Those consumers who also don't buy heritage tomatoes or apples because of the irregularities in appearance, will be the ones who lose out. Sounds like there are still plenty of opportunities for cheeses, just not in a uniform delivery.
Too bad I can't find that original article, which went into a lot more detail than Wikipedia.
Are you some kind of cheese nerd, or is this not all that unusual for a Swiss fridge?
First swiss often do fondue with 2 different cheeses, the usual moitié-moitié mix of Vacherin fribourgeois and Gruyère. Then sometimes you have 2 to 3 different raclette cheeses because you like different tastes. Then there are the cheese you might grate on your pastas (in my case I would usually use italian cheeses) and the different cheese you want to offer at the table in regular diners + the ones dedicated for the aperitives like Tête de Moine...It can add up quickly without being a nerd.
Of course you can fondue with any kind of cheese. I love using Dutch farmer's cheese in my fondue. In fact, my brother-in-law has recently started making cheese which is very suitable for it.
I'm Dutch, and I don't have 20 cheeses, but 5 different cheeses is very common, and more than 10 is not rare for us.
It always has a ridiculous "luxury" tax, ending up above 50€/kg, which is absurd for Italy...
...I'm guilty of using too much of it... it often also is my go to snack during late night fridge peeping... but hey, there are worse (and costlier) habits to entertain
Maybe a stupid question, but how can you remember all those different types of cheeses and what they taste like? I'd have to have an extensive notebook every time I went to the store if I wanted to manage 20 types of cheese.
(My typical fancy cheese buying system is to go to the store and buy something at random and hope I like it, which since I like cheese, often works out, but it means buying it again can be almost impossible)
We do the same but with cheeses.
ABBA’s Goudas Just Wanna Have Fun and Eminem’s The Real Slim Cheddy from 3Mile. Beatle’s Let it Brie!
Whatever. Knowing 20 of pretty much anything isn't some One Weird Thing. Get out more. Maybe try something new. You have my sympathy.
I'm not from one of the big cheese nations of Europe, when I grew up we had one kind of cheese for everything, but a couple of years ago I tried to broaden my palette, buy everything I could in local shops and supermarkets, and remembering twenty different kinds of cheese is not difficult.
What also helps is that these cheeses are significantly different, so Emmentaler, Camembert, Parmigiano Reggiano, Mozzarella, Bavarian Blu, Manchego, Pecorino, Gouda, Feta, etc, they all are very different, and most supermarkets in Europe have them all, so you can try out things easily.
I’ve tried buying most of these different cheeses in an upscale American supermarket and have been very disappointed. Even the ones imported from Europe, every variety just sort of tastes either gross or too similar. I swear Manchego tasted better 20 years ago the first time I had it in the US, maybe then big business got ahold of it. The best cheese I’ve ever tasted as an American was actually an expired Limburger cheese. It had such an amazing taste, I’m not joking. But it was at a weird outlet store that sells expired food and I never saw it again.
The only semi exception to this rule (although I still have to make sure it’s authentic!) is buying Parmigiano Reggiano, that stuff is a staple in our household.
Then again the best steak I’ve ever eaten was a 45 day dry aged steak, so I guess I just like funky flavors. Tasted like the most amazing cheese + amazing steak at the same time.
It's part of your culture because you discuss guns all the time, well in France, we do the same but for cheese.
I blame big food corporations for trying to homogenize, sterilize, pasteurize, and genericize the taste/appearance/chacteristics of food to the equivalent of white bread. Society just trudges along with it with extremely low awareness as to how much better it can be.
I'm not sure this applies in paris though, I suspect it does not. It's such a big city it's likely the markets are similar to american ones, being targeted & priced at affluent upper middle class professionals. IDK though I have spent very little time in paris.
Again idk about paris. Lived in france for many years and still back regularly for family. But spent maybe a week total in paris, and even that was over a decade ago.
(I did once get a very lame baguette at a Monoprix once. Blew my mind that the French tolerated it.)
One possibility is that you were there out of season. We've gotten very good at preserving apples for all year, but they are harvested only for a month or so. It takes industrial climate control to make them taste good after about December.
As in, where the brandy comes from? I never knew it was eponymous. Booze is of course the original technology for preserving apples and fruit in general. My understanding is that was the original intended purpose for our older orchards included those planted by Johnny Appleseed.
Reminds me of Luther Burbank:
We tend to buy bread in supermarkets only in case of dire emergency. Statistically, there probably was a much better bakery around the corner from that Monoprix.
> It takes industrial climate control to make them taste good after about December.
I remember my grand mother keeping apples in her cellar (cold but not freezing, dry, close to constant temperature year round). The apple she put there were fantastic long into winter. They would not look great, slightly shrunk and with wrinkles, but the taste was excellent. Industrial climate control is to keep them look good, not to keep them taste good.
Apples are also an odd fruit because they can be kept for such a long time: https://www.foodrenegade.com/your-apples-year-old/ this makes shipping them anywhere much easier than a tomato...
Johnny Appleseed is American. The US has a huge diversity of apple trees based on locality.
However, like so many things, said diversity is seasonal. There is a good reason for pressing apple cider--you need to do something with the enormous number of apples you couldn't eat directly.
If you want apples out of season, you're only going to see the mass-manufactured ones.
Since these cultivars were no longer connected by breeding, they changed characteristics over several centuries giving rise to an absolutely enormous diversity of local apple types in the US--especially since apple trees from seed are kinda unstable genetically.
IF you take the seeds of a tomato you will get a mostly decent tomato out of it. IF you take the seeds of an apple or a haas avocado you will likely get something that looks nothing like its parent. Unlike tomatoes it takes a LONG time to grow a tree, so if you want an avocado or apple orchard your going to use grafts to make sure you get the best chance of having a good product in 5 or 10 years...
The economics of commonality should be readily apparent... pick something that you know works for your multi year bet to pay off sounds like a good plan.
Avocados are also interesting because we DO get other varieties due to how it reproduces (you need plants of both sexes). IM fairly sure that apples do not have this issue so farms are monocultures.
Add on to that the fact that the varieties we see are designed to be kept long enough to have a birthday and this is what you get.
Johnny Appleseed walking through colonial American planting apple trees? he was a hippy promoting more fermentation of alcoholic apple cider, for which sour apples work just fine.
virtually all French wine grapes, btw, are grown from cuttings grafted onto American root stocks because the native roots were not resistant to the invasive Phylloxera fly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera
it is because of grafting that we have variety in these cases.
ie, most of the time they won't be sweet eating apples- in the US in particular this used to be less of a problem, because apples were for cider / alcohol. During prohibition entrepreneurs got active in trying to save their industry (while others were just ploughing orchards over) and we get modern ideas like "an apple a day" and the whole modern sweet eating apple became very mainstream. Not that eating apples weren't a thing before that, but it helped explode their popularity in modern western eating habits.
I just checked the websites of about half a dozen orchards within a reasonable driving distance from me, and they all had a range of 30-40 varieties. Not all will be ripe at the same time; 15-20 all at once is going to be a huge orchard!
However, if you want to see some truly weird apples, heirlooms offer way more interest and variety if you can find them. (This probably involves making friends with people who have old trees, rather than finding a shop that sells them.)
For example, I live on an old family farm with an heirloom apple variety (unknown name, if it was ever named at all, but dating back to at least the 1850s) that is spicy and bubbles/fizzes when you bite into it. It's quite cool, and I think it is something some people would want to buy, but it is unsuited to modern commercial production for a few reasons; for example, it fruits on new wood at the tips of the branches, which makes it less suited to modern tree pruning strategies (all modern apple varieties fruit on older wood, which makes them much easier to prune).
In my experience, the average US grocery store has a vast selection of produce and I see the pattern with apples (standard base varieties, with some rotating specials) across most categories of produce - citrus, cucumbers, peppers, root veggies, etc.
So in short, I dunno, I actually feel like there's a massive variety of agricultural products in the US. Certainly way more than in Switzerland, the country in which I've been to the grocery store the most outside of the US. Coop has like 3 kinds of apples, Migros was a bit better and had some interesting Kanzi apples which I had not seen in the states.
YMMV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Otherwise, any farmer’s market in Britany and Normandie will have plenty of interesting apple varieties.
The problem though is that those more unconventional cultivars tend to only be available seasonally.
My fat american butt eventually relented a few days later and I bought a single breast from them. It wasn't even good Popeyes. Tasted like either they dont know how to make a good crispy piece of chicken or Europe gets sent the scraps.
Five Guys also showed up, their pistachio shake was intriguing but a huge disappointment.
I don't like what Paris has become, multiple French bistros have dropped in quality post-COVID(in my opinion).
Also seems like Costa coffee has abandoned the city? Their coffee wasn't anything to go crazy over but it had good memories when I was a broke unemployed dev touring Europe via backpack.
I hope someday there's a society we've managed to build that's good enough to look back on the 20th and 21st centuries with the judgemental glare we rightly deserve.
How much of it is actually thrown away though? It's my understanding that the "ugly" looking vegetables are just used to make sauces, canned produce, ready meals etc etc. No one is throwing out perfectly good tomatoes just because they are ugly - they just get turned into something else.
Throwing or not throwing away the food would make no difference in the lives of the people going hungry. The people going hungry are going hungry not because of a dearth of food, but due to issues such as war or political or family instability.
The above sounds very harsh. Obviously there are some schemes that allow excess food to be used by poorer people, like food banks, quality tiers, common agricultural policy type schemes, or just ensuring everyone has sufficient income through tax breaks or benefit schemes. Food banks give food away for free, and they are very limited in scope, and therefore have a limited affect on food price. Quality tiers are things like a supermarket selling "wonky veg" next to full-price veg, but you'll tend to notice that the wonky veg isn't actually much lower in price than the full-price veg. The EU's old common agricultural policy scheme effectively solved the problem by getting the government to guarantee that a food grower could sell their food for a viable price, but it led to huge complaints about "butter mountains" and waste - I think the point was missed that this waste was a reasonable trade-off for ensuring that food continued to be produced in sufficient quantities even in a bad year, and the fact that the government bought the excess meant that they owned it and could if they wanted to feed the hungry with it. Tax breaks and benefit schemes solve the problem without lowering the price of the food because the food seller still gets paid full price for the food.
My point is that good intentions have generated schemes to get excess food to hungry people, but they necessarily have to be small in scale to avoid negatively affecting economics.
Putting entire political-social-economic discussions aside, this argument relies on "Wonky Veg" being cheap from farm to market, which isn't always the case, and therefore do not work at scale in real world.
Put simply, perfectly equal-sized and spherical tomatoes roll easier on conveyor belts, fit nicer and denser in cardboard boxes, slices evenly with machines, and therefore often cheaper to your table than odd shaped ones, at the same time being more lucrative to trade.
Of course it feels wrong to grow crops only to crush some, I wholeheartedly agree, but this needs a bit more thoughts than trying to "just" save them.
In the same way that a sudden interest in therapy for dogs would prove that dogs were suffering from a mental health crisis. Yeah, you want to sell produce at a premium so that somewhat well-off people can feel like they are making a difference? Sounds good to me, yup yup. I mean the vagaries and arbitrariness of upper/upper-middle class social signaling is a trope in itself.
Evidence for this? Any at all? Because I can’t imagine someone getting caught in the act of frowning in disgust which then immediately causes a shop owner to toss out that and similar-looking produce in the hopes that no one else will be disgusted. And how you would cook up such a causal connection is beyond me.
What actually happens—and which just trivially follows from good old “economics”—is that perfectly good food is thrown out because you make more money by eliminating supply that can’t be sold. (Maybe also food regulations, I don’t know.)
Yeah that'd be pretty crazy, probably why that's not what happens. It's far likelier that the produce is filtered on the farm before it even gets to a supplier.
https://econreview.berkeley.edu/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugl...
> What actually happens—and which just trivially follows from good old “economics”—is that perfectly good food is thrown out because you make more money by eliminating supply that can’t be sold. (Maybe also food regulations, I don’t know.)
I think that's more why they lock the dumpsters behind grocery stores and/or dump bleach on the food, but that's also disgusting, so, lateral move I think.
Then there’s the crucial farmer link. Which is just some loose “farmers we’ve talked to, like X” (one step above “people are saying”) and a link to a human interest or whatever you call those uninteresting subject-driven The New Yorker articles.
I don’t know how people are in the USA (spoiler alert), but where I am from food is the everyday grocery product that people are most stingy about.[3] Lower prices are always good. So it seems bewildering that the consumer would send such signals to the Market—surely this would cause higher prices for the consumer? Not only that but here (like in America) there are farmer subsidies. Payed for by tax payers which are also consumers.
(And Americans care about food æstehetics that much? Well let’s look to the article again: “Psychologists argued that the lack of public interest in ugly food was connected to self-esteem.” What the fuck? Seriously?)
Not to mention inflation which makes such everyday products more expensive. Which everyone who cares about Economics on this site seems to be tearing their hair out over on a weekly basis.
The article talks about how these noble startups are enabling ugly produce to be sold to smoothie retailers or whatever. Or juice factories... like the Market is so catastrophically mismanaged that you need a hipster startup for that? To connect that an orange shaped like Steve Buscemi doesn’t taste bad as juice?
I am not being negative about the article by the way. Just the Movement. The article raises the question several times about whether this is really A Thing or if it is an astroturf, someone trying to make a buck on real climate change and environmental issues. Just look at penultimate paragraph.
> The ugly produce movement exemplifies the twenty-first century consumer’s reliance on social media to navigate lifestyle changes. Food waste isn’t a simple problem; it’s an example of the broken agricultural system’s inability to distribute resources in a way that benefits all consumers. If individuals really want to be part of the solution, they have to look beyond the glitzy marketing of ‘socially responsible’ firms and become more vigilant of companies that claim to have an answer for everything.
Would you look at that.
A somewhat funny part is where they describe how the customers of these things are higher-income because it is more expensive. So the Market is so screwed up that “ugly food” isn’t something that the poor buy out of practical necessity? It’s been relegated to social indulgences-buying upper-middle class uh, people?
All in all this damning evidence that you have presented here demonstrates to me that The Ugly Food Movement is a silly, boutique food practice that some I Want To Make a New Consumer Need marketing firm cooked up, some startups made A Thing, and that upper-middle class water cooler NPCs are probably now doing the good work of spreading the word about.
[1] Because if this was about consumer choice, according to these startups, what difference would a new kind of company make?
[2] “One innovative company called [Redacted], based in [Hipsterville, USA]”
[3] Just imagine if people were given the chance to buy almost-expired or some other such ugly food... and of course they are and people love it. Why the heck do you need a startup for that?
My point was never that startups are helping yuppies save the world by getting yuppies to buy ugly food. My point was, that food being deemed as below standard and thrown out, in any amount, is disgusting in a world that still has food-insecure people in it. That's it. I don't give a shit about these startups. If it is true what they say that they are indeed bridging a gap between food that would otherwise be discarded and well-meaning people who want to change how they consume in such a way that's slightly more beneficial to the world, then more power to them. That's a good thing, IMO. But it is also a band-aid solution to the larger problems of the logistics of food production and distribution, and if anything, it's an extension of one of the bigger problems in itself: that food is not grown, shipped, and sold to feed people, it is done to make money and therefore, if a given group of people exists that it is not profitable to sell food to, they will not be fed. That, to me, is disgusting.
The rest of this is a lot of waffle about how stupid Americans are and I'm just not interested in that as a topic.
Edit: Yeah I just saw your other comment and it's clear you're just here with an axe to grind about people you perceive to be richer than yourself, and, I dunno man, maybe that's important, but to me it's boring. Go find someone else to grind it with.
You posted an article, I responded to it. Standard fare.
(Before you argue damage is cosmetic, a significant break in the skin molds quickly)
Its also why ugly food industry took off and companies like misfit markets or imperfect foods have billions of dollars in business, who've created a market for ugly looking perfectly edible food