Readers on food inequality in eastern Europe
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Wanting a quieter working environment, I recently moved from a big city to a village. The biggest shock for me is how bad the food that is sold here is. Village shops typically buy all their products from a wholesale store like Macro, sometimes the inferior versions of Western European brands, or often the generic brand. The tomato sauce is mostly sugar and food colouring, the chocolate has no actual chocolate in it, and these products are sold at the same prices as the high-quality food in the cities, so it is not a simple matter of rural people not being able to afford better. The people just accept what they get, and none of my new neighbours understands why I would complain.
So, while it may seem unfair to blame the bad food on the people who are the victims of it, if there were more concern from the rural/small-town Romanian public about their food, there might be room for competition and distributors would change to serve them.
Here in the US, this county of ~30,000 has 3 large supermarkets and many smaller grocers. The 10-15 miles distance to the supermarket means that the smaller places can't get away with selling total crap (it's rather rural, so people mostly have cars). The supermarkets all have store brands with decent quality and several national brands for most items.
Having been to the US and spent time in some rural areas (I did work-and-travel in Alabama years ago), I would not be so quick to claim that your supermarkets have "decent quality". Most supermarket food in the US is much closer to the bad stuff I find in my village shop than the higher quality food you would find in Western Europe or the largest Romanian cities. But perhaps that is a topic for another thread.
A bunch of candy products have switched to being "chocolate flavored candy". Most candy in the US is total crap, because they've cut out all the parts that make it good to save money.
That's almost entirely a myth. Along with the myth that most of the cheese sold in the US is "American Cheese" or "cheese product." These are fantasy lines of attack on the US for people looking for an excuse to bash.
Here are two more of those myths: the US only sells mediocre, watered down beer (that one has long since been destroyed, it rarely gets used now); and the US doesn't make any good domestic wine that is competitive with eg French wine.
The average Walmart (a mid to lower tier grocery) has a large, normal selection for real chocolate of all varieties (including European). Typically they will have a large half aisle filled with real chocolate candy products to choose from.
The US is the world's largest market for real chocolate.
I think that one isn't used so much because people hear that many American regions now have interesting microbrewery scenes. However, the major national brands are mediocre and watered down compared to many national German or Czech brands (that is the whole reason American regional microbreweries have been able to compete).
> a large, normal selection for real chocolate of all varieties (including European)
That European chocolate in American supermarkets is quite often the lowest-quality stuff from here. For example, Milka. My friends and I spent a lot of time laughing at what American supermarkets think is worth importing. You also see the same thing in India: the worst of European chocolate sold as some exotic, special product, but I would never touch that stuff at home.
I guess this is somewhat universal: the only Brazilian cachaças available here in Germany are the worst ones in Brazil, but they have insane prices (e.g. 12€ for one that isn't worth the 2€ it costs in Brazil).
Which makes sense when you think who is prepared to export levels of product sufficient to supply a nation, but it's amusing that all we really see is the mediocre versions of other nations imported.
You go to a more populated area in the US (basically any major metro), you can get the good stuff fairly easily.
We also have 'food deserts' in poorer urban centers (certain cities in Alabama could qualify). I don't have an explanation for those, I think it has to do with poverty.
It's a bad situation for people that don't have cars, but for people with cars, 2 or 3 miles to a grocer is irrelevant.
In Detroit, roughly 90% of households have at least 1 vehicle:
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/detroit-mi/#category_transpor...
Yet strangely, before mass-market supermarkets existed, people in rural areas ate fresh produce directly from farmers without having such 'economy of scale'.. and the people in the city had trouble accessing them..
when the 'economy of scale' is devoured by the middlemen creating it, it is neither economical nor scalable..
Before mass-market supermarkets existed, rural people ate fresh produce often only because they grew it themselves, not because they were able to buy it direct from a farmer. To buy from a farmer, you need cash, and a lot of rural families were cash-poor. Instead, people in the countryside maintained their own gardens and they made a lot of pickled foods for the winter. However, that is all a lot of work, and in fact historically a lot of rural families had poor nutrition in terms of fresh vegetables in spite of living in the regions that these vegetables came from.
My municipality (in Belgium) is not considered small in any aspect, and yet it actually consists of three historical villages.
My grandparents have a house in the southern of France, and that village/municipality has ~320 residents.
If you haven't noticed that, it is possible you just haven't travelled enough. I've lived for years in both Western and Eastern Europe, so I can tell you -- the differences are very stark and, IMHO, should be illegal.
Are you talking about USA?
However, high quality food is available, but it requires time (to go where it is, since it isn't always distributed like the plastic-wrapped sugar stuff) and money, though not always more than the stores charge for mass-produced things.
It depends where you shop. A Profi will sell low-quality products regardless of whether it is in a big city or a small town. On the other hand, only in the big city can you shop at Mega Image, which sells a lot of products identical to their Western European versions. Its distribution network is much better than any of the competition. Carrefour and Auchan's more expensive generic brands are identical to that sold in the West (their cheaper generic brands, however, are such crap I don’t even know who would buy it). Meat, I don’t know because I don’t eat it.
It does not.
You're not getting my point. You go to a Profi or Mega Image and you buy a Milka chocolate, it is the same Milka chocolate because there is only 1 distributor and this is the version of Milka chocolate that gets manufactured for Romania, Bulgaria, etc. And it's shit - it has less cocoa, it is 90g instead of 100g, it is filled with sugar substitutes.
You go to Germany, to an EDEKA or a REWE, and you buy the same Milk chocolate - it has higher % cocoa, it is 100g, it contains milk, cocoa and sugar, no chemical substitutes.
I can make the exact same point for soft drinks and pretty much all packaged goods. Hell, even things like laundry detergents are diluted compared to their western counterparts.
Similarly, at a Carrefour or Auchan you could buy the generic-label chocolate, which is just the French version with a Romanian ingredients sticker pasted on it, for the same price as a Milka.
People in big cities have access to plenty of high-quality products if they just take advantage of that opportunity and ignore stuff like your Milka example. It is people in small towns and villages who are forced to buy shit food.
On the other hand, in Germany, you can buy a Milka pretty much anywhere and it is a good chocolate.
Also, this is not really about Milka, it is about thousands of products across dozens of categories, so we can't just ignore this as an isolated, one-off issue. That is why people are pissed.
any examples?
> Non-local brands, on the other hand, sometimes substitute their products with lower quality crap
change 'sometimes' to 'very frequently' and that would be correct
Don't take that for granted. Some of the Italian pasta sold in Romania would not be eaten in Italy: http://stirileprotv.ro/standard-pentru-est/marea-diferenta-d...
In Italy, pasta is made from durum wheat, water and - for some northern pasta types - eggs. Nothing else. Not cheaper common wheat like in Romania, not extra vitamins, minerals or even precooking like in US.
> It’s scary when even the fruit available is obviously full of hormones. We had a grapefruit for a while and it became an experiment to see if it would ever go bad. After four months we gave up and threw it away – but it still looked fresh.
"Full of hormones" is scary language. Plant hormones exist, but they are very different from animal hormones (which is what prefixless hormones normally refer to). They are indeed used in commercial farming to e.g. help cuttings grow new roots faster, or accelerate fruit ripening (e.g. ethylene is commonly used to ripen bananas). Ripeners are almost the opposite of preservatives, and plant hormones certainly don't explain a 4 month old fresh-looking grapefruit. Neither translates to "fruit full of hormones" in any meaningful sense and it certainly doesn't translate to anything negative. Animals are full of hormones all of the time: if you don't have hormones you die in pretty short order. Plants sans hormones doesn't fare much better.
I'm sorry that their agriculture products suck, but perhaps one can say that without making vague scientific-sounding scaremongering statements.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=chinese+garlic
Personally, I avoid it.
What, exactly, was promised to population when Romania (for example) switched to capitalism and opened its borders?
Don't have actual insight here, but 'progressive' to a soviet bloc communist would likely mean 'ultra communist' e.g. hard line stalinist..
Their economy has increased in size by roughly five fold since they switched to Capitalism, with zero population growth. They've gone from a GDP per capita of sub $2,000 to nearly $10,000 in that time. And it appears likely set to continue growing nicely in the coming decade. I'd be willing to bet that in another ~15 years they'll get to near $20,000 per capita, generally something closer to where Slovenia, Slovakia and Czech are today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_austerity_policy_in_Roma...
I think no-one disputes that the food is lower quality. The question is how much of a discount this gets, and why stores haven't created more expensive better quality options.
I recall an item on Dutch news that seemed to state that Romanians wanted the same products as Austria at a lower price. This is unlikely to be accurate reporting, because that stance is obviously unreasonable. That is presuming the desired price differential isn't just reflective of the cost savings by potentially having lower payed employees.
I can't imagine any executive saying that. That makes no sense. Why would they?
My best guess is that either people are unwilling (or unable) to pay the same price as their Austrian / Belgian / French counterparts for the same product, or the cost of selling the same product and doing business in EE is somehow higher (e.g. due to required kickbacks and high level political corruption) meaning these companies end up with less profits operating in these countries and end up taking a shortcut to maintain their profit margins.
Or they actually make more from operating in EE, ending up with higher margins just because they can. That's also a possibility.
What I usually see in Vienna is Milka at 0.99Eur price for 100g package. Slovak price tend to be bit higher at around 1.19Eur for 100g, with 0.99Eur used as promo price. I never actually bothered to compare ingredients.
Please consider that selling to end customers is selling to certains price points, regardless the costs to a large degree. Milka is sold as premium chocolate bar with given price point. There’s plenty of competition both cheaper and more expensive. This is all about marketing and until recently, people were not really sensitive to ingredients, so they went with whatever is cheapest to produce within some margins of customer satisfaction.
So, I think your last statement is what is considered around here to be true.
But as it happens, I know quite a wealthy family who got scammed for millions (through a corrupt notary) on a property deal in an EE country. It wasn't even a business dispute, just a scam.
When they took the matter to court, which should have been a clear "win" case, the judge(s) (even on appeal) ruled against them, so they had no way to recover their money. From that point of view, it is not unreasonable for me to assume corruption can (potentially) play a part of it. :)
Personal anecdote - I visit Austria almost weekly due to business matters and never bothered to buy anything there just because I would consider it of better quality. I always assigned any perceived differences to placebo. I argued that detergent itself, once found and tested, is cheap enough to produce and most of the cost is marketing, packaging, shipping and profit. So why on earth would anyone cheat on detergent content. At most, maybe parfumes would be different due to local preferences etc. But few weeks ago, producers of laundry detergents reacted to public outcry due to these differences with answer that in western europe, people tend to wash clothes on 30C, so they put there much more enzymes (or what) than in EE, where people tend to wash on 40C. Sure they do, when you need to add much more detergent to clean anything on 30C... So go, figure.
The article states that at least in some cases the inferior food is _more expensive_.
From the article: Nobody has an appetite for inferior food – and the solution is, most of the time, “add more sugar”. If you add to this the fact that food is generally more expensive in Romania [...]
Most local raw produce is better. The packaged stuff is worse.
That's the kicker -- it isn't. Some stuff is more expensive.
E.g., Milka chocolate - 1 EUR in Germany is also 1 EUR in Bulgaria. But in Germany it's good and in Bulgaria, it's shit.
So, the question should be: How much higher are the profit margins in Eastern Europe?
This is article in Czech - https://www.dtest.cz/clanek-5156/rozdilna-kvalita-potravin-v... - but if you scroll down there is table showing products and you can see that the worst quality products are sometimes more expensive.
Try to buy 10 different yogurts (from a variety of supermarkets and specialty shops) and do a comparison on taste, texture, propensity to de-emulsify, etc. You'll find that there is a very wide range.
And try to reproduce that one great yogurt you had somewhere at home. I mean, I've done the whole comparison above (and many more than 10) in a quest to replicate the yogurt from The Yogurt Shop in Adelaide's (AU) Central Market (which, from what I've been able to find, is the way it is because of a combination of two different yeast strands as well as a specific straining method they use), and I've tried many, many different ways of making yogurt - and still fail to make something like it. I mean, I won't call myself an expert because I don't even have a degree in anything biology or food production related, but I do have enough experience to say that making (good) yogurt is not 'easy' - at least not in the way that it would make sense for people to do it themselves as anything else than a novelty.
Here in Canada:
Carrots can have added orange paint, legally disclosed on the packaging.
Yogurt can be from other stuff that milk.
Bread has to be labeled as 'whole granins' if entirely from grains, otherwise it's still sold as bread.
McDonald's fishburger, isn't made from what is technically a fish.
Bacon bits can be from other things than pork.
Coffee, doesn't have to be from coffee beans.
Things can have taste enhancers, color enhancers, odor enhancers.
They can be sold unripened as ripe.
Etc etc. I can count all day.
When you compare food between continents, you can't ignore the above.
The almighty quest for profit will cost you health.
> One of the biggest culprits is fish - salmon is a disgrace in the Czech Republic. It is usually cooled to a point before it freezes, then thawed before being passed off as fresh salmon. The cooling data and thawing is written on the side of boxes – but the retailers take advantage of the fact consumers cannot generally read English-language storage instructions. Savvy buyers know to buy goods where labels on products have Czech language labels stuck over the original text. This means the product that is sold in western markets is identical to the Czech market product.
A lot of the salmon industry is dealing with frozen fish. Some may even argue frozen fish is safer.
Salmon at the moment has a pest problem so prices go up and customers in general are feeling they are getting a bad deal.
And then there is the well known fraud passing one fish of as another. This business is fishy, pun intended and that has nothing to do with being in Czech when shopping.
Having people who can be quoted with their opinions does not absolve journalists from providing some perspective. The Guardian should know better.
Not asking rhetorically. What exactly is it you’re suggesting these “quality conscious” consumers do?
Markets and naked capitalism as solutions go these issues have proven ineffective. This article is evidence of it. And all you suggest is some naive, Econ 101 platitudes.
On the contrary. You're mostly making up that there actually is a huge demand for higher priced, higher quality products there, while the fact that no one has gone for that supposed huge and very available market speaks against that being true. That wishes of a small minority are not being catered for doesn't prove anything.
The reality is much more nuanced than what you're suggesting. The reality is that people don't care as much, and that producers aren't as stupid/greedy as you make them out to be. Their buying patterns are what economists call a revealed preference. Sure, if you ask them, people will all say that they want the best-quality products. Turns out though (and not just there, but everywhere) that in reality people want a mix between quality, affordability, perception, and other things.
(oh, and suggesting that an article in the Guardian of all places is "evidence" of anything is laughable)
Because that's illegal?
there are shops in my city that do exactly that, but the markup is more like 105%.
Articles that don’t cite statistical data but rather anecdotes aren’t “evidence” of anything. That’s not what evidence is. What they really reflect is minorities projecting their views onto the majority. For example, I personally find web business models perplexing. Why would you want to watch advertising and data mining when you could just pay $50 a month or whatever for content? But I resign myself to the fact that I’m a minority and people really do prefer that insanity to honest monetary transactions.
Here, the food quality is awesome.
Imported stuff is the same as in Western Europe. Because local market’s small, manufacturers don’t bother localizing properly, i.e. you remove a Montenegrin-language sticker required by law, you’ll likely find “Hergestellt in Deutschland” underneath.
The large part of groceries are local. Some of them are from Montenegro: fish (except salmon and a couple other spices not found in Adriatic & not farmed locally; but freshly caught tuna is IMO better than frozen Norwegian salmon), wine, seasonal fruits & vegetables. Some is imported from neighbor countries, of that most is from Serbia (majority of meat and dairy products), some from Croatia, Macedonia, Italy, Greece or Spain.
The sad truth is when you are the poor fellow and had given up sovereignty over the many of the economic tools available to sovereign nation states you'll get shafted no matter what.
Denmark imports tomatoes from Italy at the same duty rates as Bulgaria which are zero. Denmark has more money, normally countries would enforce both import and export duties since there are no duties effectively Bulgaria and Denmark and Bulgaria can only compete on price per unit and neither country can use any other tool to control the price.
If Bulgaria wants to import Tomatoes from say Turkey or Israel they also have to go through the EU red tape and effectively pay a "fixed" price which is more or less set to protect EU tomatoes growers.
Bulgria also cannot subsidize Tomatoes for the most part without violating EU regulations.
Now Bulgria gains a lot form being an EU nation, having lesser tomatoes is the price they pay.
I remember this happening regularly in the 1990s when people from ex-Yugoslavia drove over to Italy/Austria to shop for better quality (although more expensive) products.
This isn't an argument against the EU, it's the reality of a highly regulatory market with a plethora of constraints but with the general premise of a free market economy in which the highest bidder wins.
Not saying EU is perfect, just the net effect of EU is progress.
This isn't an argument against the EU as a whole it's the reality of the circumstances.
When both rich and poor countries are forced to import from the same sources at the same rates which are designed to protect the producers rather then the consumers the prices rise and they are forced to compete at the price per unit which also directly translates to the final consumer price.
Bulgaria, Romania or Denmark can't reduce their import tarrifs on tomatoes from a specific EU country, they can't even control the import tariffs from non EU countries.
You assume that Denmark would enforce the same or lower tarrifs than a poorer nation on some basic goods.
Smaller nations also can have negative import tarrifs on some goods in order to allow thier importers to compete with bigger consumers. Which you cannot do in the EU.
The EU as a whole also has trade agreements with many of the regional non EU members.
These argeemnts also enforce protective tariffs to reduce the competitiveness of non EU imports. The EU also requires its trade partners to meet EU regulations which increase the prices of exports to begin with.
The whole point of the EEC then EU is no tariffs inter nation.
You are criticizing something you have either invented or severely misunderstood.
Or it’s just copy paste talking point.
Maybe poorer people can’t afford the same levels of food quality as richer peoples, and the only solution is to grow your GDP faster, which membership in EU seems to enable.
Changes in that information system now manifests in surprise over information that, previously thought identical products, are not identical by region.
They even put it into the slogan: "Milka Alpenmilch. Für Mich – Für Dich 80g"
This whole thing to me sounds like the "chemtrail" conspiracy.
http://www.wz.de/home/wirtschaft/schokolade-100-gramm-tafel-... https://www.milka.de//Produkte/milka-tafeln-100g?categoryId=...
Toilet paper is used in a location where I do NOT want to have a paper cut!
Any evidence?
There just isn't the same base profit to make there compared to, say France.
And I hate to say it, but it's perhaps it's safe to assume, that the French have a higher culinary tradition then any of the ex Soviet countries, where people's cuisine was very rudimentary.
Sure there are people shopping abroad, but it's a minority.
The average income in Romania is <$500 (1), so if you want to cater to people that have little money who want to buy branded products, something's gotta give.
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1- https://www.romaniaexperience.com/what-is-the-minimum-and-av...
None of the Eastern European countries now in the EU were ever "Soviet", with the exception of the Baltic countries that were occupied by USSR.
The statement still presumes that culinary culture essentially didn't exist before communist times..
I would wager that pre-wwII food quality in France vs Romania was probably fairly similar..