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Many Westerners arriving in Hong Kong are fearful about buying their food at the wet markets and I was told that I should do everything from washing my vegetables in Conde's crystals to sterilising them in a solution of Milton's (a sterilising solution for baby bottles). I did none of these things.

We bought and ate local for seven years and suffered no ill effects. My rationale was that the restaurants that I was going to were certainly not buying their produce at the most expensive supermarkets in Hong Kong and I doubted that the supermarkets were doing more than repackaging market produce anyway.

We bought vegetables, fruit and fish at the wet markets. We also bought our tofu there and the fresh tofu is delicious. It is one of the things that we miss sorely from our time there. Learn to cultivate a taste as it is cheap, good for you and an incredibly versatile product - it can be steamed, boiled, fried, scrambled or roasted depending on whether you purchase firm or soft tofu.

We experimented with meat at the markets and when goat was available I would buy it as our houseboy made excellent goat curries. I didn't buy any of the Chinese dried sausages or dried fish but we always bought the small local quail eggs and salted eggs.