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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Switzerland has had the exact same problem due to heavy dairy subsidies. Besides scaling back on subsidies, Fondue and Raclette was pushed heavily in marketing, which is probably why these are staples of Swiss food nowadays. I'm sometimes asking myself whether tabletop style Raclette couldn't be popular in the US. How strong is America's distaste for cooking food at the table (I'm just going by Lost in Translation here)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raclette

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Same thing in Austria, at least until a few years ago.

Farmers still complain over falling milk prices, and that they cannot survive. Yet the market is still saturated, milk was literally drained down the gutter regularly, every milk product is incredibly cheap IMO, considering how it is produced (although there was a butter shortage and a price "spike" last year).

Subsidies (and even worse EU wide subsidies) seem to do more damage than good in the long run.

> Subsidies (and even worse EU wide subsidies) seem to do more damage than good in the long run.

It’s important to understand why they are there. There are not there because states are scared of food instability. Austria for instance tracks how much of the daily food intake it can produce locally and there are yearly goals to make it 100% self sustainable.

If that goal is still important as EU member I can’t answer but it’s still a goal.

Not entirely true in my experience. This would be particularly national interests and don't explain EU subsidies.

When staying particularly in Austria, the subsidies are there because national politicians and EU politicians from Austria want some part of the EU subsidies pot for their farmers, contributing to the general constant rope-pulling and trading "a piece of the cake" (i.e. EU budgets) - usually in the form of: "You get subsidies for x, we then get support for our poor farmers in poorer regions, since they are starving".

Generally the EU subsidies for agriculture are misguided and just money down the drain. Until they begin to dry up causing uproar and "EU took our money!"-complaints.

I think there might be some retroactive argumentation going on about why they exist which does not go back to the roots of it, but if you look at why and how the CAP was made and how subsidies and price fixing within the countries works, you can still see where it came from.

Not at all. We consider it something of a luxury, in fact. (Cooking food at the table)

So much this. The average Swiss person eats Fondue 1x per year, similarly Raclette.

I doubt your numbers. According to [1], average per capita consumption of Raclette was 1.35kg per year in 2006, and that includes infants. Gruyere was even >1.7kg per year, and I'm sure a lot of that goes into Fondues. I don't know about you, but I can't down 1.35kg of Raclette in one sitting, and I don't think Swiss have changed that much since 2006 ;).

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/record-growth-in-swiss-cheese-c...

Like all things involving subsidies and the economy, there is an amazing Planet Money episode on this.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/02/607787950/epis...

Yep, I also kept thinking about that episode.

Is this why Costco stores have so much cheap Jarlsberg Swiss?

Jarlsberg Swiss

??? Jarlsberg is a region in Norway not Switzerland?

That might actually be made in Ohio.

It was big in the 70s. I enjoy cheese fondue and raclette.

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