for food can be considered as being at a low price. Vegetables, fruits are offered in a fairly wide range, but in what the Canarians are really strong is marisco – the seafood.

The traditional Canarian cuisine – if not the fancy ones – do not use to attract masses of culinary experts, though it is a telling example of a subtropical, agriculture based society having recently transformed too rapidly from the famine-struck franquism to the abundance of free consumerism. Many authentic types of food are being looked down, while others overtly celebrated, as symbols of ill- or well-being. The basic difference for the European eye is the lack of preserving technologies – simply there is no real need for it, everything can be harvested at any time, or, if not, can be substituted with something else that is favouring the little differences between the harvest seasons. Just for illustrating the problem: one of our biggest sadness is that you cannot get proper mango from March till July, but nisperos (medlar) you can only obtain from January till May.

Our interest has turned to those tropical / subtropical types of fruits that did not enter the world wide market because of their resistance to long shipping conditions. Also we are curious investigators of the local herbs – growing wild abundantly, and of the edible vegetables (endemic or invasive), and the processes they can be turned to delicious food. Or any use they can offer. As a fanatic mushroom collector, I tend to waste a lot of time on being able to get to the forests for this beloved type of alimentation.