Or Tor Kor Market

This guide to Or Tor Kor Market in Bangkok traces its start in 1974 as a government project of Thailand's Marketing Organization for Farmers, built to cut out middlemen and enforce strict quality rules on what farmers could sell. It follows how chefs and food obsessives began treating it as their first stop, pushing stallholders to compete on quality rather than price, from pyramids of premium durian to a hundred kinds of prepared Thai food. Listen for how a market designed by bureaucrats became a magnet for the city's most particular cooks.