Puno is a small city of about 150k residents at the Southern part of Peru on the shore of Lake Titicaca.  While it is the capital city of the region, the area for MILES around Puno is pretty desolate and unpopulated.  We only stayed in Puno for one night before our venture out on Lake Titicaca but we were there long enough to walk around the city a bit.  Just a few blocks from our hostal, we came upon one of the largest street markets we’ve ever seen.  While we’ve certainly seen large outdoor markets in other cities around the world, most of the cities have had populations of 1/2 million people or more but Puno was small and we strolled through at least 1-1/2 miles of continuous “jam-packed” vendors selling produce, fish,meats, flowers, and a few sundries.  This was an “EVERYDAY” thing and was in addition to the central mercado, one indoor supermarket, and hundreds of tienda’s.

As we were strolling through the market, we couldn’t help but ask ourselves, “how can only 150k people POSSIBLY consume this much food in any given day and what happens to the TONS of remaining food at the end of each day that has been exposed to thousands of people, insects, dogs, and the SUN?