Author: Charles Dittmeier

When I was a kid, the Tastee Bread company trucks—emblazoned with the slogan “Baked while you sleep”—rumbled around early-morning Louisville delivering bread to the grocery stores.   This woman’s bread is also probably baked while everyone is sleeping, but she doesn’t have any truck with a logo and has to be content with singing out “Num bung,” the Khmer word for bread, to alert her customers.

Different fruits can mark the change of seasons in Cambodia but not coconuts.  They’re available all year round and just about everywhere.  There are cheap, nutritious, and delicious so they are a favorite with much of the population.  Here are three coconut vendors along Street 63 in Phnom Penh.

From the vendors’ point of view, the downside of coconuts is that they are big, heavy, and bulky and you can’t stack them like you can cases of beer.  The white coconuts have had the green outer hull cut off, mainly for a better-looking product although cutting off the hull also helps the coconuts to chill faster when you throw them into the ubiquitous orange coolers.

Quite a few fruits are in season now.  Today I saw pineapples being sold on the streets.  Vendors like these tend to stay on the outskirts of the city, probably because it’s closer to home in the rural areas and probably because the police hassle them less there for bribes.