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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for all of Europe, but here in Amsterdam most people have a decent supermarket within walking (<15min) or cycling (<5min) distance, with plenty of unprocessed / raw ingredients (so not mini-markets that mostly sell sandwiches and microwave meals). So we tend to buy groceries often (daily or every other day) and in small portions, or even on a whim. We also don't own a car (yes we do have a child, and we know plenty of multi-child families without cars).

AFAICT, that's a lifestyle that's not available to most Americans. The flipside is of course that our houses are tiny by American standards.

In the few Asian cities I visited, there were also plenty of small cheap eateries in walking distance.

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>I can't speak for all of Europe, but here in Amsterdam most people have a decent supermarket within walking (<15min) or cycling (<5min) distance

I lived in downtown Boston (USA) for a number of years in 4 different apartments. In each, the kitchen and fridge were fairly small, but I had a neighborhood market no further than a 2-3 minute walk away. A larger market was only 10-15 minutes away. As a result, I tended to eat far more fresh produce since I went to the market almost every day and had little space for storage.

Now that I'm in the suburbs, I have to drive to the store, but I generally don't more than one to two paper bags' worth of goods at a time. I still don't shop for a whole week, even though I have the space.

Where I lived in Florida bodegas were common. It's definitely possible but high real estate prices don't help things. There is new retail space being built in the neighborhood where I live now and unfortunately it most certainly will not have cheap, whole foods available.

This is how I live in Australia. Got a supermarket on the same street so I’ll think about what I want from lunch, and go buy as close to the exact quantities of what I need to make it.

As a result I have close to no food wasted.

You may not waste food but you probably produce a lot of packaging waste. At least that’s what I saw in UK and France.

The UK especially produces an astonishing amount of grocery packaging trash compared to the US. I probably produce more food waste in US but I compost so don’t feel too bad about it.

Life is full of trade offs.

Not a whole lot I don’t think. I take a bag with me and grab unwrapped fresh foods. The only packaging is meats which seems fairly unavoidable. Single use bags have been banned here for about 10 years now.

I always wonder why literally everything is wrapped in plastic here

In the US, a single grocery trip can result in 10-20 plastic bags. Not sure about the UK, but in most European countries people bring their own tote bags.

Doing everything right!

Not actually relevant.

Household size in the US has been trending down. We have more 1-3 person households and fewer large families.

When I got divorced and my family size shrank from 4 people to 3, we had to start putting extra stuff in the fridge so the milk wouldn't spoil.

Of course it's relevant. Household sizes have also been trending down in Europe and Asia. But even for small households, if you need to drive >20min to buy milk, bread, eggs and unprocessed veggies, you only do that once per week or two weeks and need a bigger fridge. OTOH if you you have a big supermarket in the same building or block, you barely need any fridge at all.

To be clear, I would like to see more mixed use, walkable neighborhoods in the US. I have lived without a car for more than a decade in the US. I've been extremely poor and living in small spaces and spent some years homeless.

You're theorizing. I'm speaking from firsthand experience (plus substantial research).

I'm not theorizing, I'm relaying experience from visiting relatives in San Francisco and NJ, and from staying with friends or for work in DC, Chicago, and Austin at various points. There is of course variety in all those places, but grocery shopping was always a lot less frequent and longer distance that what I was used to (with the exception of a friend who lived alone in DC about 10min walking from a Target).

If you have relatives living in housing in San Francisco etc, those are probably not the kind of housing or demographic or lifestyle I'm trying to talk about here. And if your well heeled relatives can shop infrequently and fill a big fridge and it's an asset to them to have that big fridge, they aren't the demographic I'm talking about.

Please do not tell me what solutions I'm allowed to desire for my country. I don't tell you how you should run things in the Netherlands.

What was actually "told to you"?

Where in Chicago because I've got like 7 grocery stores within a 20 minute walk + 3 targets and a Walmart I can also get groceries at.

> OTOH if you you have a big supermarket in the same building or block, you barely need any fridge at all.

I don't agree. Case in point: a friend of mine grew up without a fridge in her household and it's a massive pain, because now you have to shop daily and frozen goods are of course out of the picture entirely.

All that additional time spent going back and forth and standing in line adds up.

My personal experience is that replacing the fridge from one that keeps four days worth of groceries to one that can hold a week's was a massive improvement in quality of life.

For one it gives you a buffer should the shops be closed or out of the goods you currently require.

And, mind you, I've always lived less than 600m from a supermarket with fresh produce etc.

We shop daily for a family of three. I’ve never had to stand in line either. I walk in, grab what I need, scanning as I go on my phone, then walk out. It’s that easy. Sure, occasionally they want to check my backpack to see if I missed scanning some items, but that’s only once every few weeks.

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