Living in the Bay Area makes foodies out of people ;) Don't get me started on my sustainable seafood, alt-milk or simulated meat preferences.
> Question - could your parents have afforded real cheese and not the plastic processed stuff?
Absolutely. They were solidly upper middle class. But they were also immigrants from India, a society that doesn't eat as much cheese beyond paneer (though a lot of dairy in other forms) so their first exposure to western style cheese was the dominant American cheese culture of the time, which was Kraft-style slices and powdered Parmesan in a can. They were also super-frugal, so perhaps there is some truth to what you are saying, but really, to this day, they have a very simple mental model of cheese, so they don't know (or care to know) what they are missing.
Admittedly, cheese also formed a smaller portion of our diet - mostly on sandwiches.
Not trying to antagonize here, but mainly wondering if you have a nuanced reason? The consensus is generally that the Bay Area doesn't have very good food, without even adjusting for the cost of living.
What?
Exhibit A: http://www.berkeleybowl.com/ Exhibit B: http://cheeseboardcollective.coop/ [exhibits C through Z on demand]
I haven't seen better grocery or cheese stores anywhere else in the US, or in Switzerland (there's stores with some better cheeses, but nothing with the range and variety).
You, clearly haven't been to those places I listed or you wouldn't have made that statement (and yes, Berkeley is atypical for the US).
Maybe second to New York for restaurants, but per capita pretty much on top. California is the best produce region of the country, so there are better ingredients within 4 hours of SF than within 4h of NYC. NYC might win for European haute cuisine and for long-established restaurants.
https://sf.eater.com/maps/san-francisco-bay-area-michelin-re...
(More 3-starred restaurants than NYC)
Portland is great, too, for similar reasons.
All of them (and probably >10 more cities in the US) have world-class food across multiple cuisines.
More importantly, and again talking stereotypes in the spirit of original post, the image of a young, hip silicon valley operative certainly includes the aura of foodiness
Overall, I'm very happy with the food options in the Bay Area, though.
Not saying it's the best; I would certainly rate NYC higher (and with more of long tail cuisine-wise), and would give some other cities a leg up for narrower categories (e.g. LA's Korean food destroys SF easily).
But... "the Bay Area doesn't have very good food"... I'm entirely baffled by that statement.
Many of the classic Bay Area foodie places were also super overrated; I always thought Chez Panisse was mediocre, and relatively unknown places nearby (La Limes) were actually better. There were a few real treasures though: I'll miss Aki-san at Sushi Sho.
For any average non-foodie person such as myself, the selection of any major metropolitan city (quality, variety, diversity of ethnic origin) is far more than sufficient.
If you're trying to make some obscure, excessively-specific, metric-based argument based on number of stars and specific obscure cuisines that are missing to satisfy the extreme foodie, that's also trying to be antagonistic, because it's aimed at an exceedingly narrow audience.
The latter approach creates more of a critical mass for competitive restaurants. In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of decent little downtown areas that are walkable, and have higher end food, but they’re tiny compared to Berkeley’s gourmet ghetto / downtown, or Downtown Oakland’s Lake Merrit area (and SF blows all that out of the water).
Downtown San Jose may end up eventually being competitive with the rest of the region, but it was a ghost town at night 10 years ago, so it’s still getting bootstrapped.
All of the examples cited in the other responses are decades-old establishments.
Anyway, Silicon Valley has a reputation for expensive, mediocre food, but that’s comparing to SF and East Bay which are both quite good.
I immigrated from India to North America very young (in elementary school), but this was true for me as well, and it took a long time for me to _understand_ cheese and its varieties. I'd expand on that and say that the same held true for bread, jams and jellies, and cured meats as well.
My mental model of cheese was "gummy plastic Kraft slices", and I didn't eat much of those because they didn't provide much in the way of taste. My mental model of bread was "gummy white wonder-bread". My mental model of jams and jellies was some generic bottle of smuckers strawberry. My mental model of cured meats was some oversalted hunk of ham. Mental model of syrup was a bottle of Aunt Jemimah's.
It was a full 15 years of living here before it dawned on me the rich variety of tastes and textures that comprised these foods, and how they could be combined and incorporated into meals. Most of that I owe to eating (out of a sense of obligation) home-made high-quality food prepared by people who had invited me to their homes. Even then, it took a few years until I put two and two together and made the connection that somehow _these people_ were making delicious things out of these foods, and I was somehow not encountering them myself in my own choices.
When I finally burst through to the other side of that, it was a revelation. Cheese was cheddar and jack and gouda and brie and oka and all sorts of other wonderful tastes and textures. Bread was rye and sourdough and pumpernickel and calabrese. Jams were rhubarb and black currant and ginger and marmalade. Cured meats were kolbasa and proscuitto and genoa and soprasatta. Syrups were maple and molasses.
In my childhood days in India, we would sometimes go out and buy exotic "western" food from the store - and this was before India's markets had opened up - so what you were able to obtain were all these singular examples - Wonderbread white, some generic paste of a jam, some processed cheese.
We would eat these and the novelty would hold my interest, but at the back of my mind I felt a bit sorry for those westerners. "This is all they subsist on?" I would wonder.. "how sad".
That implicit bias stayed with me as a child, even after I came over, and influenced my choices in food. Even with all the opportunity to sample a broader range of examples, one must _motivate_ oneself to do so. You have to go out of your way to go to a cheese shop, and try a few, and experiment with them. Why do that when you have already made up your mind that there is nothing more there than what you have already seen?
It was a revelatory event when I finally understood what I was missing, and how I had ended up in that circumstance, and how my biases had guided me into a constrained existence where I had denied myself exposure to these wonderful things.
I take it as a lesson learned, more generally, about prior biases and how they can influence my choices so that I mold my own environment to be blind to things I could otherwise have experienced.
I wonder if someone will ever come up with simulated carbs, without using artificial sweeteners, made from meat & fat. Imagine simulated bread made from 100% chicken.
I assumed that the crust would be more bread-like, but somehow made with some chicken meat. It was more like a flavorless thick circular slice of chicken breast with pizza toppings.
There is also a retail-available cauliflower frozen pizza brand at Sprouts -- both pizzas and crusts-only for homemade pizzas.
Not the person you asked but I'm nearly 34 and 'real cheese' wasn't really a thing when I was growing up. You had shredded cheeses, Kraft, Velveeta and maybe up to 4 cheese rolls in the deli counter at the grocery that could be sliced.
Now the non Whole Foods/Trader Joe's grocers are exactly the same with the exception of having small refrigerated sections, away from all the other cheese, with more 'fancy' cheeses at considerably higher costs for relatively small amounts. With several of those 'fancy' cheeses costing 10-20% of my weekly groceries I just don't see myself trying them anytime soon.
I've never seen any of my friends or co-workers eating, or even discussing, 'fancy' cheeses either but I bet you can go to 90% of their houses and find Kraft-style individually wrapped slices and/or a block of Velveeta.
I also wouldn't classify Kraft slices or Velveeta as cheese, and the FDA doesn't either.
Can't say I've ever even heard of/seen this brand although their product locator shows them at the grocery I shop at, looks like the only thing sold in my state is their shredded cheddar.
>or Cabot are fancy,
Again I've never seen this but my grocery also allegedly has 3 of their products, all 2lb bricks of cheddar. Looks like a store about 20 minutes away has 20 of their products, all cheddar but weird ones like horseradish, hot habanero, port whine spreadable.
Most of the stores seem to have 0-3 of either brand's products.
You'll see a lot of Sargento's 'snack bites' and packs of 11 slices of a few varieties though but every one I've ever tried was not worth the price and was often extremely dry/waxy.
Other than that, and the fancy case, it's some store brand bricks of a few cheddars, store and kraft brand shredded cheeses, Kraft slices and Velveeta.
To this day, things that I buy or bring and leave on the shelf will still be there the next time I visit. It's probably a matter of different palates reinforced as culture.