Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores | Hacker News Reader

Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

economist.com

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i've been reading HN for the last 4 years or so. over that time ive slowly gotten rid of social media; first by uninstalling apps, then by deleting accounts. Lately I decided to get rid of reddit, which had had a huge impact on my media consumption. I've found myself taking the time to read articles posted on here, and as such Ive found a few sites that I favor for content.

Early on I simply read comments if a site was blocked, then went to archives, and now i'm finding myself paying for sites I appreciate. I feel like this is an eventual outcome for many, but getting users to consume "long form" media is the trick. If it weren't for these free peaks at the content, I would never have come around to paying for it.

Honestly, with the amount of paywalled sites posted on HN, it's impossible to have a subscription for each one.

You keep using that word, "impossible". I do no think it means what you think it means.

Not impossible; just foolish.

Maybe all these paywalled sites could start a subscription service where you pay one low monthly fee and get access to X sites with it.

Then every publisher that is a member of the subscription service gets an amount of money proportionate to the number of subscribers that read their articles.

Seems so obvious to me but maybe there’s a reason why it wouldn’t (or hasn’t) worked.

I grew up in Montana so I am probably one of the few millennial Americans that probably recalls what life is like before supermarkets. They were just becoming a thing there as I was growing up. (Very, What's Eating Gilbert Grape.)

We had an IGA in the small town I grew up in. The fresh food options there were borderline Soviet. We went to a butcher to get our meat when we didn't have meat from hunting.

We got produce direct from growers, at various markets and from our garden. I would get strawberries once a year when they were plentiful enough to be affordable in a pallete from a local bulk market.

Baked goods were what you got from home, otherwise you could have generic branded spongelike bread loaf.

American supermarkets blow my mind. I can get strawberries, blackberries and blueberries year round. There is a butcher in the store selling fresh high quality meats. There is a bakery producing French roundloaves, donuts and cookies, most produced in the last 24-48 hours.

It's incredible. And yet, when I unload my cart of fresh produce, meats, cheeses and baked goods it doesn't look like the carts around mine. They are full of canned foods, frozen foods, boxed foods, etc. I'm not judging. You can't beat a frozen pizza for satisfaction/effort, especially when you weren't expecting to feed anyone. But I can never get over the variety in my local produce section.

When I see people share "fast" recipes on YouTube they involve jarred sauces, spaghettiOs and raisins. (Fuck raisins.) You can make a great meal fast with few ingredients. If you take the time to have brown sauce or demi glace on hand.

Even with the aid of the supermarket and all it can provide, good food takes time. And that requires sacrifice. One parent has to come home after 8 hours working and cook. The kids can't do extracurriculars every week of the night. If you want to enjoy food culture, both cars have to be in the driveway a couple nights a week. And IMO that's why class and America's work culture have a lot more to do with our poor food culture than our grocery stores.

Why fuck raisins? Earnest question, I always just assumed taking a lot of the moisture out of a grape was bad enough for flavor

Probably sugar

> Why fuck raisins?

They’re garbage grapes. And they often add sugar, directly or indirectly. Dried wine grapes are delicious.

Fool's chocolate.

I will now be aliasing 'raisins' with 'garbage-grapes'

I think people generally dislike them because they're often the odd thing in whatever dish (and because they're easily confused as chocolate chips), due to consistency and density.

If you add raisins to a salad for example they'll just collect at the bottom; Hope you like finishing your salad with a spoonful of dried fruit covered in ranch dressing.

Also, flavor.

There’s apparently a variation of fried rice that uses raisins as an ingredient. It doesn’t really taste like anything else that would normally go in one.

Raisins in a salad with ranch dressing? That sounds bad. I would expect them more with sweet dressing, or maybe something more vinegary.

They're toxic to dogs and cats, to the point where some animals can die from eating just a few of them.

Same with grapes, but from what I understand raisins are worse for a reason that is not currently understood.

I think it's a volume thing. It's the seeds that are toxic to dogs, for the same unit volume yiuncan get more raises and the seeds within in for the same volume of grape.

Hating on raisins seems like a uniquely American tradition to me. They sure are loved in India and the middle east. They are a common ingredient (along with dried plums) in rice dishes for some delicious sweetness. Not to forget, they pair perfectly with cashews and walnuts.

Yes, but the taste of the veggies, fruits, berries and meat is far worse in supermarkets vs buying directly from growers / butchers.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The pork I get front eh supermarket today is better than what we used to get buying half a pig from our local market.

Apples also are better because supermarkets have the ability to harvest from a large geography whereas small markets only provided provincially available varieties like red delicious.

Most metropolitan supermarkets can provide air chilled chicken which has never been frozen.

But in contrast, no steak will surpass what you can get in Montana from a rancher raising grass fed beef.

Disagree here. Seasonal fruit veg and meat is excellent from my local supermarkets.

As someone who has moved around a bit I think it’s very regional. I have had great supermarkets with great produce. CA is pretty easy in this regard. Some states have universally miserable tomatoes and I don’t understand how Trader Joe’s seems to always have the absolute worst peppers. I think it comes down to what will last through hard lines and what grows in the state.

Very well said. It doesn't sound like I grew up as rural as you, but I can remember going to small grocery stores growing up that functioned in the same way you mentioned. People around me often had to travel to different cities to find the food they needed (and it's actually going back in that direction due to poverty). I would not be surprised if a large number of people got a good portion of their food from hunting today.

I live near several supermarkets now and they have literally everything, all the time. But it's like you said, it takes time to cook good food. In addition, when you grow up having so much access to quick meals (including restaurant options), you grow up never learning how to actually cook and I think it takes you a lot longer than it would have otherwise. It seems to me nobody knows how to cook anymore because it's barely necessary.

You say it’s barely necessary, and yet there’s also an obesity crisis. I feel like unless you’re rich enough to be able to afford restaurant food 7 days a week (so not most people), then the quality of food available without cooking means that it is more necessary than people think.

As a child of immigrants (who were farmers/rural prior to coming to America) sit-down dinner with family was tantamount if you were eating at home that day.

I assumed everyone did this, until I found out most of my friends did not eat dinner together with family. My shock at this was immense.

I wonder if Thanksgiving dinners are equally so contentious as they are cherished because of how rare family dinners have become. People aren’t just used to being stuck together with family at home at one table like that anymore.

> I wonder if Thanksgiving dinners are equally so contentious as they are cherished because of how rare family dinners have become. People aren’t just used to being stuck together with family at home at one table like that anymore.

I think it has more to do with extended family whom you don’t ordinarily see; from the stories I’ve heard, there’s usually one obnoxious uncle who picks stupid arguments or someone like that.

My family growing up and my family now; we make it an absolute must to eat every dinner together. We also tend to invite people over.

It’s honestly the most important thing you can do as a parent. Let’s you know about your kids lives, share in the ritual, and generally bond.

Do you, or will you, allow your children to participate in extracurricular activities? Or is eating every dinner together less of an absolute priority as you claim? Your comment makes it sound like you may have some.

I ask because most of the dinners I missed growing up were due to sports.

I had dinner together with my family very, very regularly growing up. I also did a ton of extracurriculars, including sports. I think when I was younger, it was every night as a family. In high school, I’d miss dinner on competition nights or when that particular sport’s practice schedule was incompatible with dinner time for whatever reason.

I plan on having dinner together as many nights as possible when I start a family, but not to the extent of disallowing extracurriculars. But I also think that I would discourage my kids from being so involved elsewhere that we can’t have dinner together as a family a couple times a week.

How late are the extracurricular activities? I'm not American, but at home we would just eat all together after, e.g. around 9 p.m. and if they were later in the evening, we would just eat a bit earlier, like 7.

I think many Americans would look at you like you were nuts if you suggested regularly eating dinner around 9pm. I'd say 5-7pm is the most common here. Often when trips to Europe come up, the discussion is about how you can't get dinner at 5pm because the restaurants aren't open. Although my last few trips to Europe I noticed there are more restaurant choices in touristy areas that open early just to get the American's business. I've also noticed it's better to wait and eat when the locals do. Some of the worst Italian food I've ever had was in Milan at a touristy restaurant, and some of the best was in the same town at a place that a local recommended outside of the tourist areas.

I think you have found the heart of this issue. As a French I wasn’t understanding the points being made about extracurricular activities but here a 7pm dinner is considered early and most people will eat around 8 up to 9. To be fair few people leave work before 6:30pm and being home before 7:30pm would be exceptional.

My beef with US supermarkets the only time I went there is how poor is the quality to price ratio is particularly for vegetables. Generally speaking you could shift every thing one price band compared to France.

My young kids are in bed by 8pm, if we don't eat at 6:30 or earlier they get indigestion from trying to sleep right after eating.

When I was in school, we ate as a family when schedule allowed. For most of primary school, sports were done in time for dinner. Music lessons were usually 1-2/week and often after dinner (instructor had a day job too). In high school, dinners as a while family were less frequent, but whoever was home would eat together. Same for the short time I lived at home after college - dinner was around 6pm and Mom expected me to let her know if I wouldn’t be home (default assumption was I’d eat with Mom & Dad since I was living there).

You figure it out, my siblings and I were always in multiple extracurricular activities. We’d typically eat at like 6-7pm. If something came up we’d move dinner to 5pm or later to 8pm. There’s always someway to make it work. We also tended to have breakfast together so even if we have to miss 1-2 days a week for dinner, we still eat together at least one meal.

In the US extracurricular sports and music tend to be after school 3-7pm range.

American. Everyone I knew had dinners with the whole family most of the time. The Thanksgiving issue is when your bigoted aunt / uncle / cousin / grandparent shows up. Or your dad and uncle fight over something that happened fifty years ago, or your grandma acts like an ass to your lesbian aunt, or something. Just to pick examples from personal experience.

American. 28. Grew up going to an inner city school with a bit of a class divide. Thinking about it now, the upper class families were more likely to eat dinner together; but I knew very many classmates that did not.

American, I have a decade on you. Grew up in the rural south east, 50+ minute school bus ride every day being bussed into the inner city to maintain the 40% white ratio. (Without bussing and zoning, the school would have been more like 5% white, or less.)

Families eating dinner together was the norm, and this was not a rich area.

Today this is probably less the case, the past 25 years have not been kind to the area. Loss of opportunity and rampant meth abuse has caused a lot of issues.

Drug abuse should not be treated as the cause of such a problem in our society.

My point was perhaps too subtle.

I don't view meth as the source, but a symptom of the economic situation(hopelessness), which then causes further socioeconomic decline in the pursuit of more drugs.

Drug addiction, for many, is trying to fill a hole. That hole could be poor choices leading to a bad situation, absent or abusive childhood relationships, a self esteem model that has been largely destroyed by the culture that person lives in, a lack of role models, many things. They can be internal issues that the individual is primarily responsible for, or external issues that are the result of being dealt a bad hand in life. Most likely a mix.

I'm sure supermarkets now are better than what you grew up with in Montana but I have the opposite experience. I'm in SF, we supposedly have good produce, farmer's markets, and big supermarkets with lots of selection. But they pale in comparison to what I'm used to from Japan and France.

The bread here in SF is horrid and that includes that massively over rated Tartine, not to mention how bad the baked products are at most supermarkets. They're shovelware baked goods. The produce selection is 1/3rd what it is in France and much of it is tasteless compared to the good stuff you'd find in Japan or France. There's 1/6th the selection of cheese. !/10th the selection of pâté. But hey, we get fresh tortillas so you win some you lose some. Even the milk here is off. Our beer selection is 1/50th of Belgium and zero of the sweet ones. Our cider selection is 1/5th of the UK's.

It's all relative. If you were at a 1 and entered a 5 then it seems like a huge step up. But if you then experienced a 10, that 5 no longer seems so great.

Me too. I grew up in Colorado and have spent a lot of time shopping at farmers markets in Sacramento before moving to the bay area. The supermarkets here have great variety, but lousy fresh vegetables amd fruits. Real lousy.

Pints of heavy whipping cream, even the fancy organic kind, at my local Whole Foods in Los Angeles don't exceed $6.50, which is already more than I'd like to pay. $15 seems insane. What's the brand?

Have you ever bought groceries anywhere in the US other than SF? I’ve noticed a lot of variation even within the US.

I don't think this generalizes, it really depends on where you live in the US. I work in Europe and know many US expats there, so this is something we talk about.

The consensus has been that the quality and diversity of fresh foods in the US these days is frequently superior in many categories at the median, though notably worse in others. The paucity of good produce is noticeable everywhere, for example, a fraction of what is available in (my case) Seattle. Meat quality in the US has always been relatively excellent, though depending on what part of the US you live not always diverse. European butter is superior on average, but cheese shops have a similar range in big cities. Seafood in Europe is excellent along the coast, better than the US outside of a handful of fishery adjacent cities, but often poorer than the US once you move inland. The bread is indistinguishable for the most part.

Processed and cured meat products is still an area where available European products are unambiguously ahead of what is commonly available in the US. The US has improved a lot in this regard but it hasn't caught up yet.

Some of these are arguable of course. The one consistent thing everyone notices is the limited diversity and availability of fresh vegetables in Europe, and beef quality, but that is a pretty natural consequence of geography. All of which should be separated from the cuisine produced with said fresh ingredients.

Strongly strongly disagree.

The average produce, meat, cured meat, and seafood in the western EU is vastly superior to the average available in the USA.

Bread is especially disgusting in the US compared to EU.

That "average available in the USA" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The USA is larger than Europe, but no one would credibly say that these things are all good across Europe. You can find plenty of terrible bread, meat, and seafood in Europe. To call it "vastly superior" is indefensible on its face.

Hence why I referenced the median. It wouldn't make sense to cherry-pick a US city like Seattle, which has amazing ingredient quality and diversity that few cities can compete with, and generalize it to the entire US. I've lived a lot of places and recognize the variance. The ingredient quality isn't even consistent within single European countries, having surprisingly high variance over -- by American standards -- relatively small geographic areas.

If you compare blue collar city against blue collar city, the US is definitely competitive in my experience. I think many people have an outdated view of the food available in flyover country. I split my time between Western Europe and the US, and get around both. I am having a difficult time finding these "vastly superior" ingredients in Europe that you speak of.

I agree that the diversity is higher in the median, but disagree that the quality is higher. I live in the UK, but have spent time in the US, and for day to day shopping in the 3 cities I've spent lots of time in (SF, LA and Raleigh NC) the quality at the highest end is good but everything else is a crapshoot. Even at that most of the actual high end ingredients are European ingredients (cheese and butter, cured meats, olives) and cost 4-5x what they do in Europe. Not only that, I don't actually trust when I'm buying DOP parmesan from a us grocery store, but I know what I'm buying here.

The quality of supermarket meat in your average Tesco, or Asda ranges from acceptable to good. The quality in a Target or Walmart ranges from very very poor to good in my experience. As a textbook example the fabled wooded chicken breast is for the most part not a problem here, but was something I experienced on more than one occasion during my last month long trip to SF.

Bread is way better in Europe than in the US. There's not even an argument to be had here. In most of Europe, you can buy bread on any street corner that is better (not to mention way cheaper) than what you get in expensive specialty bakeries in big American cities. Bread is just not something that most Americans care about, whereas it's an important part of the culture in most of Europe.

The US is geographically larger than Europe but way less diverse in terms of culture. And it matters a lot when talking about things such as food.

The US is immensely different in terms of culture. Europeans have language differences and they've got old historical stuff, but the difference between Masschusetts and Texas is huge. Including food. This is complicated by large liberal cities falling into pockets of similarity.

What I think is worst in the US markets is bread and cheese. They taste terrible, and bread is so bad they need to put something inside to have at least some taste. Fruits are terrible too, but they're not produced here, so that is understandable.

I sadly have a similar experience in Canada. Whilst I have found products here that are good in most categories, and produce is generally fine, I find I have to be more selective with meat, seafood and especially baked goods and cheese.

You're right, I forgot about the cheese shops, because in France I wouldn't have to go out of my way to find good cheese.

But, "Bread is indistinguishable"? WAT? Really? I guess we have different tastes. Other than some sourdough there is no bread I've had that I like in SF. That definitely varies by country in Europe. Hard to find good bread in Germany and some of those northern countries have their interesting breads that are an acquired taste I have yet to acquire.

My impression of fish in SF, LA, Seattle, NYC, Baltimore, is it's not close to France and Japan. The selection is small, the quality mediocre. Maybe like cheese there's some speciality shops I'm forgetting.

> Hard to find good bread in Germany

This sounds like a wild claim to me - the Germans must be the most passionate people about bread that I've ever met. Every time I talk to Germans who've lived abroad, they bring up the poor quality of bread that they experienced. Sometimes just a visit will do - Germans who've visited the US usually have a horror story or two about the sweet brioche-like loaves. Our neighbours visited recently and it must have been the second or third thing they mentioned about their visit...

>> Hard to find good bread in Germany

Well, that can o ly be because our bakers are opening shop in the UK and tge US then. Arguably bread quality decreased considerably in Germany so. Mostly due to the fact that big chains dominate the bakery market. Same goes for local butcher shops. German bread still beats, say, Italian bread on average. And don't get me started on what passes as bread in the UK or Scandinavia, even if those countries improved a lot.

> Hard to find good bread in Germany

Must be a different Germany in a different Universe..

Back in Germany anybody who (realy) cares about bread wouldn't even think about buying those mass-baked chemicals from the stores. For bread you go to a craft bakery which you can find everywhere - if you don't just look for around the neighborhood of the big Supermarkets.

And in those magical craft bakeries you'll find it hard not to buy anything at once, but at least a good dark, handmade in the night before, bread.

I've been around quite a bit, it's hard to find something comparable to a German or Central European dark bread enywhere else.

I feel there are two schools of bread in (Western) Europe: the French and German one. The French love bread with a thick, crunchy crust, whereas the classic German dark bread rarely have such a crust.

???

Of course German bread has a thick crispy crust. If anything it's the Anglo box shaped bread which is soft and doesn't have a proper crust.

> Hard to find good bread in Germany and some of those northern countries have their interesting breads that are an acquired taste I have yet to acquire.

As others have said that's the most hilarious claim I've read in a long time. Unless you like "toast bread", i.e. white, sliced bread in plastic bags that typically taste like card board, Germany is probably the place with the widest variety of bread types and with the people who feel the most strongly about bread. Also if you search for high quality bread in any other country, you almost always find that the bakery is run by some German immigrant (my experience in NZ, OZ, Sweden).

The fish in Japan is excellent but much of it isn't native. It comes from somewhere else, frequently the Gulf of Alaska, the product of which is available fresh in Seattle without sitting on a boat for a trans-Pacific journey. Asia pays top dollar for it though, so they get a lot of it. But here? It is where they got it from, it is big business. The quality of sushi in Seattle is somewhat famous, not only the myriad local sources but its direct access to the entire Pacific Rim.

I wouldn't have to go out of my way to find good cheese in many parts of the US. It isn't the 1980s, the median availability is similar to the median availability in most of Europe, here in 2022. You seem to be fencing with stereotypes instead of reality. I don't have a dog in this fight but (1) I spend a lot of time, and have spent a lot of time, all over the world and (2) I eat absolutely everything everywhere and in particular investigate their food markets. I'm not guessing about what is and isn't available to the average person in various places, I actually shop in those markets.

Every place has their local specialties, and some places in Europe really do go above and beyond, like northern Spain. But the quality and availability has radically converged in my lifetime for everyone. Americans are not benighted or some such, their markets are quite good this days. The fact that ordinary suburban US supermarkets routinely carry hundreds of cheeses from all over the world is quite a change from decades ago. The actual cheese shops just specialize in obscure cheeses that minimally intersect with the ones the supermarkets carry.

All that aside, Americans have amazing produce. That and beef are two things they do exceptionally well by any standard. I've never been able to get anything comparable in Europe.

There is no such thing as "Europe" on this topic. Just the UK and France are worlds apart, for instance.

> The bread is indistinguishable for the most part.

Sorry for the bluntness, but you lost me at this part. I lived in the US for a long time and traveled to Europe often. I could never get bread as good in US, even at the new fancy bakeries that keep popping up. The one-euro baguette (or tradition) from any random boulangerie is way better that any four-dollar baguette I found in the US. Is it the water, the flour, the technique? I think I've seen this question being asked, but not sure there is a good answer.

Anyway, I am now in France and not much has changed. Food (stuff that you find easily in a supermarket or corner shop) is still way better than similar stuff in US. And costwise, compared to the part of the US where we lived (northern NJ) almost everything is cheaper.

> The produce selection is 1/3rd

You clearly haven't been to Berkeley Bowl (not very far from SF...). Or Monterey Market (also in Berkeley).

> There's 1/6th the selection of cheese.

Strangely, also in Berkeley, https://cheeseboardcollective.coop/bakery-cheese/cheese-shop... - it's been Covided alas, but the photo there should give you an idea.

But some of your items, especially the pâté are definitely in the category of "Why isn't this just like at home?", which you really shouldn't use as a measure of quality.

Well said. It's about priorities. My wife and I have found we are more culturally aligned with France and Italy. Focusing in enjoying the simple things in life, like a meal made from a few simple, delicious high quality ingredients.

That is also how California style cuisine is described.

Easy to say when nice advocados are a dime a dozen. The US has so much better fresh edibles than say Ireland.

"California style cuisine" focuses on local ingredients, if you had a "California style" restaurant in Ireland it should focus on things like beef, grains, cabbage, carrots, etc. but it would be prepared differently.

As a rule of thumb, the further south you go in Europe the better the quality of food gets. Especially the basics, like vegetables and meat or fish. That being said, us Germans are bread fanatics. We do suck when it comes to overall food quality. We'd rather pay 100 bucks for a frying pan to cook to cheapest discoubter meat instead of payibg 10 bucks for the pan and investing the other 90 in high quality meat from the local butcher.

American grocery stores have become absolutely amazing in my lifetime, from a pretty poor start (also growing up in the rural west). The diversity of fresh, high quality foods available most of the year is astonishing. And that is just your average suburban supermarket. Bigger cities have an incredible range of boutique food purveyors to meet the demands of every obscure desire or requirement. This is linked back into the agricultural supply chain where farmers will produce bespoke agricultural goods for rare and unusual needs on demand.

The creation of a free trade zone for agriculture from the Arctic to the Antarctic along the American side of the Pacific Rim is a significant contributor. Everything is in season somewhere. I don't know if younger generations appreciate the magnitude of the change in American food markets.

"Appreciate" is, perhaps, not the right word. Maybe "worry"?

Younger generations grew up on a message of climate change and it can be disconcerting to walk into a grocery store and find the entire produce department to be a geography lesson. This from Peru, that from Mexico, the other from Alaska, all flown and trucked in on a cold chain straight from some far-away monoculture farm.

If anything I suspect the increased supply chain insecurity (2020 through today) will help a lot of younger folks (unfortunately) develop an appreciation for the marvel of megamarts' supply chains.

There are some who are specialised in finding any possible excuse to bring up global warming in every thread.

Can't you see that the majority of people don't care? Leave us alone already.

Yep we’re fucked.

I want you to know you’re very much alone and only becoming more-so in this disposition.

If I were alone in my not-caring stance, there wouldn't be a problem to begin with. :-)

> Leave us alone already.

This is the context in which that term is being used.

Younger generations are filled with self righteous tiresome scolds. I don’t know where we went wrong.

Maybe by underpaying teachers and getting a lot of weird ones as result?

Teachers are paid more today than they have ever been.

They are oversensitive for sure. But the true mystery is why we, who know better, can’t toughen ourselves up and get over it.

Yes and you’re the enlightened wizard lmao

When the economy crashed, you told everyone it was a result of their culture and lifestyle choices rather than because of Wall Street. These idiot kids believed you.

Where is the scold in the post to which you're replying?

Deglobalization of agriculture -- as a downstream result of trade policy, political instability, shifting weather patterns, or some combination thereof -- isn't exactly hard to imagine. Or even hypothetical! See: East Africa, right now: drought at home + major trading partner at war = starvation.

Looking at the shelves of a grocery store and thinking "the set of social and physical conditions required to make this possible might not be stable throughout my lifetime" is not "scolding". Hell, it's not even unreasonable, especially given that the very premise of the thread is that this is all quite new to begin with...

As someone from the younger generation, it's probably linked to hearing about climate and ecology from 4th grade to now. Many people took the message seriously, which leads to questioning a lot what the people before us did. Basically the older generation not taling responsibility, first for climate stuff, and then for raising "self righteous tiresome scolds".

Does find some "really guilty, to blame" solve contemporary issues and foreseeable futures ones?

I'm moderately young (36) and I consider myself an ecologist, not the one who buy the hat but the one who really care, and I fail to see solutions and even ecology in much of the so called "ecological moves"/Green Deal.

Entomophagy to my eyes is sold as ecological, but sound much more a way to industrialize even more the food production chain simply because we can't produce anything good from insects without a full-scale industry behind, while we can all raise chickens nearly everywhere in the world. Industrialization per se is not bad nor good, it might be one AND the other in various proportion, but so far food-production industrialization have created abundance bubbles and deep crisis vanishing most of the initial production stability it have given, so I highly doubt insisting in that direction can be of help at least IN THE ACTUAL TERMS.

I see proposal for fully-automated factory-farms and I've no doubt they can work BUT I doubt they can scale. They might be able to grow some veggies in Island and Chile, i.e. in unfriendly climatic conditions, they might do that with nearly local-only resources at least to sustain the production once the factory is built but the output is still far less than a classic "grandfather's garden" behind the house, in those areas of the world where it can exist witch are not so vast but also not so few... Now IF we push all of that because we think we are doomed and it's time to plan an artificial life in bubbles planning a migration to Mars in a century... Well... Ok, it's clear that such move can be done only by VERY FEW, probably so few that they can't reproduce with healthy children, even with genetic engineering help. If the target is "let us create some small artificial pseudo-paradise bubbles while most will feel the disaster in their own skin and only the most adaptive of them will survive allowing us few to be the new "élite" who holds scientific/industrial knowledge and survivors are just young and strong slaves to exploit... Again I doubt it can't work for more than few generations.

If the target is a mass civilization shift to really adapt as much as possible to climate change... Well, I see veeeery little sustainability in all modern "green" tech innovations.

I'm curious to see other outline-scenarios about the future to just try imaging how can they possibly work, in mere theory at a high sight.

Let's say we can push anyone in modern buildings (who need to be built, BTW) so the civil energy needs goes down much. Industry needed behind? Let's say in my new house (built few years ago with p.v. etc) I can sustain intermittent grid electricity services, I do not need gas to heat/cook. Good. What about my solar panels (made in China), inverters (made in Austria and India), batteries (China, perhaps with South-American or Russian lithium and some others raw materials)? How can be made in the new world? Who will be able to build them? Let's say I also buy an EV so I can go around with my own energy (for just few years, cfr battery lifetime), did the farmer can do the same? Maybe, I'm pretty convinced that agrivoltaic can made us erase tractors needs, but it's just an idea so far AFAIK, did the supply chain can do the same anyway? And so on.

Long story short: IF/when a day we will be able to build Star Trek alike ships/isolated environment that once built can self-repair and work for decades, we adapt to live in them, with no genetic issues due to a low variety of seeds etc well... We will/would have found a solution. But we are probably more than a century behind such tech. I see no really feasible recipe so far in little time and on scale. Not counting the fact that when things start to go bad people tend to be a bit upset so unrest and revolutions and wars happen and they are not exactly ideal to build something new, in the short time span they just consume and destroy and MOST on the from the history have no more plans than the short-term win.

it's probably linked to hearing about climate and ecology from 4th grade to now.

I think this is a big part of it. We were (and are) okay with teachers and children’s entertainment giving children strident, non nuanced messages thinking that they’d get the more complex picture later. That looks like a mistake.

Basically the older generation not taling responsibility, first for climate stuff, and then for raising "self righteous tiresome scolds".

I specifically said “where did we go wrong,” isn’t that taking responsibility?

> I specifically said “where did we go wrong,” isn’t that taking responsibility?

That would be taking responsibility as a generation if the generation as a whole was asking that and taking steps to fix it. That doesn't seem to be the case, even if you as an individual are doing it. Just like me trying to not be self righteous won't change the fact that my generation is like this. At least all the generations seems to have people that have a sense of personal responsbility, that's good news.

They were raised by self righteous tiresome scolds

There is somewhat of a middle ground. My cart looks very close to yours but I really don’t want to spend the 60 to 90 minutes most good meals take more than once or twice a week.

However you can make lots of good food ahead of time and freeze it. I spend a few hours every Sunday and it makes for quick 30 minute no effort meals for about two weeks.

> fast with few ingredients

Slice an onion.

Slice mushrooms.

Fry up with ground beef.

Add a little water or soup stock or bone broth.

Let simmer for a minute.

Quick meal.

Just one of a million examples for quick recipes that take minimal skill. You can even run the veggies through a chopper or food processor.

I regularly grind up a pile of vegetables in the vitamix and drink the result. Prep time is 5 minutes. Cleanup is 1 minute.

I'm not really buying the "no time to eat healthy" thing.

That's another way. Fruit/veggie balance up to you. Add Spirulina powder or similar if you want.

Do you find the Vitamix ones reliable. I've run though a number of blenders from other companies and had them fail after a while. Usually the motor just stops working.

I know many people who use them. The only one that burned out did so after about 10 years of 3x per day use.

Also, the optional stainless container is a lot easier to clean than the plastic one that comes with it.

I've had various juicers and blenders in the past, the vitamix replaces all of them.

No, I am not shilling for vitamix. I'm just a satisfied customer.

TY for the recommendation thinking about doing this again, will look into it.

The time involved in living healthy is not in the time it actually takes to make a meal (which is trivial, and can easily take less time than the round-trip to a fast food outlet.)

The real time it takes is in the time you need to learn a bunch of skills that make that possible. In an ideal world you learnt those skills at your mother's knee, but we are now 3 generations into "fast food" so it's probable that was missed.

It takes time, and effort, to regain those basics. From something as trivial as boiling water, to using a knife, to "knowing" how long things cook for. Then experience as to what ingredients go together (tomatoes love Basil, chocolate doesn't like garlic).

A skilled person can make a lovely pasta dish in minutes, an unskilled person has literally no idea.

My mother learnt to cook with minimal information (recipe books and magazines), my children can get a master-class in anything on YouTube.

We live in an age where we have access to any knowledge we want, and yet seem to be incapable of doing anything for ourselves.

I learned those skills initially at my mother’s (and father’s) knee, but I have better access to good equipment, good ingredients, and information than they ever did when they raised me.

It’s easy to say we “seem to be incapable of doing anything ourselves” but home-cooked meals are still de rigueur for younger generations.

Why don’t we just teach that in schools? Instead of learning that the interior angles of triangles add up to 180 degrees maybe we could learn to cook healthy meals for ourselves?

Isn't cooking classes quite common? Atleast I had that for two semesters. Mandatory.

A lot of places have abandoned that in favor of optimizing for STEM and the college rat race.

They used to: "Home Economics"

BTW, not learning math can be very costly to your financial future.

My high school offered Home Ec. But my guidance counselor made me take Latin instead (I had already completely several years of French and didn’t need language credits). Probably a good thing - in hindsight, the home ec curriculum was pretty watered-down.

*aaS all the way down is the end result of a purely service economy. When we don't manufacture anything tangible, or develop skills of our own, it leads to reliance on 'specialists' to meet all our needs. The end result being a dependent, unskilled consumer culture... not quite as utopian as the MBAs made it sound. .

"chocolate doesn't like garlic"

Mole (https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/223261/authentic-mole-sauc...) would like a word with you...

Recipe I described. You have to know how to chop an onion and mushrooms. How to break up a lump of ground beef.

That could be "learned" in 1/2 an hour if you don't want nice TV chef uniformity in the veggies.

Time yes, but also “no lapses in self-discipline” is a factor as well.

Something I came up with one day because my gf wanted a cabbage dish:

Slice a head of cabbage, an onion, and 5 slices of bacon (or alternatively use smoked ham hocks or turkey necks).

In a large pot or dutch oven over medium heat, saute the bacon until not quite fully cooked. Add the onion to scrape up the fond and cook until soft. Add a cup of chinese cooking wine, cook for 3 minutes, then add two cups of chicken stock and a tablespoon of chicken bouillon. Add cabbage. Cook with lid on for about 45 minutes over medium heat and then another 15 minutes with lid off, stirring occasionally until the liquid is evaporated. Finish with pepper and season to taste with a bit more bouillon. It's slightly sweet, savory, smokey, and salty. My kids tear it up.

Want to make it a main course? Add some cooked ground meat and a few of cups of cooked rice. Now you have a meal that can last you all week. LOL.

We eat that as a main regularly (with ground beef or turkey). No rice, just the veg and protein. Although we dumb it down even more and skip most of the liquid steps you mention - just cook up the cabbage and onion in some oil, with seasoning, toss in the meat, and done. Yours sounds richer, but ours takes all of 10 minutes from start to plate.

I came up with it as a riff off of hers, which was... chop a cabbage into large chunks, throw in a pot with bacon strips and water, and cook for an hour. You ended up with wet, bacon-flavored cabbage. Was never a cabbage eater outside of eggrolls and cabbage rolls before I met her, but this is a staple side nowadays.

I often cook like that but pre-packaged fast-food is in fact faster to cook. I am not saying it should be eaten all the time, but the receipt you describe is not that fast. Mushrooms specifically are time consuming to clean in any non symbolic quantity.

And you also need rice/potato with it unless you go keto in which case you need much more cleaning/slicing mushrooms and more meat.

A lot of cooking time can be done async tho.

Rice can be put in a cooker and prepared ahead of time. Some cookers even let you specify a time in the future when it should be ready. Similarly, marinading develops a lot of flavor over time that you could be doing work or errands.

Or prepare four or more servings. Put in refrigerator or freezer depending on how fast they will be consumed. So the 20 minutes, let's say, turns into 30 but split over four or six meals, so it's not so bad.

> Mushrooms specifically are time consuming to clean in any non symbolic quantity.

FWIW, in my ~10 year professional cooking career I think I've washed a batch of mushrooms a grand total of 2 times, only because they were uncommonly dirty. You've probably eaten unwashed mushrooms many times in restaurants. Eating a little dirt probably isn't going to hurt you. If there's anything pathogenic on them a rinse in water isn't going to do much.

Clean? I rinse them under running water. This isn't a TV cooking show. It's just home cooking.

I should mention that the mushrooms are always cooked well.

It's quick but it requires actively prepping and cooking for the whole time. It's 20 minutes where you can't do anything else (well, you can, podcasts and audio books ftw). Cooking a frozen meal takes 1 minute of activity and then you can do other things for 30 minutes before you eat. For some that's a huge win.

For what it’s worth I grew up with super markets and it still blows my mind. Has since I was a kid, how do I have strawberries in winter!?

It’s also what has enabled us to diversify. Easy to obtain any food, any time, without much meal prep.

I personally am still looking to grow, store and remain self-sufficiently. But it’s entirely a life style choice; built out of my fear for the further.

Ask yourself, can the next generation build supermarkets? I don’t know if they could. It’s an amazing work logistics. Further, it requires California and growing food in desert. It also requires an abundance of energy for transport AND international trade. All of which is under tremendous pressure.

So, basically - California needs nuke energy, & fast.

Easiest thing that should happen but never will. Can’t wait to see how things turn out, that being said.

And water, which is becoming more and more scarce

Carve out a giant semi-cone into the oceanside, acting as a static water inlet/basin.

Line surface area of cone w/heavy mirror array. Desalinate thru concentrated sunbeams.

Or something like that.

They are building giant solar desalinators in Saudi Arabia so this is maybe not far from the truth. https://wired.me/science/environment/desalination-solar-dome...

Getting water from the sea up to the desert would be a huge challenge in California, and right on the coast isn’t very sunny for most of it.

I'm not sure what they're attempting to describe in the article but so far seems to me like a child's toy compared to a proper multi-stage flash distillation plant (which uses multiple stages and decreased pressures at each stage to massively decrease energy requirements) -- and even those should use more energy than reverse osmosis plants.

California zoning laws wouldn’t allow that. And changing it would take decades of bureaucracy.

I wish I was joking.

> Ask yourself, can the next generation build supermarkets? I don’t know if they could. It’s an amazing work logistics. Further, it requires California and growing food in desert. It also requires an abundance of energy for transport AND international trade. All of which is under tremendous pressure.

Yep. You're saying the quiet part out loud. Ssshhh.

I’d trust a good can of tomatoes before I touch the borderline unappealing off season strawberries they have in those markets. Happy that you’re trying not to judge but looks like you still have a ways to go before getting off a high horse. As oogway says, “one often meets their destiny on their path to avoid it.” When I remember the solid research showing people taking multivitamins die faster I keep thinking what might be in store for people who swear organic food will make them live longer.

Like your railing on frozen food. You realize frozen food is far fresher and less likely to have “chemicals” or whatever is your choice enemy right?

I feel the same with with orange juice FROM concentrate vs the shelf stable stuff, everyone calls me crazy for it.

I’m from Florida. You’re crazy. Both are equally bad. If you want fresh orange juice, buy Florida oranges and squeeze the juice yourself. They aren’t very good for eating though. For that you want California navels.

(Florida’s true delicacies are the keylime and the stone crab. I’ve never gotten a keylime in a grocery store that comes close to what grows on the trees in the state. And stone crab you’ll never find in a grocery.)

I had no idea there was a difference between the oranges. What I know about is apples, growing up near a lot of apple farms. It's probably not worth trying to compare our niche insight, though.

Stone Crab claws are one of the greatest seafoods in the US. But due to the way they are harvested (single claw snapped off and the rest of the crab thrown back), you have to eat them immediately so no shipping.

Wiki:

> Harvesting is accomplished by removing one or both claws from the live animal and returning it to the ocean where it can regrow the lost limb(s).

Incredible ... sounded so wasteful at first to not eat the body.

Plenty of stores offer freshly squeezed orange juice nowadays. Some have the machine that will do it right in front of you.

Neither option tastes anything like what it’s supposed to taste like, to me.

The process of making concentrate loses most of the aroma, which is then added back using perfumes which are derived from oranges. Because the perfumes are made from oranges, using certain techniques, they do not have to be listed as separate ingredients, and the can will just say “orange” in the ingredient list. One fundamental problem is that natural orange juice goes bitter when exposed to air, and that problem isn’t solved by concentrating it… because you won’t drink it all right after reconstituting it.

If you compare FCOJ to fresh-squeezed, the difference is not subtle. It’s incredibly obvious. It doesn’t even matter what type of orange you use for juicing—try them all.

>Neither option tastes anything like what it’s supposed to taste like, to me.

That's because the not from concentrate is mostly bullshit. They store the juice for up to a year and preserve it by deoxygenating the giant storage containers. That destroys most of the flavor and so they add in artificial flavor packs rendering the end product an orange flavored beverage instead of juice.

From concentrate is actually better. That's 100% from an orange. You lose flavor from the solidification process but the end result is all from the orange.

> You lose flavor from the solidification process but the end result is all from the orange.

"All from the orange" is a clever conceit. It's a processed food product. If you get Minute Maid, it incorporates a flavor pack created by Coca-Cola. It's not listed in the ingredients because the flavor pack is made from orange.

Unless I've been grossly misinformed those aren't added to the concentrate.

> If you compare FCOJ to fresh-squeezed, the difference is not subtle. It’s incredibly obvious. It doesn’t even matter what type of orange you use for juicing—try them all.

Completely agree and it’s so much better at least to me.

I’d even go as far to say that many people who are used to drinking the concentrate or shelf stable stuff have no idea how much different fresh squeezed OJ tastes. To the point where it’s surprising and in some cases not to their taste because they are so used to the processed stuff.

I like eating the concentrated stuff semi-frozen, tastes better than most sorbets imo.

>Like your railing on frozen food. You realize frozen food is far fresher and less likely to have “chemicals” or whatever is your choice enemy right?

I think you're making stuff up here.

Nope. This is true, but phrased in adversarial way. Google flash frozen foods.

When frozen they can pause the aging of the food at a chosen time vs shipping it both the consumer and shipper are hoping to get the timing right. So frozen goods have much better control over the state of the food the reaches the consumer. Freezing also physically protects foods by making them harder.

Thank you, I should have been more specific, I meant 'making stuff up' in reference to the adversarial portion.

No, the sentiment about frozen food being superior is on the mark although the exact argument isn’t correct.

Frozen produce is harvested at peak, frozen nearby, and then transported. The texture suffers, but in other respects this is far superior to the “fresh” produce you get, which has to survive transportation at room temperature. Whether you would prefer frozen depends on what you are getting and how you prepare it, but there are tons of scenarios where you should prefer frozen foods.

Certain foods are clear winners frozen, like peas, corn, spinach, if they are going to be cooked. If you’re making sauces, fillings, pies, etc from berries, frozen berries are your best bet. The non-frozen berries have to be shelf stable and the shelf stable ones don’t taste good. The good tasting berries keep well frozen.

> far superior to the “fresh” produce you get, which has to survive transportation at room temperature

Depends on the distance to transport and water content though. I have never eaten frozen pinneapple, but I guess it would be awful?

Not awful at all. Actually makes for a great summer popsicle.

I’d expect frozen pineapple to be quite good even after thawing. It has a lot of long fiber for structure that I’d expect would survive.

Frozen and thawed watermelon (and other similar melons) would likely be dreadful.

It’s good, but it’s not fresh either. It’s better than canned pineapple

I think it depends on the application, in a situation or recipe where fresh fruit is important (like a tart), frozen fruits likely won’t measure up. In something baked (like a pie) frozen can work well. A smoothie, frozen fruits can be amazing.

I've had good luck with frozen edamame, and I understand that freezing improves fish by killing parasites. Fun stuff.

Thank you for the information. To clarify, I had intended to convey that they were effectively making stuff up by accusing that other person of some sort of squeamishness.

Edamame is similar to peas, so it makes sense that if one freezes well they both do.

Yep, I only mention it because I recently realized it didn't have to be this special treat I only got when I went and ate sushi somewhere. I can just boil a handful of 'em for four minutes in salty water any time I want. Downright luxurious.

It is necessary to freeze fish to kill parasites. All the fresh fish you see in a supermarket was frozen at some point.

Sure they are fresher (if the fruit accepts being frozen) however I don't see why they would have less chemicals. Most chemicals people try to avoid are used for growing and not packaging. The only way to avoid these is buying trustable organic labels.

Please don't build a illusion of fair, non organic farms somehow working in a natural way when they actually are just as profit oriented as any other big company.

You can buy organic frozen food as well, you know.

> I remember the solid research showing people taking multivitamins die faster

Do you think that could possibly be because people who are more sickly are more likely to try taking vitamins, as a curative? So it isn’t the vitamins killing them, but the disease making them take vitamins? Of course, I’d have to see the actual study you are referencing to see if they discussed causality.

One of the problems with Americans and food is that we've been conditioned to have sugar in absolutely everything, and the 80s made it worse because of the low-fat fad (they just increased sugar content to maintain mouthfeel). Ask any Gen Xer and they'll regale you with nightmares of the dominance of oat bran in 80s cuisine. On the one hand, you get a muffin. On the other hand, it tastes like cardboard flavored with sugar and cinnamon.

Try making a traditional tomato sauce using canned tomatoes and follow the recipe exactly... then compare that to Prego or Ragu. The store brands taste like a freaking dessert topping comparatively.

Most people don't eat enough low-cost, high-availability items like cucumbers and spinach, and they don't manage to learn how to do things like make their own bread, which is far superior fresh from the oven than anything you can get from a supermarket bakery. They also don't appreciate frozen vegetables, which are just as healthy as the fresh stuff, even if it might not taste quite as good some of the time.

One of the things that the Food Network did a HUGE disservice to people is that a couple of entire generations (Xers and Millennials) were convinced into believing that everything needs to be cooked from scratch and that any meal that involves a kit or a flavor packet is inferior. There was maybe one show on that entire network with a host who would use kits and flavor packets and other items, and she was regularly panned by the audience for not being "authentic" enough.

The store brands taste like a freaking dessert topping comparatively.

True!

...convinced into believing that everything needs to be cooked from scratch and that any meal that involves a kit or a flavor packet is inferior.

These kits and flavor packets also come from the store, and also contain unnecessary ingredients. Family members from other generations insist on using envelopes of powder for everything, and they eat more poorly as a result. They need the powder to make gravy, while we gen-Xers whip that up from fat, flour, and any flavorful liquid. Watch Alton Brown for ten minutes, and eat better for the rest of your life.

I know perfectly well how to make a gravy from scratch. It's not hard, anyone can do it. Gravy is just flour, fat, stock, and seasoning. Cook it long enough without seasoning and you have a roux. Cook for a few minutes and add milk and you've got a white gravy.

But for a brown gravy to be served with dinner, most people own one fridge/freezer. They aren't going to sit there and reduce chicken or beef broth to make stock, doing the little ice-cube-in-a-ziplock trick, and virtually all store-bought shelf-stable stocks are horrible and virtually indistinguishable from broths. Most don't have the room and don't want to spend the time.

It is vastly easier and more time efficient when getting home from work with mouths to feed to use an off-the-shelf product and doctor it up than it is to go through all the steps needed to produce a similar quality gravy, and there's virtually no nutritional difference between one and the other despite the snobbish protestations of people like Alton Brown, who has never been involved at any level of professional food preparation. He's a drama nerd who found a niche, not a chef.

Go look at a restaurant supply store website. Marvel at all the fun powders and bouillon and other flavor enhancers they have. If Michelin star restaurants can use them, so can you.

Anyway, say you want to make fried chicken. You know that buttermilk is a great marinade. How many different things can you use to achieve a similar result?

You can:

1. Just use buttermilk

2. Rehydrate buttermilk powder and use that

3. Use ranch dressing

4. Use a ranch dressing packet

5. Thin out yogurt and use that

6. Use kefir

7. Literally use any other slightly acidic dressing

The important thing is NOT the buttermilk. It's the acid in the buttermilk that helps keep the meat tender, and the viscosity that keeps it stuck to the meat. I rarely use it, because I don't keep buttermilk around. I usually use either ranch or off-the-shelf Italian dressing.

By all means, eat what you want to eat. No judgment. I was just trying to understand the difference between "dessert topping tomato sauce" snobbery and "gravy from a mysterious powder that is secretly mostly corn starch" hypothetical practicality. There seems to be a contradiction? Scratch gravy takes like 20% longer than envelope-of-mysterious-powder gravy, while good tomato sauce takes hours. Of course, you can make it on the weekend and throw it in the freezer, but the same is true of homemade stock and basically every other prepared ingredient. (including gravy!)

I literally do have multiple boomer-generation family members who cannot make a gravy from scratch. The "greatest" generation folks in my family, while we still had them around, were also not outstanding cooks. They had an excuse, because they grew up in shotgun cabins eating government commodities. I'm not so sure about the boomers...

It was specifically about the sugar content and how American tastes have morphed to expect those things. Good tomato sauce does not take hours unless you're trying to cook it in a skillet on a sidewalk in Arizona. Sunday sauce is a bit different, but that's because you're simmering meat in it.

Gravy is an entirely different animal. Yes, it's mostly flour and corn starch, but it's also not the star of the dish the way that tomato sauce is.

I don't know anybody in my family aside from my Gen X sister and millennial cousins who can't make gravy from scratch. My "Greatest Generation" grandmother in particular only cooked about 30-40 dishes, but she cooked them so regularly that she didn't need a cookbook, and they were never anything but great (except when she tried to feed me frozen pizza when I would stay over for the week. She'd throw American cheese and ham on top because she didn't believe it would be filling enough).

I think there was a bit of a backlash against sauces from the gen-x and millennial crowd, and that may explain why they can’t make gravy. Popularity and fashion explains a lot, and gravy was NOT popular during the gen-x and millennial eras. I think this is just because we got bad TV dinners drowning in sauce, nothing more or less than that. The baby boomers I know had a similar backlash against canned goods—boomers had plenty of awful canned Lima beans made into casseroles growing up, and it put many of them off canned goods in general, for better or worse.

Just another example of fashion in food—lard is coming back in fashion as an ingredient in home cooking, and in the UK, brown sauce is going out of fashion.

I'm going to hang my comment here! Your corn starch statement made a perfect hook, but there are a lot of gravy comments I don't understand in this thread.

I don't get why people would use flavour packets when making gravy, or why people would use corn starch.

Not saying it's wrong, but that it seems unneeded.

For example, let's say I fry up a pork chop. I may put 1/2 a spanish onion in the pan, and I'd definitely add some cayane pepper and mustard powder. Maybe some fresh garlic.

As the cooking nears completion, I'll add flour over everything, until all the juices and grease is absorbed.

At this point I want to brown the flour a little bit. My heat is little below medium, I want browned, not burned.

So, I try to flatten the flour against the cooking surface, spread it out, make sure it gets heat.

This takes maybe 4 minutes, with me making sure the flour gets moved around, re-flattened, mixed up a bit, so it all browns.

When ready, add in cold water. The amount is try-till-you-learn amount. If it starts out too thick, add more! Now set pan to full heat, and stir repeatedly.

When the water is hard boiling, keep stirring, making sure that during this entire process you are cleaning the bottom of the pan.

If you're using nonstick, instead of stainless or iron, you probably can't do this right. You need to scrape the pan here. You need to forcefully agitate. Right tool, right job.

You may need to turn the heat down a bit, as things thicken. Again, you need to start thin, make thick.

(When you first add the cold water, it will be very water like. Thin. But what happens is the flour breaks up, and makes it thick, so first timers will need a lot more water than they think.)

Two things will happen here. You will collect all the flavour from everything you have just cooked, and the gravy will start to thicken on its own.

No corn starch is required, or flavour packet. Full, lush, flavourful, thick gravy, no lumps, cold water is part of this, and the hard boil after.

It will take a few tries to get it right, but once learned, all things become gravy.

Note: thanks for lettimg me hang my comment here. Also hi.

Corn starch in American sauces was probably introduced by Chinese immigrants, where starched based sauces are extremely common instead of flour-based ones, since wheat is historically less common in southern China (where most early Chinese immigrants came from)

Starch also has the nice property of tenderizing meat and locking in juices when used in a marinade, in a process called “velveting.” https://www.bonappetit.com/story/velveting-meat/amp

Corn is a new world thing, although I admit that early Chinese immigrants could have discovered it as a replacement for some Chinese starchy thing...

Corn shows up in China during the 1500s via the Phillipines. https://amp.goldthread2.com/food/how-corn-ended-china-americ...

The traditional starch is water chestnut, and you can still buy it, but corn is a lot easier to turn into a starch.

In general, a lot of things went via the Pacific as well during the Columbian Exchange. East, Southeast, and South Asian looks very different without chilis, tomatoes, or sweet potatoes to name a few.

Earlier than I thought, I figured a couple of centries later.

That's a fine technique. What set me off ITT was the "a kit or a flavor packet" recommendation. I have long considered these to be egregious wastes of money. The ones that act as thickeners are mostly corn starch (which is weird for non-Chinese-food), except a 2 oz packet costs more than a whole tub of corn starch. The ones for flavor are almost entirely salt and MSG. There's nothing wrong with salt or MSG, but they are also much cheaper when purchased individually.

I think this phenomenon started in USA with the "Betty Crocker" and "Bisquick" product line. This was marketed as easier than scratch cooking. There's nothing wrong with the concept (I'm sure there is a box of Bisquick in my kitchen), but it doesn't always make sense from a value standpoint. Also it is less flexible. You could apply the technique you describe no matter what you were cooking, and you could vary the timing and amounts a great deal. The "kit" stuff is more like a chemistry demonstration, which must be carried out fairly closely to the directions on the box in order to remain somewhat flavorful.

https://tastecooking.com/the-thing-about-bisquick/

Interesting analysis.

I think it really extends to everything, others have mentioned pre-made tomato sauces here, also baffling both for price and taste.

When I left home, pre-internet, and started grocery shopping for the first time, I recall wanting spagetti. Well ground meat, that made sense. Pepper. Salt. Noodles.

But until years later, I didn't think about the spagetti sauce I bought. I just kept buying it. It was just there, labelled as a natural ingredient.

You want to make spagetti? Why, there's the sauce!

In retrospect, I think labelling is quite effective in this way. Get 'em when first out of the house, latch on to their inexperience then.

I think something that would be more useful, would be to make your own seasoning mixes at home. Since most of the time none of the ingredients of, say, taco seasoning are particularly challenging.

To be fair for a real Italian tomato sauce ala bologna you need a form of sugar to make to tomatoes taste great.

However a little bit of milk already does the trick. No need for whatever sugars people throw in there. The Industrie would never use milk for several reasons.

I don't think that most folks can make their own bread simply because of time constraints. And honestly, we have a long history of folks not making their own bread.

See, I do make bread. Daily. But I also don't have a job. It takes a few hours a day, but that's OK for me. At some times, when I've been poor, I've made bread on weekends, but freezing that bread to eat later isn't quite as lovely. But again, it takes hours and requires a working oven too (I had a toaster oven when I couldn't afford natural gas.

And really, that last bit gives us a view into the past: Kitchens used to be dangerous and a lot of folks didn't have proper ovens if they lived in cities. Folks have been buying bread from the baker for... um... centuries. And it was better for everyone because it kept some of the fire risk contained. Plus the bakers could make lots with less fuel than individual folks could do, which is honestly even a bonus now.

I'm not sure we are really losing stuff by not making bread - even if I make it and enjoy the fresh bread. Anyone can look it up online if they really want to.

The problem isn't that people don't make their own bread. The problem is that bread just isn't a part of the culture in the US in the way it is in Europe.

In most of Europe, high-quality bread is cheap and available everywhere. In the US, high-quality bread is extremely expensive and only available in specialty bakeries. People who are really into bread in the US often make their own. In Europe, where you can buy fresh bread on every street corner, why bother making it yourself?

The problem with tomato sauce is that it's cheap. The sugar is there to mask the poor quality. There are good tomato sauce brands, and they taste much better, but they cost twice as much. I like Rao's personally.

> Try making a traditional tomato sauce using canned tomatoes and follow the recipe exactly... then compare that to Prego or Ragu. The store brands taste like a freaking dessert topping comparatively.

Five years ago I made the decision to eat lower carb, I didn’t want to give up tomato sauce dishes entirely and found most of the canned tomato products still too high in sugar. Moved to just buying decent ripe Roma/plum tomatoes (they tend to be the lowest in natural sugar content), slice them in half and roast them with a head of garlic, stick blend them and simmer with a little chicken broth and white wine, fresh garlic, basil, bay leaf…and you have a really tasty lower carb tomato sauce.

Anytime I taste any jar sauce, it’s now inedible. Just like you said…it tastes more like a jam to me now…way too sweet.

I think an unrecognized part of this is the crazy variety of foods we've become accustomed to via restaurants.

I don't mind cooking from scratch. I find it rather fun and relaxing. Fresh ingredients are problematic, though. I can store a ton of frozen/canned food that's good for a long time and eat what I want, or I can buy fresh ingredients and then I'm pretty much locked into those choices whether I want it or have time to cook or not.

Places like TGI Fridays, Chilis and services like Doordash give people a huge range of options that you just can't replicate without frozen/canned foods. If I tried to buy ingredients to make anything a Chilis can, the vast majority would spoil before I could cook them. The food would probably be better than Chilis while it was around, though.

We got used to getting what we wanted, instead of what we had. The only way to replicate that is long-lasting food.

There is a bakery producing French roundloaves, donuts and cookies, most produced in the last 24-48 hours.

Bread in most instore supermarket bakeries is a matter of cooking frozen dough that arrived on a truck rather than making anything from scratch. What you buy was produced a lot more than 48 hours ago.

This is how convenience store croissants are made in Switzerland (frozen dough baked in an oven at the convenience store). I thought it weird at first, but the end result was still tasty. Beats the factory bake approach used by places like Starbucks (well, they follow the convenience store model in Switzerland also otherwise they wouldn’t be able to sell any). I assume much of Europe uses a similar model.

It’s usually terrible. Whole Foods (used to— haven’t been in a while) have decent fresh bread. But in general, US baked goods are awful vs any other country I’ve visited.

I make no-knead Dutch oven bread and used to make my own sourdough. It’s hard to top that, and almost everything is downhill from there.

I grew up in Brooklyn and supermarkets didn't really become a thing here until the 2000s. Like there was Key Food, but that felt more like a general store. There was a Waldbaum in the area but it was pretty inconvenient to get to.

Instead we had fruit stands selling produce, a bakery, a butcher, fishmonger selling seafood. And this isn't mentioning all the ethnic food stores. All of this was on two or three short blocks. The first time I saw a supermarket was when we went to New Jersey. It was a Wegmans and I think what was amazing to me was just how much stuff a single place could have.

I think ultimately it does come down to convenience. I think it's easier than ever to have decent meal at home. You don't even have to peel your own carrots or tear your own lettuce anymore. Sure something with more complexity might take time, but that's better for a weekend.

IGA is a supermarket chain. Granted, it's like the older, smaller ones (it's not a Walmart Jumbo Center) but it's still a supermarket.

"When I see people share "fast" recipes on YouTube they involve jarred sauces, spaghettiOs and raisins."

This really depends on the cuisine. I've really been getting in to Indian food recently and the recipes in it are nothing like what you're describing.

Relatedly, one of my main complaints against American supermarkets is that they all seem to be catering towards makings Italian food. Some have "ethnic" food sections, but those tend to be tiny and mostly filled with Chinese/Japanese/Mexican food... And even there have nowhere near the selection of a grocery store specializing in that cuisine.

American supermarkets also tend to be full of meat dishes, with few selections (outside the fresh fruit/vegetable isles) for vegetarians... Though that's been getting a little better in recent years in an some parts of the country.

I grew up in northern MI. We had an IGA too. Supermarkets were 1hr+ drive away. Cool that our experiences were so similar.

> when I unload my cart of fresh produce, meats, cheeses and baked goods it doesn't look like the carts around mine. They are full of canned foods, frozen foods, boxed foods, etc.

Canned, frozen, and boxed foods offer a much higher "calorie/dollar" ratio. Berries, in particular, are wildly expensive on this metric even in-season.

A family with 3 kids, 2 cars, and median earnings (one part-time, since working to pay for childcare often makes no financial sense) literally cannot afford to subsist primarily on "meat, cheese, and fresh produce".

Yup, class is a huge part of diet. No denying that.

> One parent has to come home after 8 hours working and cook.

Or 10! or 12!

Farmer's markets are the way to go for produce if you have farms in your area. Some are overpriced and upscale, some are cheaper than your local chain grocery store. You can also buy grains/beans in bulk at lower prices, often direct from farmer's coops, and have it shipped to your door. Get a pressure cooker for beans, a rice cooker, save on the gas prices as they're electric, and use an induction electric stove. If you want meat, well, that's going to get more expensive. Eating less meat, but higher-quality, is going to be healthier anyway (boycott the factory farms, grass-fed beef is probably best).

However, you have to learn to cook. This is a barrier for some people. To me cooking is relaxing and I've got a lot of low-effort high-speed methods, but then I have a background as a wet lab researcher and that's about 100X as painstaking, where you're tracking every single thing you do in a lab notebook, mixing up solutions with precisely measured masses and volumes, adjusting pHs, running timers and working in this high-pressure environment where one screwup can waste a whole day's work if not a whole month's. Cooking in comparison, I don't use recipes, it's just pure fun. Get a decent collection of spices, that's important. Learn to clean as you go, and you can take most raw ingredients and go right to a great meal in half an hour.

If you've never done much cooking, a course isn't a bad idea. Indian cooking classes are great for teaching you how to cook a wide variety of grains/beans/veggies. Baking is more of a hassle as you have to measure stuff out and be more careful with temps and times, and tends to take a bit longer, but has the benefit of being able to make larger dishes for more people in one shot.

> Some are overpriced and upscale, some are cheaper than your local chain grocery store

Some also sell imported fruits and veggies...

Indeed. I've seen bananas at the farmers market, and I don't live in Hawaii.

One local farmers market puts in significant effort verifying that the farmers are indeed local, including visiting the farm. People still show up with trucks full of identical pies, swearing they spent all day baking them.

Some have vendors who appear to be farmers but are people who buy produce at the food terminal like grocery stores and sell it at the farmers market.

I have never seen a cheap farmers market. Around here they seem to be exclusively for and patronized by wealthy older people, who don't blink at paying $7 for a head of lettuce.

Actual farmers markets are often designer shops for rich people.

If you find actual farms and coops you can get good deals.

There’s a local food coop that sells large boxes full of produce for $20 every Thursday - but you don’t get to choose what’s in the box.

Yes! There's a vegetable farmer here, does most of his profit at a farmer's market in a town across the valley, we would buy the box of whatever was left for $20. He would drop it off on his way home. Was a good deal for him, and we got amazing vegetables all summer.

The real farmers that drive in to urban areas tend to do the majority of their business with restaurants, often the rather better ones that want high-quality or unique produce (this is according to farmers I've talked to who referred to their farmer's market sales as 'nickel-and-dime'.)

Some of them do a half-off sale for everything they've got at the last half-hour of the market, that's good to know. Some are just buying from the wholesalers, too, that's something to watch out for as others note - but some of those run lower margins than the local grocery stores, so it's cheaper to buy from them.

I've seen tons. There are many in the Sacramento area where there are tons of farms, you can get produce and other items for pennies on the dollar compared to the grocery store.

Same, in area South of Seattle they have just become whole foods for the most part. I still go because at least the money goes to smaller scale businesses, but there is nothing inexpensive about them.

There used to be one at one of the Cow Palace parking lots in the 80's.

Even then, I was shocked at the low prices.

I stumbled on this Farmer's Market by accident.

I had this security job guarding the Cow Palace on the weekends. The insurance was less if they had a guy on the premises.

I remember seeing my boss (Bill. The nicest boss I ever had. Never forget this huge man walking towards me on a Sunday in complete darkness besides the emergency lights crying while holding a dead cat. He loved the abandoned cats that neighbors left on the property. The higher ups authorized poisoning the cats. I could feel his pain. When I saw the bait traps I disposed of the poison. I was the only one there during the day so I got no reprimands. I thought I'm fired, while carting my huge box of fruits/veggies, and honey, but he didn't care.

Since that day of shopping at that Farmer's market I was ruined I guess? Everone I have been to since was overpriced.

(Here's something to think about. There is a tiny model of the Cow Palace buried below the auditorium floor. Only a few people knew about it then. It was left there by the architects. I had keys to most rooms, and did my fair share of exploring. Seeing that model of the Cow Palace was something out of a Twillight Zone episode. They even put in tiny cars in the parking lots. It was all dusty, but an exact model of the Cow Palace in Daly City.)

Well those were some lovely reminiscences. Thank you. Did you see the model before it was buried?

The legit ones are cheap. I buy avocados for 50 cents a piece at mine. I think they are grown in ventura county.

In the US half of the farmer markets are basically expensive scams, but there’s always the legit ones with cheap products. For example, in SF there is Alemany farmer’s market, and that’s it.

> one screwup can waste a whole day's work if not a whole month's.

Whoa, your job is safe from the likes of me. I have undergone some tough times, but… that’s a bridge too far. Yikes.

> However, you have to learn to cook.

I cook the same meal almost everyday. I have precooked a pot of white rice (trying to use brown) that sits in the fridge. I start cooking a chicken quarter or two and then microwave some mixed frozen vegetables (corn, green beans, carrots). Then I put some of the rice on top of that, microwave again, then the chicken is done (add some seasoning) and eat with salt. I listen to a podcast while cooking.

Otherwise I eat junk food (BK/TB/McDs or ramen shop). I do have a binge eating problem (bored or way to fight brain dead). But I can also fast eg. eat a meal a day for weeks to drop 10s of lbs. It's not easy to keep it consistent. Also I am more productive if I don't eat the entire day (except caffeine/water), eating induces tiredness.

UK supermarkets are crap, and have got noticeably crapper in recent years. At even large mid-tier supermarkets you will find a paltry range of fruit and veg, and a maeger selection of almost entirely prepackaged meat and fish. I have noticed many things are routinely out of stock and it can be a lottery shopping for a specific recipe.

I recently visited Portugal, and in a small city supermarket there was a bakery, meat and a fish counters and a wide variety of produce, all labelled clearly by variety name. It put my local large supermarket to shame. The prices were cheaper too.

I find this every time I shop on the continent. Are our standards that much lower? Is it just Brexit? I yearn for a European supermarket experience in the UK.

UK supermarkets are far better in terms of fruit and veg selection than anything we have here in Germany. It can be much worse trust me. UK is also way cheaper

That explains the fruit and vegetables we have in the US in Aldi. I buy produce elsewhere.

Weird, I just moved to the US and Aldi is one of my favorite places.

Where do you go for produce? I'm in Chicago if that matters.

I like Aldi, just not for produce. For produce I usually go somewhere more premium like a Whole Foods, Fresh Market, or a local specialty grocery store. Or Costco, if I want a lot.

Not the grandparent, but I buy produce at Costco, local grocery chain, Whole Foods, and local natural foods co-op. Aldi is basically the worst produce available, second to Walmart/Target/convenience-store. I used to go there for bananas because they were a lot cheaper and acceptable (but lower) quality, but recently their banana prices haven't been lower.

Costco and specific midrange grocery stores like Kroger/Safeway/Publix etc. In Chicago there are many great independent grocery stores especially in the suburbs. Check out Village Market Place in Skokie.

I say specific because I found the quality varies greatly from store to store, and likely who the produce manager is. As much as I hate to say it, the stores in the more affluent neighborhoods carry higher quality produce.

Some of the highest quality produce I've found was at Costco, with a "picked/packed on" date of just 2-3 days prior to purchase. The downside is you have to buy in bulk, so be prepared to freeze or plan accordingly.

Also has great produce. The section just varies from week to week.

I got a great deal on small cucumbers and mangos but next week they didn't have either.

Honestly? Where are you shopping, what are you comparing to each other? I think the segmentation of stores in the UK and Germany are very different.

UK has Waitrose and (for some things) M&S for high quality fruit and veg. But they are also highly priced. Germany does not have a posh equivalent. However the common non-discounters (Rewe, Kaufland, Edeka, Globus), are really not bad.

I am not sure about the exact number of fruit and veg SKUs in Tescos and Sainsburys (UK) but I often find them of less quality than I remember them in Germany. I never had issues shopping fruit or veg in Germany nor the UK though.

I also noticed that the UK imports very aggressively non-seasonal products from afar. Like beans from Peru or blueberries from Morocco. I am not sure of that happens in Germany, too. So potentially you are noticing exotic fruit and veg having a different availability, which might be due to different customer awareness towards the impact on the climate of imported goods from afar.

Everything other than Waitrose in the UK is a “budget” brand. That’s why the selection is poor, and why the presence of a Waitrose makes house prices go up around it.

Waitrose also has their own essentials range which isn't particularly expensive.

Isn't discount supermarket a perception. I mean they are all supermarkets.

Only in the sense that low-end anything is 'a perception', since they are all after all 'that thing'?

Rewe and EDEKA aren’t bad but are far more expensive than UK supermarkets and still have less selection. The quality is higher though. Lidl is about the same but far more expensive. Aldi Nord is far worse than Aldi Süd which is in the UK

Btw I would definitely say that most Germans consider Rewe to be the posh equivalent

How is thos possible? When the Lidl and Aldi are both in the UK and Germany and what about the Netherlands?

From my understanding the Netherlands is the same as Germany.

Lidl is about the same but far more expensive. Aldi Nord is far worse than Aldi Süd which is in the UK

Lived in Denmark for a while, it was worst than anything I experienced in Germany and much more expensive. Though I found smaller shops, asian and middle eastern run with great vegetables and tofu (hard to find for some reason). And this was in Copenhagen mind you.

I have also heard this. It’s just so variable depending on local expectation and country

What German supermarket are you comparing too? Rewe, Edeka, and Real have a very wide offering of fruits and vegetables. Are you comparing to discounters?

In my experience Germany has the best supermarkets I’ve ever encountered, with ridiculously aggressive prices.

Rewe and EDEKA are extremely expensive compared to UK supermarkets

ah I noticed as well. UK supermarkets are great for junk food or novelties (Marks & Spencer is fun), but it's hard to buy good, simple food. Italy has greats supermarket and grocery stores.

Also Hungary has bad supermarkets, in my opinion.

I think part of it is that UK standards are lower when it comes to food, yes. I know this might be offensive, but I think there's some truth to it. The reason I think there's truth to it is that it works in the opposite direction too. Standards for food are higher in Italy than in Portugal and guess what? Their grocery stores are better than the Portuguese ones.

Comparing meat specifically in Portugal vs UK, it's generally awful in the UK, but I've never heard anyone there complaining about it. Therefore, the standards must be lower, even if by simple virtue of people not knowing any better.

I think you're right. For example in EU supermarkets you will typically find, separately: white onions, brown onions, sweet onions etc. In the UK: onions. Maybe sometimes also 'large onions'. Same goes for most other produce.

It's chicken and egg, as the demand for this won't materialise without awareness and the awareness won't arise without the knowledge there even are different types of onions, I imagine most Brits are clueless.

What type of onions are the UK "onions"? I'd assume white onions because they're attractive and versatile?

As a British expat, the “yellow onions” you see in US supermarkets are most familiar.

Also as a British expat, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose in Bath had all of the types of onion you’d find in the US pre-pandemic - though I haven’t been back since. I’d imagine Brexit may have ruined that.

I haven’t been back in a few years, but the selection of onions in my local Kroger would be staggeringly exotic next to the offerings of Tescos of the north-east.

Yes, I suppose it doesn't really surprise me that the regional variation would be different. Bath didn't have a Tesco until recently, but it did have a Safeway/Morrisons which had a slightly worse selection than the "posher" two. It also had a farmers market though which was by far the best place to buy anything.

I am absolutely baffled by the local grocery store’s (Midwest US) supply of potatoes. They have something like five+ varieties of midsize ones, two types of big ones, bags of both, and an entire end cap dedicated to various little bags of tiny potatoes.

I can't speak for Sainsbury's or Waitrose in Bath specifically, but neither Brexit nor the coronavirus has impacted my onion buying ability.

I was in Sainsbury's in Edinburgh this morning and there were yellow white and red onions, and shallots and spring onions too!

Yeah but where else can I get the unhealthiest food in the world: prepackaged scotch eggs

This is a ridiculous claim and entirely false (just go look at the online grocery sites e.g. https://www.ocado.com/browse/fresh-chilled-food-20002/vegeta... ). I have never experienced this in the UK. What kind of shops are you guys going to in the UK?

Red onions, brown onions, white onions (normal, large, bulk bags, loose or bagged, pre-chopped etc), shallots, echalions, spring onions, red spring onions, tropeas etc (them also organic + non-organic varieties of each) are all normal to see in UK super markets (at least in my local part of London). Even Tesco - a chain that many would say is the lowest of the low super market "for poor people" in the UK - carries these.

Depends where you are. Food deserts exist, even in relatively affluent countries. The range of goods at a supermarket is different in Bath (affluent) to Maerdy (poor).

Also size and population though?

Bath, being a major city, has far more residents and visitors than Maerdy, a small rural village.

My guess in Maerdy is that the residents probably drive somewhere (Aberdare?) with a supermarket. I'm not sure I'd live there without a car...

> I think part of it is that UK standards are lower when it comes to food

This is patent nonsense. Current UK food standards for the moment are aligned with EU standards despite Brexit.

> Comparing meat specifically in Portugal vs UK, it's generally awful in the UK, but I've never heard anyone there complaining about it. Therefore, the standards must be lower, even if by simple virtue of people not knowing any better.

Yet more nonsense based on absolutely no evidence at all.

I think they mean personal expectations, not safety or technical standards.

Then that's what they should have said.

You interpreted one way, everyone else interpreted it the way I meant it.

You have misunderstood the comment.

The food selection in Italy, in most areas, is unmatched anywhere else.

It's because of what Italians demand.

If UK citizens really wanted better food, it would appear.

'Health and Safety' standards and even 'grade certifications' etc. have nothing to do with it.

> If UK citizens really wanted better food, it would appear.

You can get top quality ingredients in Scotland and eat well here too (despite the "west coast" problem).

I'm sure Italy has its own fair share of shit-end supermarkets punting low quality produce as much as any other European country.

> You have misunderstood the comment.

Hardly my fault if the OP chooses to use a very specific phrase with a very specific meaning when it comes to food quality.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but since Brexit I've noticed the shelf life of fruit and veg has gone through the floor (I suspect the time the produce takes to reach the shelf has increased). For things that have advisory "best by" dates on (e.g. strawberries), where you used to get a date a week in the future, now you need to take care to not buy something with tomorrow's date.

In semi-related news, The Independent ran a story yesterday about how Brexit is causing less British fruit and veg to be produced: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-britis...

I have noticed the same thing with Christmas trees. They lose their "tiny green things" (name?) earlier.

Maybe picker/cutter shortages? Like instead of picking the strawberries or cutting trees with 10 people in one week 5 people do it in two weeks? To fill up one truck load.

"needles"

I understand people here debating veggies and fruits or meat. But Christmas trees? How often does one buy one? Once a year? Might have been a fluke? Or do you have a compelling reason to relate this to Brexit?

More of a point for the general phenomena.

I don't think it has anything to do with the EU or not. Rather I think there has been some industry wide "efficiency gain" in picking/harvesting/cutting stuff that make the product worse when you buy it.

Obviously the Christmas tree can be a fluke. But so was my mom's and my tree the year earlier. In my childhood they still had like moist resin and smelled alot. But the ones you buy nowadays are dull.

You need to get a base that allows you to water them, also some varieties just drop no matter what. Nordman firs seem ok still.

> "tiny green things"

“Pine needles”, as we say in the business

My parents are in Ireland and they're saying the same thing as we are - shelf life for fresh produce has dropped. Anecdotally, we've noticed that all our seasonal produce (e.g. strawberries right now) seems to have a decent 4-5 day shelf life.

One benefit of all the working from home has been a few commuter towns around me have revived their high streets.

E.g. i have two awesome butchers nearby, the fruit and veg shop is way better than 5 years ago in terms of selection - quality and price was always good there but selection is fantastic now. I’ve got lots of random little shops nearby now, e.g. a coffee roaster, a social food thingy etc etc

5 years ago this town mostly had just hairdressers on the Main Street.

I noticed that things got substantially worse in my local shops after Brexit. However, I don't think it's entirely that, or directly at least: if you find a "real" greengrocers (at a market stall or otherwise), you'll find a very much larger range of interesting veg than you normally see. I think that the big shops like standardising on things that sell very well, and fruit and veg are sort of the worst of worlds for them – readily perishable, wide range but low cost and low margins, and fussy customers who (famously) will leave "wonky" cucumbers on the shelves at the end of the day. The economic shit-show of the last few years has made supermarkets very price conscious and the first thing they can cut that actually has a meaningful impact on their bottom line, but is unlikely to be noticed, is their range of fresh goods.

If you're interested, in Denmark it's amazing to see the cultural differences – lots of lovely vegetables but with many different types of carrots, swede and turnips!

What I remember of the UK you had to inspect everything you buy closely. In Australia you don’t it is pretty much all good.

Also avocado and mangos taste good in Australia and are hard and tasteless in UK.

Most fruit is grown in Australia except out of season stuff that is easy to spot by it being triple the normal in season price.

My daugther was born in Finland. She always loved to eat fruit. When she was 2 we went to Australia and suddenly she did not want to eat "the same" fruit anymore. Well, they really tasted like fruit and not like colored water.

The UK might be marginally better than Finland, but they also get a lot of imported watery taste from Spain etc.

>they also get a lot of imported watery taste from Spain etc.

A lot of this is just eating out of season fruit grown in greenhouses and picked early to be transported to be "ripe" on the shelves. Eating fresh Italian tomatoes in February is as poor an experience as eating UK tomatoes in February, but eating them in June is likely to be much better in both cases.

Though with some bad luck, your tomato won't be tasty even in June:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190601232951/https://www.tages...

(Farmers allege and a Swiss supermarket chain actually confirms that for their supermarkets they prefer tomato varieties that "deliver a consistent taste all year round", so instead of mediocre tomatoes in winter and great tomatoes in summer instead you get mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round…)

Is the UK supermarket the same as the Netherlands?

I have lived, worked, and paid taxes in 5 countries. And it was obvious to me that the food standards in England (and the US) was lower than most European countries. Sorry if that offends but I believe this to be true based on personal experience living there.

> I find this every time I shop on the continent. Are our standards that much lower? Is it just Brexit? I yearn for a European supermarket experience in the UK.

I think it’s an Anglo thing. Canada, the US, and Australia are all like this too.

Australian supermarkets have gotten much better in the last few years. The quality is still lower than what you can find in your local green grocer or butcher, but there is a wider variety of items and specific supermarkets will carry items for the local community that other locations won't have. And so long as you buy in season, the supermarket is usually fine.

Honestly I miss U.K. supermarkets now I live in the US. (I moved before Brexit so things are probably much worse there now.)

Tesco somehow always managed to have what I needed but my local Safeway in SF frequently has empty shelves (predating the pandemic.) And unless you go to Trader Joe’s (which is missing a bunch of other stuff) there’re no nice freshly preprepared meals available.

I moved from the UK to Canada and still miss UK supermarkets to a degree. That said, I went back for ~1 month last summer and often ended up needing to go to multiple supermarkets to find basic things such as chicken breasts... If Brexit isn't the cause I'd be very surprised.

More likely covid was the issue (assuming you went in 2021?)

A lot of unavoidable staff sickness has caused major troubles in manufacturing and delivery of goods.

Plus some real stupidity relating to tax and licensing of lorry drivers. :-(

Yes, brexit has had an effect, but I think covid is more significant.

Yeah it was August of 2021.

Portugal is a difficult comparison because it has a great climate and very low wages. Compared to Northern France, Netherlands, Scandanavia etc British supermarkets are pretty decent.

>> At even large mid-tier supermarkets you will find a paltry range of fruit and veg

How much do you need? Is the problem that the supermarkets are crap or that your expectations are stupidly high? Any large Tesco/Sainsburys etc has every vegetable that I’ve ever tasted available all year round.

That reminds me of a scene from the movie "Infamous" which is about Truman Capote and Harper Lee traveling to rural Kansas in the 1960s to research Capote's true crime book "In Cold Blood". Truman visits a grocery store to buy cheese and only finds Velveeta processed cheese there. He asks an employee if that's all the cheese they have. The employee says "Well, how much do you need?" missing the point that it wasn't the amount but the lack of variety that was the issue.

Same in France. My parents basically never go there and just shop at farmers’ markets, or butchers, or bakers, or fishermen, etc.

Although I remember waitrose in the UK not being bad

Booths (regional chain in the northwest) are outstanding; Waitrose are obviously good too. Our local co-op, Midcounties (the second biggest, I think) has a number of Food Market stores which have a really decent range. But if you go by Tesco and Asda you’ll be disappointed.

My greatest frustration with UK supermarkets is the illusion of choice. You'll find metres of shelving with the same product in different branding / price points. Went looking for Thai Jasmine rice, but the rice section is just 40 variants of Basmati, & one box of Arborio. There's 5 metres of fridges packed with fish but it's all Cod, Haddock and Salmon in various guises.

If you want any ingredient that's remotely off the beaten track (and I'm not talking super exotic stuff, basics herbs like Sage are hard to find) you've got to go Waitrose or specialty shops.

This fucks me off no end. As someone who eats vegemite, to find a full meter of shelving dedicated to Marmite in various formats almost everywhere is very frustrating. For long shelf life goods what's the downside of just providing more options?

It would be hard for me to believe any generalizations about grocery stores in the US. In San Francisco where I live, there are ~5 grocery stores within walking distance that span an order of magnitude in price and markup. Some items are only available at the higher end stores, and items that overlap are sold for up to 10x the price at the smaller, more expensive stores.

For example I can get a pint of heavy cream for ~$2 at the cheap store, or I can get an organic fancy one for $15 at Whole Foods. I can also get a normal brand name (Horizon) for either $3 or $6, depending on where I buy it. Finally, Safeway has a unique ultra-pasteurized product that is way better for me (lasts for months) for ~$4. Very difficult to make any generalizations about service or value.

You are clearly ultra-wealthy, so don’t speak for the majority of Americans

Even paupers deserve some cream in their diet.

This reads like sarcasm, but I don't know. I wouldn't assume someone is ultra-wealthy because they live in SF.

I lived around Geary and 7th. Similar experience. So many grocery stores. They're all tiny, and heavily focused on different ethnicities of food. The halal butcher was great. Meraki permanently closed, but it was great for fancy food.

The thing that was most mind blowing was the corner liquor store having fruits and vegetables. Not much, and different every week - but something.

I was living in that area for the lockdown. A few different places I regularly visited offered toilet paper. They let me know if I needed some they would help me out.

I grew up in a small town, I moved to the "big city" for school. San Francisco is really special in regard to food. I don't know, but I'd guess old parts of all major cities have a pretty spectacular grocery stores. Let me assure you, you're in a special situation, that most folks aren't. Old cities aren't enough, they need that daily foot traffic, consistently, forever.

I don't see any 15 dollar heavy cream at Whole Foods via the Amazon app. The 365 brand is 4 dollars. Highest I see is 6 dollars. This is in Los Angeles. Changed my zip to 94105 which is the most expensive zip in SF and I still don't see 15 dollar heavy cream.

One interesting development in the last few years is that Whole Foods is working hard to become Safeway and Safeway is working hard to become Whole Foods.

I am not sure how this article got past any editorial checks. First they state prices are too low in the US to make any profit, then on the next paragraph goes on to talk about “yet” Americans getting served less. Finally reverting back complaining Americans are not getting a good deal.

author also use gross profit of Walmart, which sells everything from salt to guns, as a measure of profitability for “grocery” stores.

What are the “peddling” here - dark store as a concept ?

Right- I would love to see the numbers compared with something like Kroger, whose main business is groceries. Calling Walmart a grocery store is like calling Target a grocery store-- technically true, since they both sell groceries, but neither of them seems to be especially focused on food.

I certainly don't argue with the idea that our grocery stores suck, though I'm not convinced it's a solely american problem nor that the reasons are those given in the article.

The purpose of this article is to serve as propaganda. It purposely diverts the blame from the government to the "big bad stores"

Agreed, I too was surprised to see such a fact-deprived article from the Economist. While reading it I wondered if the Economist had started a public "blog" section or something, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

> author also use gross profit of Walmart, which sells everything from salt to guns, as a measure of profitability for “grocery” stores.

The article has an entire paragraph dedicated to this:

> Walmart’s shops are enormous, selling plenty besides groceries. Tesco operates over 4,000 shops, the bulk of which are its smallest. Walmart has only 4,700 shops in total, despite serving a population about five times larger. On average, its supermarkets are ten times larger by floor space than Tesco’s. Bigger stores increase consumer choice. A Walmart supercentre might stock 140,000 different items, compared with just 40,000 at Tesco’s biggest branches. But it also means they may be wasting a lot of space by stocking products that do not sell, adding to costs. American supermarkets sell far less per square foot of shop space than British supermarkets, notes Bryan Roberts, a consultant based in London.

Something about comparing the US to other rich nations rubs me the wrong way when, in my opinion, servicing a country as large as the US is very different from servicing a small island like the UK. The post talks about difference in margins and regional squeezing, etc. However, how much of the cost difference comes from transporting the goods? The post also mentions how large stores are, and how large of a selection there is, in US stores. That seems like it'd drive up the cost, but I don't hear Americans complaining about too many options. Honestly, I think it's an achievement that an American can eat as healthy for the same price as the French, they are very different countries geographically!

I think it's less about wealth, and more about population density.

For perspective, France is slightly smaller than two Colorados.

> but they do not have the size that European supermarkets have to resist price increases by suppliers.

Walmart bankrupted Vlassic by suckering them into a deal where they were stuck selling pickles at a loss. They are infamous for dictating price to their suppliers.

Campbell’s soup spun Vlasic off as a separate company but they loaded them with debt owned back to Campbell’s.

Two years later, Vlasic missed a debt payment to Campbell’s and had to go into bankruptcy.

The article was referencing regional grocers. However, and to your point, Albertsons and Safeway may be "national" brands but Albertsons, Inc. (which is Albertsons/Safeway) actually has 22 "regional" banners that are all serviced by a single corporation, which I don't think this article actually takes into account.

I discovered a few years back when visiting OH, SoCal, and VT that my Safeway card works at Vons, Acme, and Shaw's.... and that the store layouts and much of the contents are basically identical as well.

The layouts are extremely purposeful. There are books written about how to lay out grocery stores. They do the same kind of A/B testing on store layouts that Amazon does on the “buy it now” button. It’s no accident that there are three different places in the grocery store to buy cheese, or that produce is at the front of the store and milk at the back, or that candy is next to the register and potato chips are on the end caps.

> Walmart bankrupted Vlassic

https://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know

I always find the Walmart Vlasik story funny.

I mean Vlasik could always say no? If they were dumb enough to enter into a deal with Walmart than was worse than no deal at all, that’s on them.

My guess is some sales dude thought he could get a good deal with Walmart, couldn’t, took it anyways, then decided to blame Walmart.

I mean if I need my house painted and some painter offers a deal where they lose money don’t blame me when I accept.

> My guess is some sales dude thought he could get a good deal with Walmart, couldn’t, took it anyways, then decided to blame Walmart.

WalMart deals always look good in the short term. The problem is the longer term.

What really happened is that some sales dude got a deal with WalMart, bumped his numbers, got a promotion, cashed his check, and cleared outta dodge. And then over the next few years WalMart squeezed Vlasic to death.

> I mean Vlasik could always say no?

Saying no doesn't always work out either. See: Snapper

https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

Snapper got bought by Briggs & Stratton and the Georgia plant was closed.

Sounds like Snapper, similar to Vlasik, was headed for the crapper Walmart or no Walmart.

Yea, that seems totally bunk outside of double or single-digit store companies. Even the regional US chains like Publix or HEB or Fred Meyer are as large as many EU chains outside of Tesco, which may as well be the Walmart of Europe.

I'm just tired of so many articles whose whole premise is "the US isn't doing thing X that a smaller, denser, and massively older country has done." Yea, the US has issues and is responsible for a lot of its own problems, but it's also not the same as Germany or France or Spain on so many different levels. You can make the case that the US should actually be N different countries, but that's not really an option, so you deal with the world as it is.

Even the regional US chains like Publix or HEB or Fred Meyer are as large as many EU chains outside of Tesco, which may as well be the Walmart of Europe.

Tesco isn't the largest chain in Europe. Walmart is bigger than the large European chains, by a factor of (just?) about 5 to 10.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103223/leading-grocery-...

https://payspacemagazine.com/retail/top-7-supermarket-chains...

Ah fair. I mostly meant that in the sense that, Tesco is closer to Walmart's "we sell everything" offering. Your second link was talking about the largest grocer in Europe having 1300 stores across 8 countries, which is about the same size as Publix which only operates in 7 states and has 800 stores in Florida alone.

Schwarz group operates 1300 Kaufland stores. Kaufland is like a Walmart (as far as I understand), each store is huge and sells everything. They also operate around 10000 Lidl stores across 32 countries. Those are smaller and sell mostly groceries. I think Tesco exists in several sizes, from small urban stores to suburban super stores.

Obligatory link:

https://www.fastcompany.com/54763/man-who-said-no-wal-mart

This is anecdotal data but I think our grocery stores are amazing wonders of the modern age and fulfill every need I could dream of.

As long as you have the money and live in an area served by a decent grocer

I love our grocery stores too. But you need bigger dreams.

Beastman82, you're dreams are good enough :)

In all seriousness, having the massive variety of choice at reasonable (I grew up eating mainly plain grains) prices is a wonder.

Speak for yourself. I find I can never get everything on my list at just one store, so I end up having to shop through multiple stores to try and find what I'm looking for. Even then there are things I can't get at any store in town.

I'll agree with them being wonders of the modern age but they are far from fulfilling my needs.

Are the items you can't find in the one store out of stock, or that store simply doesn't sell them to begin with?

The latter. (It wouldn't be fair to complain about stock shortages; everybody's suffering from those in some way or another.)

I live in a small city in a rural area of the midwest that has a handful of grocery stores. We had two locations of a pretty good regional chain that offered what I would consider a broad enough selection of items, but several years ago they were acquired by a national chain and the selection was greatly reduced. I've been to that chain's stores in larger cities and they had a much wider range. Honestly I think they just made some (IMO) unfortunate value decisions when scaling down for a smaller market.

Other grocery stores in the area each seem to have one thing they're really bad at: one is known for their terrible produce, another refuses to carry specific common items or brands, another is highly variable in what items they carry at any given point in time (regardless of recent shortages).

It's certainly a modern marvel that we can have access to all of this food concentrated in one convenient place, I don't mean to diminish that or the work involved in getting it there. But I do think it's a space in which most if not all of the players (in my area, at least) could use some improvement.

Comparing grocery stores in USA and Europe (let’s say Italy), one big difference is that USA has a much larger variability in quality of products. In usa, You can buy the cheapest meats to the most expensive. While in italy the lower bound of meat quality is capped: a low end meat in Italy is medium to high end in USA.

It makes grocery shopping in Italy much more pleasant than in USA. You go into any grocery store in Italy and you are assured that you will get good quality products no matter what price range you pay.

Much of the Mediterranean has amazing produce. The few times I was in a US supermarket, I was amazed at how pricey the food was and not that impressed with the variety of food. I mean, you'd expect to be impressed in e.g, San Francisco by the local produce. For that I had to go to the Farmer's Market, which charges an arm and a leg for nice produce that I would get at a quarter of the price in my local super market.

IMHO, US supermarkets have very little on e.g. French supermarkets. I'm originally from the Netherlands, which has a pretty competitive range of supermarkets. But there's nothing like the French ones. They are huge and well stocked. The French obviously love food and don't really tolerate bad food. So their supermarkets are well stocked with amazingly good quality fish, meat, bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, etc. I'm less familiar with Italian supermarkets but I'd expect they are even more fanatical about good quality food. I've been to supermarkets in Spain and Portugal as well; same deal.

I currently live in Germany, home of Aldi and Lidl, which are big here obviously. My local supermarket is a Rewe. They are alright. 300 meters from my front door, I treat it like my walk in fridge. Convenience is key for me.

I think Walmart actually tried to expand to Europe and more or less failed. It seems like European supermarkets are doing better in the US.

> My local supermarket is a Rewe. They are alright. 300 meters from my front door, I treat it like my walk in fridge. Convenience is key for me.

This is the best description of German supermarkets ive seen. It explains the frequent supermarket visits, small quantity purchases and smaller fridges (in most apartments) compared to the US.

I wouldnt compare meat in the US to all of Europe. No idea about quality of meat in Italy but in German supermarkets even high end beef tastes like shit compared to what you would get (non high end) in the US.

Europe splits into the “olive oil / Mediterranean” countries and “butter” countries.

Usually the Mediterranean countries have better grocery stores compared to the butter countries.

Anecdotal I guess but I’ve visited 15-20 countries across Europe and Asia in the last ~10 years and the supermarkets were largely not great relative to your average American Kroger.

Kroger has some good deals, but the Kroger brand is often inferior in quality when compared to Walmart's brand...

Yeah I think the like lowest end bread at an Italian grocery store is going to be way better than the lowest end "bread" at an American grocery store, but the difference is at the American store there is literally (I shit you not) 50-100 varieties of bread and a lot of them are decent (actually by a lot I mean like 4-10).

Which I think generally means you have to be more savy on wha to buy. But tbf. specifically regarding bread, coming from German speaking region, I could never get happy in my (limited) US experience. The standard there seems to be adding sugar and that just straight up ruins bread for me.

That's all going to depend on where you are. Bread seems like a big division - shelf-stable bread is a lot less of a thing in Europe, likely because of a longer tradition of bakers. If you're in a major US city though, I've never had an issue finding French/German style breads, and usually at a normal grocer, if not at a specialty baker.

> shelf-stable bread is a lot less of a thing in Europe, likely because of a longer tradition of bakers.

I don’t think tradition of bakers has anything to do with it. In France going to buy a baguette every couple of days is the norm (or was when I lived there as a kid). In the US, we generally do one weekly grocery shopping trip, so shelf-stable bread becomes the convenient default.

But that's why bakers were relevant. When I was young there was bakery reachable by foot near anyone's home. Kids would get fresh bread on Sunday, the bakery was a place where you met people.

That changed. They all closed. But as you said people still consume their bread fresh here in central Europe.

It still matters what is the standard, even if you can find alternatives. It admittedly may matter more to a traveler who goes through airports and middle class hotels though, than to people living there.

For sure. I just hear the "I went to the US and there was no REAL bread to be found" and I'm always a little confused. Even the local grocer in my fairly poor neighborhood growing up had a section of bread loaves in various styles. I'm sure the selection is worse if you're in a more rural part of the US, but that's probably also towns that maybe never had an actual baker even when they were founded, assuming they were founded in an era that would have been reasonable.

I just think bread is one of these things that are central to each European culture. Germans miss their bread even in France and vice versa.

In my experience almost none of the US supermarket breads are decent. They almost all have added sugar and don't taste good compared to UK/French/Italian bread. There is one brand called "The Rustic oven" that has come out recently that has no added sugar and isn't bad, but that's the exception.

That sounds like mostly just catering to local tastes

Yeah, complaining that Americans on the whole prefer their bread sweeter is like being mad at the French for liking bread with big air pockets.

Like it’s a super weird thing where American food culture is almost universally shit on despite being just as rich, rooted in history, and varied as any other. Like if the story was that say Albanians preferred sweet breads the preference would be respected to the point of being mythologized but for American’s it’s just “oh those fat uncultured Americans with unrefined taste.”

I've had good luck shopping at local co-ops.

Here are a couple maps:

* https://grocerystory.coop/food-co-op-directory

* https://foodforchange.coop/featured/u-s-food-co-op-map/

Australia has the best supermarkets in the world, hands down. Why? Because we grow and produce almost all of our fresh produce, dairy, meat, and seafood. There are some exceptions for seasonal things, but the Australian climate allows for almost everything we eat to be grown here.

The solution to this problem in the US and the UK is less globalism, not more.

Is that true? I feel like most of the stuff I see in stores in the US is from the US or Mexico. Maybe South America to deal with seasonal changes.

I can't tell if you're joking or not, because the quality of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and poultry at Australian supermarkets is incredibly mediocre (and even that's being generous).

I'd rank Australia near-bottom of the dozen or so countries I've lived in/visited when it comes to supermarket quality[0]. Homogenized, bland food pumped full of water, optimized for profitability, shelf-life and appearance rather than nutrition or flavour.

[0] to be fair, the USA is even worse.

To add some context to your comment, which country has the best, and what’s the name of the best chain in that country?

For me, Spain or Italy probably competing for top spot, with one of Carrefour/Mercadona/Esselunga being best for standard (non high-end) weekly fresh shopping.

I even rate Vanguard and Carrefour in China, and Fairprice/Cold Storage in Singapore, above Australia.

Australia is so large that that's not very meaningful. Early in the year and throughout, a lot of fresh fruit sold in Germany is grown in Spain. That's 2000 km, around half the distance between Perth and Sidney. If I consider that as Australian-local, food from the entire Mediterranean is locally grown.

To be fair we have these kinds of supermarkets in Switzerland too. They just don't have a lot of stock or choice :)

Unless it's Trader Joes, in which case I leave noticeably happier than I was pre-grocery shopping.

I'd attribute that to the selection of choices for any individual item being very low there. There aren't 48 brands of meatballs to choose from.

They also do not want self checkouts, coupons, apps, etc.

> coupons, apps

Good? Apps are just extra margin places like Safeway tack on. Coupons are just taking things from fat margin to TJ-level margin.

Oh I love it. I try to buy almost everything at TJs.

Opposite here: I dislike Trader Joe's. I call it "bougie safeway". Trader Joe's is great if you like boxed, prepared food, but it isn't much better for anything else. Their produce is meh and overly wrapped with packaging.

I concur. I can't find anything other than all purpose and wheat flour. No bread flour, or anything more obscure like rye, spelt, etc. Similarly, they sell a single sea salt, alongside tons of trendy mixed salts. Want iodized salt? Go find a big grocery store. I do find tons of snacks and TV dinners, which I enjoy. But if I'm stocking up on essentials, I'd rather go to a big store. And yes, I do find obscure flours at big stores, most recently 00 and rye.

But that's exactly why TJs is cheaper. You gain price and sacrifice variety.

It's not just food either, trader joes is lacking many of the non-food goods that other grocery stores almost universally have. Need aluminum foil or parchment paper? You can't buy those at trader joes.

> trader joes is lacking many of the non-food goods that other grocery stores almost universally have.

It's almost like their business model is “don’t devote lots of floor space to stuff you can get anywhere so price competition drives margins to zero”. .

I'm aware.

This is indeed why Trader Joe's could never be my entire grocery shopping experience. Even staples like dry black beans are unavailable. God forbid you want to bake something...

They have a couple interesting products that I can't get elsewhere, and they don't have lots of products that I can get at literally any other grocery store.

What are you using the dried black beans for that a can won’t suffice?

Not OP, but the texture is different. Soak some black beans overnight then cook them, and compare them to rinsed canned beans. The latter are slipper and spongy, the former are lighter and have better texture.

They're cheaper, take up less space, no processed crap from all the goo in the can, you can cook them to whatever firmness you want...should I keep going?

They taste differently, it us very noticeable. So, soups and sauces. The dried beans soup is my favorite, canned beans soup is crap.

I couldn't even find plain white sugar the last time I looked. They have small bags of "raw" sugar, which is fine for putting in coffee, but not good enough for many baking needs.

Way off topic here, but Anna napoletana tipo "00" changed my life.

00 flour is great for baking and pizzas!

I had to adjust my hydration when switching from all-purpose to 00, but it is definitely a superior structure, especially with a 48-hour ferment and a little diastatic malt.

Someone said that his favorite part of shopping at Trader Joe's is afterwards when you go to a supermarket to buy all the stuff you need.

Safeway has everything I'd want from Trader Joe's at this point, and I don't have to do two trips.

TJ's for us is "we need these specific store brand items" or "I need to restock my Blackthorn cider." And unfortunately TJ's has removed three store brand products in the past two years, so the number of reasons to go there is rapidly diminishing for our household.

On a side note: Purchase a bag of vital wheat gluten, a 2lb/1Kg bag will last a very long time. The difference between AP flour and bread flour is the gluten content. You can bring any regular AP flour up to the highest gluten level that a high gluten bread flour brand like King Arthur will produce. One tablespoon of vital wheat gluten exchanged for one tablespoon of AP flour for every two cups/240 grams/2.4oz of AP flour is a provides a good high gluten ratio. I use it regularly in my bread recipes and pizza dough recipes. I only keep bread flour on the shelf for those days when I am feeling lazy or need a very specific brand of bread flour for one specific recipe.

I also find that adding gluten to rye-heavy doughs makes them rise far more easily (and generally just behave better).

I agree that there's way too much plastic on the produce, but some of the boxed prepared food is really, really great.

TJ's is significantly better value and less margin than Safeway. The opposite of "bougie."

I'm not convinced that the value is better. Most of the stuff at TJ's is reasonable quality, but the prices are often lower only because there's less product in the package. I'd have to sit down and compare unit prices before I could be assured you were getting a better value for your money.

TJ’s may be lower margin on what they carry than Safeway would be on comparable items; they achieve that by avoiding carrying lots of the low-margin items every other grocery store spends lots of money devoting floor space to.

(But those are things people tend to also need a lot, so TJ’s ends up being an extra shopping trip, instead of a replacement.)

TJ's processed/frozen stuff is often better, and always way cheaper, than either the name brands or supermarket generic brands. So I get those things at TJ's (sometimes along with stuff like milk and eggs), and buy grains, produce, meat and everything else from Ralphs.

The local paper did comparison shopping and found Safeway to be about the same price for a weekly trip as Whole Foods. Trader Joes was significantly cheaper in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It's hit or miss, but usually just because the stuff I don't like their is not my taste, not that it is poor quality. Some of their products I think are really great, both in quality and bargain. Plus, they work on a space efficiency model: products that don't sell popularly won't be kept in stock. Sometimes that's what I'm optimizing for when I want to try new products: what are other people voting for with their dollars?

Agreed. But to be fair, I've yet to see somewhere with a better cheese selection.

Well, I live in Berkeley, so I'm pretty damn spoiled when it comes to cheese shops. But I can see that being helpful if there are no cheese stores, import stores, or specialty foods stores in your town.

Man I miss the Berkeley Bowl, I spent years within walking distance..

Is Cheese Board still in business?

Our Kroger has a pretty nice cheese selection. Not quite Whole Foods but it's way, way cheaper

I think a lot of it is because it's novel to me. I'm in the Midwest, and I just don't have any close to the greater Springfield, MO area. I'm told it's just beyond their supply chain. You have to get around St.Louis before they show up.

We have HyVee though, and I quite enjoy it there.

I love Trader Joe's, but checkout there just takes too long. I want to grab products and leave, and not to spend 15-30 minutes on line.

Y'all must go at peak times or something, I've never waited at the checkout at my TJs

I grocery shop with my toddlers first thing in Saturday morning and our first stop is TJs. I only buy about a dozen different products at TJs but they're all staples in our weekly meals / snacks. Checkout is never a problem early in the morning.

Their food is whatever, but their long, slow checkout lines that obstruct other shoppers and generally customer-hostile layout often pushes me to the border of rage. The only thing that keeps me level are those dark chocolate peanut butter cups.

I don’t understand, can you elaborate?

The dark chocolate peanut butter cups are really really (really) good

If you go there when it's busy, the checkout lines can get pretty large (they don't have dedicated baggers) and crowd parts of the store. With that said, I've noticed a similar trend at bigger stores by me lately as they added more self-checkout lines.

I've generally found that checkout times at TJs are much less than the local supers.

Price- and quality-wise they totally win on cheese and pasta by a huge margin. Supermarket cheese is generally pretty awful (the only cheeses we get at the super are Mexican cheeses that TJs doesn't stock. I’ve occasionally bought, say cheddar at the super and it’s awful and costs more than TJs).

The big thing for me for the last two years is that the clientele and staff at my local TJs have done a much better job of taking Covid seriously than the same at Whole Foods¹ or any standard super.

⸻

1. I was in Whole Foods earlier today and was rather appalled to see a sign saying that customers are welcome [italics mine] to shop without a mask regardless of vaccination status. This while local Covid rates are on the rise. It seemed like they were encouraging people to go maskless.

> It seemed like they were encouraging people to go maskless.

What year is it!?

Can you tell me by looking at this photo what section I am in and what else I might find in this aisle?

https://i0.wp.com/www.dailycal.org/assets/uploads/2021/09/TJ...

It's the cookies and crackers and frozen food and hot sauce and candy and coffee aisle, of course! Next one over is the soap and pasta and canned goods and spices and dog food and olive oil.

There’s like 6 aisles, it’s not hard to remember which products are where. It’s not like one of those 20 aisle stores with unrelated endcaps. There are gas stations bigger than Trader Joe’s.

I find their checkout to be the fastest of any store I go to, but I suppose it probably depends on the location.

I've only been to a handful of their stores, but every single one just feels way too small. It also feels like the majority of the people there are employees restocking shelves and just generally being in the way. They are friendly and it's nice there's always someone I can ask if I need help finding someone, but it can be annoying to always have people in your way.

The small store sizes are all almost surely one of the factors that enables the low prices other comments have mentioned.

Try ringing the bell next time the lines are slow. That'll get their attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbafXjG9ROA

I'll also add their slowness is partly due to their clientele (moreso that standard stores) bringing their filthy reusable grocery sacks, which throw off the flow of the line.

The staff use these to communicate. There’s no intercoms so this is how they know when to open more registers, come to the front of the store, etc. Don’t ring the bells, they will not appreciate it.

Source: past TJs employee

Probably an unpopular opinion––and I love TJs––but I feel like the quality and type of things you can buy there is akin to a Dollar General. The produce is often covered in plastic and subpar quality. The selection isn't great. Honestly, its greatest perk is the frozen food section and snacks.

Trader joes is basically just a larger version of the "grocery" aisle at a drug store wrapped up in some nice marketing. Hard pass.

Trader Joe's originated as a spin-off of the Rexall drugstore chain, so you're closer than you think.

I don't know where you get that from, but, um, no. Not remotely true.

From Wikipedia:

> Also in 1958, Rexall employee Joe Coulombe was asked to test the launch of Pronto Markets, a store brand to compete against 7-Eleven. After running six Pronto Markets in the Los Angeles area, Rexall asked Coulombe to close them down. Coulombe decided to buy them out instead, and eventually renamed the chain "Trader Joe's".

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexall#Growth)

I think of it as the place to get frozen Indian food and salad kits. Do drugstores have those?

Yeah, usually (at least the ones near me). There's usually a freezer section with stuff like that in it.

I feel like Trader Joes is good for snacks you don't see else where but I can never _just_ go to trader joes and come home with some meals to make.

I realize they sell microwave boxed meals, but yuck. Thankfully they are right next to whole foods so it's not much harm to stop in.

They have an interesting design principle where they only put stores in places where you feel like you're going to hit someone in the parking lot. I suppose it promotes biking to the store.

Grocery stores are amazing? They're the ultimate feat of human engineering. I'd trade the internet for the modern grocery store.

Agree, well, if I didn't agree I have no food.

I can’t really agree with most of the article. I think that while there is some price gouging, mostly food price increases are simply an effect of inflation.

I like the generality of super markets. I like to cook so I buy whole grains/rice, lots of fresh produce, a variety of foreign/exotic spices and prepared sauces, and occasional free range/no feed lot beef. On the other hand, I know people who don’t have as much free time as I have and they can get frozen/canned, etc. food that is fast to prepare. Everyone gets what they want or need.

That said, my wife and I also frequent the weekly farmers’ market, and I go to a tiny store where I see local producers unloading locally grown produce from their pickup trucks.

I wonder if a byproduct of inflation might be more people cooking healthier meals from bulk/cheaper staples.

i live in Kashmir valley which has historically survived on rice as a staple diet. even today, due to political, historical and social reasons, everyone (actually everyone) has a stock of 100-400 Kgs of rice at anytime during the year.

this "stock" is religiously followed by every household. This also means for a small family, "survival" in case of trouble is much more reasonable because like rice, historically every family just "adjusts" whatever family needs are. families do not "move out" unless there is a house ready to move into. that means, for the most part, a family in difficult times has only daily milk and something to have with rice to survive.

i have done that, every kashmiri has been there so its pretty much normal.

About grocery stores, we still have an informal system of agriculture. there are no big chains, a farmer can bring his/her produce to a market and have small retailers who buy in small quantities (5-50kgs, depending) and sell that produce on their small shops. your "farmers market" is "the" market so the prices do not fluctuate much or like, there is no corporation that can influence prices

Thanks for your comments, very interesting.

I guess people have forgotten the world before supermarkets (the replacement for traditional 'grocery stores'). You could not buy a pineapple or a banana or an orange. It was impossible. What made it possible were the literal overthrow of governments by corporations that acted like pirates with a monopoly on a given crop, in combination with technical and logistical revolutions.

It's also amazing to see supermarkets getting the blame. Food prices are almost entirely based on trade deals and exploitation by food producers. Supermarkets are just the last mile in a long chain that includes not just food producers and transporters and sellers, but competing markets with politically-influenced tariffs and government subsidies. The price you pay for food has almost nothing to do with the supermarket, unless said supermarket has such a stranglehold on its markets that it can dictate prices up the food chain (Walmart is the only one in the US like this afaik).

Yes, America, your food is more expensive now. Because for the past 70 years, your food prices have been artificially lowered as a result of anticompetitive market manipulations, government subsidies, backroom trade deals, and changing global environments. The majority of fresh produce you get in a US supermarket isn't even from this country! And let's not even talk about the sizeable portion of this country that doesn't even have access to fresh produce, regardless of cost. Your ability to "eat healthy" is more of a political act than a gastronomic or commercial one.

This true, but it's actually not the proximate cause for higher food prices: excess stimulus and higher energy prices are.

1. Government spent $1T.

2. Fed made it stupidly cheap to borrow money.

3. We have under invested in the oil and gas industry for years, further industry consolidation after the COVID crash has led to high natural gas and diesel prices. We lack the equipment, manpower, and capital to expand.

4. Fertilizer is made using natural gas for feedstock. Diesel is used to transport food.

5. Ethanol is made from sugar cane and corn. It's used as a fuel additive too. This puts further pressure on food prices.

6. Toss in Ukraine/Russia, it gets even worse.

I hope this doesn't get buried. I don't know enough to agree or disagree, so I'd like to see how people respond.

I'm sending you articles pre 2022 from various sources just to make the point these effects were well understood and foreseen before the Ukraine war. While I include articles here about Biden's spending, it's worth noting Trump also spent a truckload of money. Use archive.ph to read anything paywalled.

[0]: Energy and Food Security: Linkages through Price Volatility https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

[1]: Nat gas and fertilizer https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fertilizer-prices-soaring-...

[2]: Biden's Stimulus Is Stoking Inflation, Fed Analysis Suggests

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/business/economy/fed-infl...

[3]: Biden’s ‘America First’ Policies Are Spreading Global Pain (Adviser during Trump admin)

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/12/biden-global-food-infla...

[4]: Yellen Wanted Biden Relief Plan Cut by a Third, Biographer Says (Recent article, but mentions her hang ups in 2021)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-04/yellen-wa...

Another thing to consider is that the Fed bought bonds issued by any high-grade corporation in the US. There was record issuance during 2020-2021. This means that those companies now have more cash on their balance sheets they can use to steer the economy going forward... so yes Apple can pay $22 an hour as a base rate now in part because they borrowed $12.5B last year but your local community hospital with razor thin margins can't compete with that. Also, many people were able to retire early from stock appreciation and home value appreciation alone which put a huge dent in the labor force.

There are a LOT of distortionary effects that remain to be seen from the stimulus alone. Now add deglobalization to the mix, and everything becomes even worse.

How has Biden's stimulus differed from Trump's?

The nature of the stimulus itself doesn't matter. What matters is the total size. The money always ends up leaking into commodities until the economy chokes.

Trump spent way too much money, and then Biden spent even more. We had $1T of debt, Trump spent another $1T, Biden spent another $1T. This alone justifies a doubling/tripling of prices everywhere which is exactly what you're seeing.

Wheat has tripled. Natural gas has tripled. Oil has doubled. Copper has almost doubled. Corn has doubled. Soybean has doubled.

We need the government to take money back however it can right now to control inflation. The US government needs to use taxes to buy back its debt and drain liquidity from the market. But of course, they're just going to keep spending more in response to inflation (gas stimulus checks, tax cuts, home buying credits), which is even more inflationary.

I'd be curious to learn more about this, any recommended reading?

Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins

The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen is a great book about the banana industry and government

Per the article, American supermarkets have the same profits (~2%) as cheaper European ones, but much higher fixed costs. Some of these costs are the cost of inputs, but that only explains so much; wholesale food prices are much lower than what you pay at the grocery store.

Political wing-nuttery aside, I don't see who you think is the culpable party here.

Trade is a boogeyman - most countries import way more of their food than America does. The UK import 46% of its food, the US imports 15%.

It's probably not farmers, since most of them seem to be going bankrupt. There is a guy that's made $4 billion on pistachios and almonds, but that's not exactly your food staples.

I don't think it's the truckers, I haven't heard of anyone making a killing driving produce around.

The article has some good theories as to why it might in fact be the grocery store's fault. America's stores are larger, stock more goods, have higher-touch service, and sell fewer store brand products. This gives them a higher cost structure, resulting in high food prices without high profits. There are grocery stores in America with lower prices, places like Trader Joe's, which sell a smaller selection of store-brand goods in smaller stores at lower prices.

Per the article, companies like Tyson upstream in the supply chain are taking record profits. So high wholesale prices due to concentration of suppliers is indeed a major part of the equation.

The banana republics created were quite awful, no question there. But current government subsidies are there so that we don't see worse food shortages during times when food production is disrupted. Say, some guy far away declaring war on an area that produces a significant fraction of the wheat in the world, or some country that sells a lot of fertilizer and/or oil not selling it so much any more for whatever reason.

Yes, they're anti-competitive, but they have a pretty good reason to exist in countries that might frequently get into wars, since they would leave a pretty big vulnerability otherwise.

Also, a lot of the food production is sold via futures to stabilize prices and to offset the huge costs of producing it that aren't recouped until months later, but the futures + inflation are kinda working against the producers right now, especially when combined with fuel & fertilizer costs going crazy.

I'm not sure about your assertion that supermarkets have so little to do with the prices, they may not take that big a cut overall, but that really depends on how careful you are shopping given that there are plenty of products where you can pay significantly different prices for similar goods. I do agree that it's probably not responsible for most of the worrying increases, but you do still have to mind your loyalty cards and whatnot.

I think that in large part, prices are going up due to inflation, global shipping issues, disruption of large areas of farmland, energy costs and lack of fertilizer. And those last two are related due to the Haber-Bosch process for producing fertilizer, fuel is not just for shipping or powering farm machinery.

There are plenty of issues, and plenty of reason to worry about how harvests go this year, but I do agree that my worry would be more about the production side, and whether farmers can plant enough, not just the distribution side.

Things are probably going to get worse unless we have really great harvests this year, in my view. The time to deal with many of these problems was months ago, before planting started, but the second best time is now.

> In 2016, 87.3 percent of food and beverage purchases by U.S. consumers, including both grocery store and eating out purchases, were from domestic production. The remaining 12.7 percent were reimported food and beverages such as produce from Chile or wines from France. Imports’ share of the U.S. food and beverage dollar has almost doubled over the last two decades from 6.9 percent in 1993, due in part to growing demand by U.S. consumers for year-round fresh produce options and increasing global trade in food and beverages. Imported inputs are used in U.S. food and beverage production, and their share of the U.S. food and beverage dollar has also risen. Imported inputs used by U.S. food companies and restaurants include both food inputs, such as avocadoes from Mexico and cranberries from Canada, and non-food inputs such as natural gas and foreign-made restaurant equipment. In 2016, imported inputs used in domestically produced food and beverages accounted for 4.7 percent of the U.S. food and beverage dollar, up from 3.7 percent in 1993. [0]

The data doesn't suggest "a majority", but approximately half of the fruit and a third of the vegetables are imported. When you look at the data, these imports occur out of season domestically.

[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

Are they? In my experience, grocery shopping is not really a pain point.

My contribution, the over-the-shoulder cellphone holder, is just one recent innovation helping groceries and personal shoppers to reduce costs, save time and enhance revenues and so on (https://SNEKmount.com)

Amazon, as well as owning Whole Foods, an upmarket grocer, now runs 29 “Fresh” supermarkets, mostly in suburbs of large cities. At these stores shoppers need not use a till at all, instead being automatically charged as they pick items off the shelves and walk out. Until recently, home delivery of groceries in America (unlike Europe) has often relied on gig-economy workers walking round ordinary supermarkets—a costly model.

But that is also changing. Walmart’s head of e-commerce, Tom Ward, is British and has brought ideas pioneered in Britain, such as “dark stores”, where goods are packed exclusively for delivery. In Arkansas, Walmart has even experimented with dispatching groceries by drone. On May 24th it announced that the programme is expanding to five more states.

How much these ideas will change how Americans shop is unclear. Cutting product lines is often unpopular; big cars and big fridges still support a model of big grocery stores with surprisingly high prices. Still, as consumers fret about inflation, the pressure on American supermarkets to innovate and cut costs is bound to grow.■

HEB is loved in Texas (suspiciously absent from NE Texas), but has a pretty great line of private label foods, competitive prices that are usually at or below Walmart's prices. For example, when meat prices spiked because national meatpackers had problems, HEB's Texas meatpackers didn't have such high costs (less of a spike).

They have to be doing well financially with a decent markup, but the quality is pretty great and other chain grocers usually don't have the same draw that HEB does in markets where they compete.

HEB is sorely missed when I live in or visit other states and go grocery shopping.

Beside national brands, they source from quality local small businesses, farms and ranches, and even make a wide range of their own "generic" brand food - including fresh foods like meal-simples (a complete meal for one, ready for the oven w/cooking directions), or even a full bbq joint in some stores. Their Central Market food brand found in HEB's is usually cheaper, fresher and healthier than national brands. But if you want higher end organics in majors cities, their Central Market stores in Austin put the original Whole Foods to shame, IMO. The few times I would go to Randells or Walmart would be during larger holidays when HEB was closed and those stores were generally more expensive, had questionable produce and a disappointing selection of just about everything else in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-E-B

Central Market is also in Houston and maybe other places - definitely not just an Austin thing.

My biggest complaint is that they don’t take Apple Pay, which I assume means they are doing something scummy with data collection.

I absolutely agree that Central Market far surpasses Whole Foods. I wanted to add that a major benefit of Central Market is their incredible bulk bin selection. I’m certain that it must be a loss leader, and I haven’t seen one so extensive in any other store. My girlfriend and I go there and pick up spices and tea for dirt cheap. 50¢ to refill a tin with “fancy cumin”, 30¢ to refill a tin with (very high quality, IMO) oregano. $2 to buy a cup (8 oz) of loose tea that lasts us three weeks (and the only other tea they have are expensive tea bags that cost >$6). $1 for some fancy finishing salt. You can shop for a recipe or shop for the pantry. From time to time, their self checkout flags the spices because we’re purchasing 7¢ of something got a recipe. They never complain, though.

They have almost every spice, spice blend, dried chili, dried mushroom, rice, bean, grain, tea, coffee, and flour you could want, in addition to baking odds and ends like powdered cheese, chocolate feves, and xantham gum.

Coming from New England, I find a lot of the dry goods at Central Market to be equivalent to a Big Y (not a Whole Foods competitor). This is because a lot of their “high end” product is just imported Italian food, which is very common in New England (particularly Connecticut). Their produce, meat, and cheese selection is great, albeit expensive. It can also be hard to find “normal” packaged stuff there.

Also, HEB/Central Market in general has been better at weathering supply shortages. During peak COVID, it was the only place in Austin with stuff still in stock.

> For example, when meat prices spiked because national meatpackers had problems, HEB's Texas meatpackers didn't have such high costs (less of a spike).

Yes, according to a GM I know this is due to them sourcing most of their products within a 100 miles. HEB has the best produce, meats, and food quality overall. Generally the best prices as well.

We go to Walmart only for the obscure brand name items or special edition things (as well as non groceries things that aren't practical for delivery)

I believe HEB is the or at least one of the largest private companies in the US. They recently bought the Favor delivery app which is the best of them all. You can write in any store and alcohol delivery from HEB is free.

Disclaimer: no affiliation with HEB, just one happy patron.

I’m in the process of moving to Texas from the West Coast and the first time I visited an H-E-B, I felt almost like Boris Yeltsin (cf https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news...)

No mention of health food stores? I live in a small county and there are at least 6 health food stores that have abundant fresh vegetables, fruits, and dry goods.

With the emergence of dark grocery stores, there will be major opportunity in the space of personalized nutrition. Shoppers will be more connected with a mobile app when it comes to their grocery store experience, and those apps have the potential to steer you toward an optimal diet that saves money and improves health.

I strongly believe personalized nutrition and shopping experiences will have major impact on non communicable diseases.

What's a dark grocery store?

I believe a grocery store that only serves deliveries. You can’t actually go and buy things in person.

No shopping floor, just a warehouse. You order online.

This is interesting because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers_Distributing went bankrupt and afaik never came back. Sometimes I wonder if capitalism has any memory.

Dark stores are physical stores only used for online shopping. I remember hearing about "dark kitchens" which are restaurants doing deliveries, but not accessible/visible from the outside.

Are those the same as ghost kitchens?

It's the same concept yes. A grocery "store" (localized warehouse) accessible only to delivery services.

Yeah same concept basically. Take over a strip mall space, paper over the windows, set up the inside in a way that's optimized for delivery only.

There's some interesting reporting on the various optimizations like all the isle being half width and one way to save floor space, or they don't put like items together so all the different ketchup brands (for example) are distrusted throughout the store so if it tells a picker to go to isle 5 shelf W and get heinz ketchup, there won't be any other similar items/brands near the heinz ketchup to confuse the picker with. They also arrange the stores in roughly descending weight so that heavy things go in first and light/fragile at the end.

Interesting, I saw a wendy's "Food truck" doing that near me. I suspect it was for delivery only, not even takeout.

Small grocery warehouses used by Instant delivery companies. From this post[1] by Tanay J

A. Dark Stores / Fulfillment Centers Instant-Delivery Apps operate their own dark stores / fulfillment centers, typically one per neighborhood they operate in. Since these are not meant for consumers, space can be used more efficiently and typically the cost to operate these (at scale) as a percent of revenue is lower than rent space for grocery stores.

https://tanay.substack.com/p/understanding-the-instant-deliv...

Sells only dark matter food.

A warehouse.

Not necessarily. Some dark stores near me (city center) have about the same layout as physical stores, but more cramped - delivery people need to pick the items from shelves.

I don’t trust a corpo-run dark store to provide me quality produce when the corpo’s first law is profits above everything else.

Rather than thinking about tech solutions for the health epidemic surrounding foods, I think we need to reign in the prepackaged food industry who relies on unnatural recipes to cut costs and increase shelf life and who adds tons of sugar to everything for flavor.

Yeah I doubt that. Personal shoppers can't even pick out the correct produce now.

It's like they search out for the least ripe or most bruised thing. Seems like it's because it's not for them so they don't care, or they don't know how to.

The other point against that theory is people will buy what they want to buy, that may be healthy food, it may not be.

Unless you're talking about taking away the choice and distributing food based on some sort of consortium which is authoritarian and assumes we have sound dietary science which is false.

On the money point, have you seen the fees these personal shopping services add? In no way is it cheaper to have someone else shop for you.

I have to say... as much as I don't like them... WalMart does the online shopping properly. I had to switch to delivery / pickup for a while during 2020 and found them to be the best. But I think this is because the people shopping for your food are paid by the hour and not by the job. They are regular employees of the store. They aren't rushed to get your order, and 50 other orders, checkout, and drive around town burning their own gas for a paltry fee. I never had shitty produce delivered, and substitutions actually make sense.

How bad is it when WalMart is treating its employees better than most?

> How bad is it when WalMart is treating its employees better than most

I work with a number of people that have an irrational hate-boner for Walmart for the reasons stated yet they are all Prime members.

Both Walmart and Amazon have horrid hours and working conditions. The difference is Bezos starts them at 2-3x minimum wage, while Walmart is at the rock bottom.

I’m surprised there isn’t more discussion of the fees associated with these services. Most people can’t afford to spend 25+% extra on their groceries just to gain some convenience

And some of us simply refuse to. I'd rather drive the 10 miles into town to pick up my dinner than give GrubHub money that I'd prefer to see going to the restaurant.

Frankly, unless I'm drunk, stoned, or sick, I can't see ever using a non-store delivery service.

>I strongly believe personalized nutrition and shopping experiences will have major impact on non communicable diseases.

What about all the poor people without smartphones? We have such an unequal distribution of wealth and technology in this county that (particularly on site like this with mostly digital natives) it is easy to loose sight of the fact that the poorest ~20% still don't have basic smart phones, or maybe even basic flip phones. Hell they might not even have email accounts.

One thing that has been made clear by all the social programs that were stood up during the pandemic is that landlines and snail mail are still the most common denominator of communication for the poor. Until we get to some simple "smartphones for all" program, I don't see this changing any time soon.

> What about all the poor people without smartphones?

Poor people have smartphones. Even poor people in developing nations are likely to have smartphones. Basic smartphones are ultra cheap commodities.

>Poor people have smartphones

Some poor people have smartphones. I guess some will get to eat. Also while there is penatration of smartphones into poorer countries, it is hardly 100%

>However, compared to other markets across the globe, India’s smartphone penetration rate is still relatively low. [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/4600/smartphone-market-in-in...

> Some poor people have smartphones. I guess some will get to eat.

I have no idea how you got from "smartphone apps will affect how people shop for food" to "anyone without a smartphone will be starved."

Similar to their initial point, they just made it up.

Or the people who have smartphones and are sick of it and pine for the old ways, but feel compelled to keep one by society increasingly expects that everybody have one and capriciously install invasive apps on it, even for things like buying groceries!

What's invasive about a grocery store app? Seems less invasive than going to the store - they could always record you there and they certainly know what you buy.

If the app wasn't spyware, they wouldn't be so keen on getting me to use it instead of using a web page.

Nobody wants to use a grocery store web page on their phone, and nobody wants to use a computer instead of their phone.

Web pages work just fine on phones, except companies are suspiciously forceful with their recommendations that you use their app instead. Don't pretend Reddit isn't doing this; others do as well.

Are you kidding? I frequently stop what I'm already doing on my phone in frustration, and get out a laptop or turn on a computer to do it in a proper browser/screen/keyboard instead of an app/mobile browser.

Grocery stores are incentivized to sell as much food as possible, which does not align with keeping their customers as healthy as possible.

But, assuming altruistic grocers, it would be interesting to see how they decide what food to steer people towards. Would I have to share my medical records and height/weight/exercise routine or would they personalize based on something else?

Or otherwise generate the best possible margin. Either by volume or by price. They might optimize slightly differently, but never for the best of the consumer. That is they will aim to generate as much as possible in total sale value and on other hand have as high as possible margin with the that value. Think of health-insurance, not exactly great for consumer.

> Shoppers will be more connected with a mobile app when it comes to their grocery store experience, and those apps have the potential to steer you toward an optimal diet that saves money and improves health.

Apps silently tacking $0.10/lb onto produce because you own an iPhone and have a history of buying "premium" stuff...

The average grocery store carries 30,000+ items, I don't know how people will find new products in a world (decades from now) where dark grocery shopping is the norm. We all only have vast awareness because we know of the goods by walking the aisles.

The web apps for grocery shopping have carousels that might showcase to you two or three new items, but there simply is nothing analogous to aisle walking. You can't even really see the full inventory in these web apps either. To me, that's a huge discoverability issue that doesn't yet present because people have prior experience shopping IRL.

Since December, all of my grocery shopping has been done via Shipt.[0] What is available via the web site and app is fraction of what's available in the store. I've lucked out because they shop at the store I used to shop at; so, I can add a detailed special request. (Instead of just saying "pumpernickel bread," I can add that it's not in the main, prepackaged bread section; but, in the bakery section, on the left side, behind the bread slicing machine.)

[0] Not by choice, a combination of Necrotizing Fasciitis, Sepsis, and Gangrene left me in a wheelchair

I feel the same way about books: In terms of enjoyability and chance discovery, browsing through amazon.com or whatever just doesn't compare with browsing the shelves of an actual book store or library.

Anyone trying to personalize their optimal nutrition is already in the top 5% of Americans in regards to healthy eating. We are so, so, so far from even baseline semi-ok diets in the most generalized all-of-humanity guidelines.

> With the emergence of dark grocery stores, there will be major opportunity in the space of personalized nutrition. Shoppers will be more connected with a mobile app when it comes to their grocery store experience, and those apps have the potential to steer you toward an optimal diet that saves money and improves health.

What a rosy view of grocery stores. I used to work in grocery and later a "dark grocery" store. It ain't all puppies and sunshine, sonny. Grocery apps are engineered to hoover up your data and entice you to spend more money, especially on things you normally like to buy. Average ticket size is higher on pickup orders over in store shopping. These apps definitely enable junk food habits with targeted discounts and advertising. Trying to subsist on a diet? Here's a free gallon or $0.99 5-gallon tub of ice cream. Good luck with that diet.

Source: I worked for Kroger for over a decade in every department.

I can't talk about level of mass-food distribution in USA, being European living in EU having only visited very few parts of USA for a very little time but in general terms: transports was and are the key to have much, much more, since the model of a self-contained starship able to produce locally 99% of it's crews needs and desire exists, unfortunately, so far, only in the fantasy domain: we made many things around the world but never all in the same place.

However the mass distribution of food have also very nasty side effects: pushing agriculture toward large and specialized enterprises scattered across the globe *apparently* have raised the overall output but in practice have lowered the efficiency and resilience of agriculture. The push toward standard sizes and varieties is equally harmful: we have create a seed monopoly with hybrid varieties *explicitly* made to keep their characteristics just for one generation (one year) tie farmers to the monopoly itself EVEN WITH LAWS making hard to sell different/non-standard varieties/calibers. Similar nasty things have happen for animal farming: artificial insemination done by very few and very large entities have crushed the genetic variability of animals, surely cows produce more milk etc, but are far more fragile and so on.

Long story short: exaggeration in the name of business have create a short-term hyper-abundance and now we are in trouble to keep the food production at sustainable level FOR NOW, not really knowing what to do for the future. We can't right now "coming back to the old school", but we must do our best to annihilate modern mass-distribution as it is because we are already in a mess, and the future is far nightmarish. I do not know how we can evolve, local scale farms might be self-sufficient for low dense areas, but not on scale, so not enough even to nourish the industry we need behind to have all needed gears and tools.

This seems like a very simplistic analysis, I'd expect more from the economist. They compare huge chains like Walmart, Aldi, and Whole Foods to Europe's Tesco. Yet we have lots of regional options in our small city and very rarely go to these big chains. Kind of disappointed I created an account just to read this tbh.

This tends to be a forum of financially advantaged people. The vast majority of Americans are shopping at Walmart, Aldi, Safeway, Kroger etc. (Maybe not Whole Foods). In that light, the comparisons are valid.

Like you, I shop at a local chain and the farmers market. I know I pay more for my groceries than my neighbors who shop at WinCo and I'm ok with that since I feel I get higher quality meats and produce along with those higher prices.

Interesting that is the case elsewhere. Our local stores are not always more expensive. We have one high end chain, one average chain, and one lower end chain all of which are local to the region. Walmart is usually on par or even slightly more expensive in some cases than the average option.

I don't get your comment. 1) Both Aldi and Tesco are European. 2) The point is that food shopping in the US is dominated by large stores like Wall Mart, Target etc, while in Europe stores more akin to Aldi, Tesco etc dominate.

I live in Norway but have lived in the US and Netherlands while visiting a lot of Europe on vacation naturally. There is most definitely a very different way in which food is sold in general. The article points out pretty much the same experiences I have had when comparing.

In fact this has been remarked on for years as a difference between Europe and the US: The US is about really large stores where land is cheap and you can store a lot of products. In Europe one tends to follow the opposite model: Smaller stores with more limited selection which has rapid replacement of products.

Automation is also quite different. I was also surprised by the kind of old fashion way checkout works in the US. Like how they meticulously pack your bags. I would say in Europe scanning is generally faster or one uses a more self automated systems where shoppers scan, pay and pack themselves.

Of course there are stores of all kinds of sizes in the US. The same applies to Europe. There are Wall-Mart style shopping Europe as well. It is just that there is a difference in what is more common in each region.

And of course saying "Europe" may be quite inaccurate as there are such large regional variations in Europe. Broadly speaking smaller stores in central areas is more common in Europe than in the US, but once you get into the details then each country tends to do things in quite different ways.

For instance I loved shopping groceries in the Netherlands but kind of hated doing it in Germany.

> I don't get your comment. 1) Both Aldi and Tesco are European. 2) The point is that food shopping in the US is dominated by large stores like Wall Mart, Target etc, while in Europe stores more akin to Aldi, Tesco etc dominate.

Aldi has a large presence in the U.S., as noted in the article. About 2100 stores, according to a search. That's nearly half as many as Walmart grocery stores.

> Like how they meticulously pack your bags. I would say in Europe scanning is generally faster or one uses a more self automated systems where shoppers scan, pay and pack themselves.

I dunno, having your shopping bags loaded for you is pretty nice. With respect to self-checkout, I haven't been in a chain grocery store in the U.S. in at least 10 years that didn't have it. They may exist, I dunno. Usually, you have a choice of both.

> And of course saying "Europe" may be quite inaccurate as there are such large regional variations in Europe. Broadly speaking smaller stores in central areas is more common in Europe than in the US, but once you get into the details then each country tends to do things in quite different ways.

This is the truth.

Anyone else basically stopped using supermarkets?

I buy my diaries from my neighbors (there are fridges with pay qr codes everywhere), meat in big packages directly from organic farmers via postal service, fruits and vegs from farmer markets (mostly digital ones these days) and every day things like oil, flour, sugar whatever directly from a local organic distributor.

Buying this way, and buying enough for a month I literally pay less (mostly) for organic/directly from farm than the cheapest supermarket option. Maybe thats just a Swiss thing however.

And I don't have to waste time & petrol shopping anymore.

So, the article claims the average price for a day of nutritious food in the US is $3.

How is that possible? Is anyone here close to spending $21/week for all the food they eat (ignoring luxury items, etc)?

That hasn't been possible for me for at least 20 years, and when travelling to cheaper places (pre covid), it doesn't seem possible there either.

Where are these average food prices?

I couldn't find the UN report that they got their chart from. However, they only said "providing adequate calories and nutrients", which is a low bar.

I'm guessing 1.5kg of dry white rice can be found for around $1, and that covers the "calorie" needs. The rest of the budget can be spent on vegetables, nuts, beans, lentils, etc. to cover the "nutrients". It would be a pretty sad diet, but I think you could hit the numbers they're looking for.

I see. I was assuming it would be a balanced diet, at least.

In that case, I'm having difficulty getting worked up over rice and beans (a tiny percentage of my grocery bill) having a small markup on average in the US.

I could easily live on that much per day if I chose to, cooking simple (and delicious) country food from my childhood, made from fresh ingredients. Or being a bit selective about the partially prepared food I buy. That's paying big city grocery prices. Anything else is more an unwillingness to cook or lack of imagination.

To put it another way, I am perplexed by the idea that it needs to cost much more than $3/day to feed yourself healthy food in the US, whether or not you have that as your budget. I'm not sure how it wouldn't be obvious that this is eminently achievable without sacrificing a good eating experience. A bit less meat, a little more legumes, and you're done.

I've always wondering why Trader Joe's is so much cheaper than the big supermarkets, but I guess this article gives the simple explanation--they are smaller and have less variety. Kind of an eye opener for me (although it may be obvious to others).

If I place a 4 item order from walmart.com, they will do whatever they can to get it to me as quickly as possible... sometimes I get a $35 order in 4 different shipments (and the shipping was "free" because items cost the same as in-store)

From the central point of the article, certainly prices are going up, but a lot of us think of quality dropping when we see the title. I'd be surprised if many people think Whole Foods has maintained its image since being bought out.

This article is mostly about costs but being a Japan resident while most things are more expensive and productd are mostly only around in season, produce tastes so much better than what I bought in the USA so I’m not complaining.

Lol, what. American supermarkets and grocery stores are probably literally the best shopping experiences of any kind in the world. This is some lobby ass hit piece ass bullshit. Par for the course for this rag

One simple thing that I find hard to find in American stores is loose leaf tea. There are 100s of bagged tea varieties, but only a couple of leaf tea packs, something hipstery organic soulful at 3x times the price.

> Today Americans spend a smaller share of their income on food to be cooked at home—about 6%—than people in almost any other rich country...

Well then, where is that windfall going? Or do Americans not cook at home all that often?

Probably due to eating out way more often and eating shitty cheap processed foods for the meals they do cook.

Prior to the pandemic most people in cities would eat out more often. Now with the rise of the hobby baker, lockdowns and remote work killing restaurants and commuting, homemade cooks, and inflation tightening budgets more people are cooking at home. Also, British grocery stores are just sad mate. Aldi is lovely for its low prices however.

Why cook at home when you can have overpriced takeout delivered?

No matter where you shop, it will be absolutely impossible to figure out where the eggs are. They fall into no typical aisle category.

Someone please create a crowdsourced website wheresthedamneggs.com

Swiss super markets are pretty great (although expensive). When i visited the US and went to stores like Target and Walmart that was kind of eye opening though... pretty terrible.

HEB is hands down the best grocery shopping experience imaginable.

I visited Barcelona in 2019. I was shocked at how much better grocery stores were, and how much cheaper, than in California. We are getting shafted in CA at the grocery store.

Did you get yelled at by an old lady for touching the produce with your hands?

Nope. I did get some funny looks for buying peanut butter.

consumers bear some responsibility for demanding low quality convenient instant prep food. most of the shelf space is wasted on junk food . if consumers cooked even simple meals, then market would be 2/3 smaller . an entire isle for breakfast cereal, one for cookies, and half an isle for canned beans ? that means everything had to cost 10x as much .

Related, and an outstanding read: ”The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket” by Benjamin Lorr

Safeway in the SFO Marina is absolutely awesome. That is also the only datapoint I have from the rest of the US.

...and our hospitals, and our police, and our schools, and our military, and...

The problems may run deeper than initially thought.

The US in 2015 had an average household income 55% higher than the UK, which effectively negates most of the arguments this argument is trying to make, as well as the graph which shows daily costs in the US being 60% higher than the UK. The US is a richer country, costs are accordingly also higher. Not exactly surprising.

This is true, but it doesn't work to tell Europeans this because they seem convinced all Americans are poor due to being in medical debt. America is a very rich country and most Americans are globally well off.

meh, i shop at Costco.

...but I rarely need that much mayo or chips.

Their milk is a deal, but hardly worth the 50¢ savings when you factor in the time it takes to park, go in, show card, walk to the back, wait in line, and go back home. Not when there's a Kroger right by me where I can get in and out in less time it takes to drive to Costco.

In some ways the American supermarket ended communism. Boris Yeltsin was shocked by full stores.

https://www.nhregister.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article...

Well due to Osama bin Laden's essentially successful terrorist attack two decades ago, America got like...a 20% pay cut. Impossible to measure, but that terrorist got America's economy into much wilder boom/bust swings (Trump being exceptional to this tendency), just a stupider economy and smaller and smaller profits. The country runs at a loss presently. It's being corroded from within and soon from without as well, its borders will begin collapsing, notably Taiwan this year.

So when everybody's poorer, everything's shittier, simple as that. Poverty sucks. For sure America has gotten poorer year after year this millennium. It's just presented from a more oblique angle, inflation statistics are of course manipulated, and worst of all the Fed now thinks left-shifting solves problems. So normally we'd be talking about multiplying by 10, but I'm not sure how the numbers are represented, I think binary coded decimal.

At any rate the era of actually printing money, actual paper money, pressing command-P and hitting enter and taking the money from the printer and then using it, is a bygone era much more beautiful than the present. Now the Fed just says "eh, here's some zeroes on the back of your account." Bernanke joked about this, thought there was no evil in fiscal easement because "they're just numbers in a computer." He even laughed. That tells you everything.

Well there's silver lining, so at least they retreated (or used sanctions according to the official press releases) from Russia so now there's two sets of numbers on computers, that's better. Or better still, concurrently with Bernanke, bitcoin was invented specifically to stop what is currently happening in America, everybody getting robbed by inflation that's way WAY higher than they're openly talking about. Not only that, but there's not just one person making money out of thin air, there's also North Korea printing dollars, they're minting money too, and I...divine the Fed doesn't have such a high integrity system protecting those numbers on the computer. Competitive left-shifting.

So that's why supermarkets seem crappy, it's because everything's crappier, everybody in the supermarket is not as skinny as before, everything's worse, why? Poverty.

What exactly are the clear conclusions from this over-worded drivel?

Inflation aside, if you're paying too much for groceries, you don't know how to shop.

Part of the problem is people are willing to pay $6 for bananas at Whole Paycheck, and the obsession with organic foodstuffs. When the same products are available at Walmart or Costco for 1/3 the price. I think we have an entire generation of people who never learned how to shop efficiently, look for good deals, use coupons. Let's be honest, the clientele at Whole Foods generally wouldn't be caught dead at Walmart. It's mostly psychological; the food there is not necessarily higher quality. For example, Costco sells restaurant-quality meat; you can buy Wagyu steak there. But you need to consider that maybe paying $8 for a loaf of 'organic' bread is an irrational decision.

Their loss, I suppose.

Whole Paycheck has certain products they can't find anywhere else easily. The higher price for the bananas is the price you pay for one stop shop convenience. The whole concept of the gas station convenience store is built on this concept. And you know what? Convenience had value. As for an $8 organic loaf of bread, that's easily the cost of a glass of cheap wine at a restaurant, or two ice cream cones. Seems like a good deal for a premium, healthier item.

> Whole Paycheck has certain products they can't find anywhere else easily.

[...]

> Seems like a good deal for a premium, healthier item.

Last time I shopped there I paid nearly $4 for a bottle of lemon juice that looked and tasted like sewer water. Down the drain it went, as did my money.

That store exudes an Apple-like reality distortion field, and it seems to be working pretty well.

If the greatest trick the devil ever played is convincing people he doesn't exist, his second-greatest trick is convincing Americans that eating well is for stuck-up elitist liberals. Yes, While Foods is mega-expensive and not that good for the price. But that's not because good food is a fake consumerist concept, it's because the American agricultural system has been gutted by perverse commercial and regulatory incentives. Go to almost any other developed nation (or many developing ones), get better food for less money

I think it's more that as Americans have evolved and more people seek white-collar occupations, and as women have taken more career (as opposed to domestic) paths as dual-income households become necessary to survive especially in places like SF, people have lost critical skills. Like how to cook healthy with a few basic ingredients. Most of the people I work with don't know how to use an oven. I don't think half of them know how to shop at a grocery store, either. If Uber Eats ceased to exist I'm concerned they would starve to death or be forced to survive on peanut butter and jelly.

When you convince enough people that $13 for a grilled cheese sandwich is acceptable, that becomes the norm. It's the milkshake scene in Pulp Fiction become reality.

Bad cooking habits are a problem for sure, but they are not the whole story. Good cooking can only do so much to redeem bad ingredients, and American ingredients are often simply terrible. Our meat is bland, tasteless, and stuffed with seed oils (American chicken especially is execrable compared to the what the rest of the world eats). Our fruits and vegetables are bred for size and productivity at the expense of variety, nutrition, and taste. The government reconmends, and in fact often mandates, consuming "low-fat" versions of foods that have had their calories replaced with sugar. And not even with real sugar, because Great Depression-era import quotas keep the price of real sugar high so high fructose corn syrup can be cheaper and big ag lobbies can be happy. Want a fresh tomato with a modicum of flavor? Where I live, all the tomatoes I can find are either ripened off the vine (and therefore worthless) or canned.

Yes, many consumers have terrible habits, but systemic forces aren't helping.

> Our meat is bland, tasteless, and stuffed with seed oils (American chicken especially is execrable compared to the what the rest of the world eats).

Think you have your conspiracies confused there. The chickens are different because of being washed in chlorine. The cows are fat because they eat soy. It's you who's fat and feminized from the seed oils.

…is the current alternative health food theory.

But you can easily get grass-feed beef, and people tend to dislike it compared to grain-fed beef, because it tastes grassier and has less fat.

When I say American meat sucks, I am not referring to what some random internet blog says, I am referring to my personal experience living outside the US. You don't need to listen to some obscure podcast to realize the difference, you can just taste your food.

Home Economics is no longer coursework in high school so you have generations who have made it to adulthood without basic kitchen training.

I hope they at least broke the nutrition science section of those courses off and continued teaching at least that much.

No. No, they did not.

Whole Foods isn't expensive anymore, this post is from like 6 years ago. Amazon lowered their prices on basic goods and keeps it higher on the packaged goods. Which are usually not especially healthy, they just have some superfood ingredients in them.

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