Tabo: A Must Experience Weekend Food Market in Bukidnon

Busy narrow streets, colorful vegetables and locals shopping first hour in the morning, wanting to buy the freshest produce. That’s how the Bukidnon local food market situation is every weekend.  

“Tabo” is the local term we use to refer to an event, particularly a weekend food market where farmers usually travel from their farm to the city and sell their high quality produce at very cheap prices.

By the time you arrive in the market at 5 or 6 in the morning, you can expect to see fruits, vegetables, dried fish, legumes, spices and crops neatly arranged in wood boxes and temporary display tables under tent roofs or tarpaulin.

You only have one goal when visiting the weekend food market – that is to find high quality produce at the cheapest price. Hmmm. Not as easy as you may think.

There are many farmers competing to sell their products and because you want the best buy, you need to roam around and do your personal survey before deciding what to purchase. Sounds like a serious job right?

Buying in the weekend food market has already been a part of my life. While others do not find it as a very interesting thing to do on weekends, well, I do. This activity felt like a chore at first but then it turned out to be a therapeutic thing that I do to destress myself ( now I’m getting weirder).

Roaming around the market trying to search for the best products and checking out new ingredients, to me is like an adventure. You get to meet the farmers who personally grow these products. I greatly appreciate what they do for a living and find them too humble for the contribution that they do to our planet.

They are the people who took their precious time to plant seeds, nurture them and wait for months even years for them to grow, blossom, bear fruit and finally ready for the harvesting. This little seed, when properly taken cared of, turn into something very important to us humans – and that is food.  

Living in three different cities here in the Philippines gave me the opportunity to enjoy tasty, nutritious and less expensive food through visiting weekend food markets. It is an eye opener of  how blessed we Filipinos are for the abundance and variety of food available to us all year round.

Have you visited your local weekend food market yet? What are your favorite products to buy?