Mercado Democracia / by Liesl Pfeffer

Mercado Democracia, Oaxaca, Mexico
August, 2013

The featherless chickens at the markets in Mexico are always bright yellow, like chickens in Looney Tunes cartoons. Their yellow legs and necks were poking up in the air on shelves in markets everywhere we went. We could not figure out why their skin was so yellow compared to chickens in Australia or the United States, so a couple of weeks into our trip, we asked our Mexican guide who was showing us around a market in San Cristobal. He said they are so yellow because they are raised on fresh Mexican corn and nothing else.  

Among the other amazing things we saw in markets, were the bowls heaped high with fried, crispy brown grasshoppers. The flavor? Kind of bitter actually.