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Comment by SirFatty | Hacker News Reader

"...how hard it is to find healthy food options compared to the unhealthy ones."

Sure, if you limit your purchases to Dollar General and Casey's. If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.

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The problem is that to a European citizen this is a bit unexpected. In Europe, in all countries, you can find roughly the same level of "safeness" of food across all tiers of stores. Go to a cheapest one and the most expensive one, and the yogurt, tomatoes or meat would be approximately the same quality and have the same nutritional components. The only difference would be that expensive store would additionally carry some imported fancy tomatoes or some fancy steak cuts. But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.

Its not just a "tier" of store, its a "genre" of store. Stores like Dollar General are not really grocers, they just happen to carry some food products. They typically do not carry any fresh foods. So its not a matter of their tomatoes are somehow worse quality, its that they do not sell tomatoes. Its not that their meats are worse quality, they do not sell fresh meat. They practically only sell pre-packaged goods. Think about the few isles of junk food and small packages of household products (soaps and what not) you might find at a gas station, and scale that up ~800m^2.

If its not something that is OK to sit on a shelf for a few months, you won't find it at a Dollar General.

When it comes to actual fresh foods (which can be found if you go to actual grocery stores), those are highly regulated. You'll find fancier varieties at fancier grocery stores, but in the end a yellow onion at Kroger is about the same as a yellow onion in Safeway or Publix or Albertsons or HEB or Whole Foods.

Certain Dollar Generals do carry fresh foods and there’s a sub brand called Dollar General Market that targets the grocery dollar.

Romanian here: the tomato quality varies by a lot. All stores have crappy "plastic" tasting tomatoes. It's not that easy to find really good tomatoes (in summer you can find them at local markets, in winter... Fancy imports I guess).

Tomatoes are, imo, the prime example and possibly the only one of popular produce, of bland produce in the US.

I think it's a combination of having them year-round (they are picked before they ripen for shipping) and the emphasis on color/look being very high. A good tomato tastes much better than most store bought to the point I didn't know I liked tomatoes until I had a garden grown one. Now I eat store bought as well but it's not the same.

I don't find most other fruits/veggies to suffer nearly as much from that though.

Really? I grow blueberries, strawberries, several cultivars of hot/sweet peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, garlic, bush beans, and several different herbs, and without fail ALL of them taste way better than the store bought version. That isn’t to say the store versions are always bad, but you know the home grown ones every single time.

Tomatoes are different though. I barely knew what a tomato tasted like. I didn't like them because they were tasteless (when combined with sny other food) and slimy.

It isn't that homegrown tomatoes just taste better, they actually have taste.

I mean, in most of the US, they're an extremely seasonal product. If you go to Pete's (a commodity big-box grocery chain in Chicago) in August, you'll get very good tomatoes. There's basically nowhere you're going to go to get very good fresh tomatoes (maybe cherry tomatoes) in April.

"Plastic" tomatoes has nothing to do with their nutritional score or inclusion of dangerous compounds. It's just a cheaper tomato variety with thicker skin and most likely harvested early, to be conditioned on the shelf. So these so called "plastic" tomatoes, or some fancy expensive ones have exact same level of harmful chemicals in EU - none at all. That was my point, that this safety level is accessible to poor and rich, regardless of their money.

Even in the SF Bay Area, we have this problem. The best tomatoes are from someone's backyard.

They actually taste like tomatoes.

Unfortunate that they can be a bit difficult to grow. Very weather dependent.

My wife doesn’t let me buy tomatoes in winter. And even summer tomatoes are bland in comparison to the ones one would get in a mediterran region or the ones she grows in our garden. It’s not even the same ballpark.

The data does not support your thesis. US ranks 3rd in Quality and Safety of foods [1]. USDA Prime beef ribeye will have similar quality from variety of stores, USDA Choice will be similar across multiple stores as well.

US does not have a problem with food safety, it has a problem with widely available UPF with many other factors (price, time, distance to fresh produce etc).

[1] https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec...

>But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.

Speaking also as an European, not they would not. There's a pretty big difference in the quality of the meant across the board between shops and brands(suppliers) of meat depending how the animals were raised, fed and cared for.

Here in Austria there's been plenty of scandals covering the poor conditions of animals in meat factories (living in feces, infections with puss, etc) yet the meat cuts receive the AMA seal of approval. I also did some work for the farm tech sector and the conditions of animals in some (most) EU countries I saw were indeed as appalling as those in the stories. It almost made me go vegan.

Sure, it's all(probably) technically safe to eat due to all the antibiotics they pump in those animals, just like in the US, but quality varies a lot.

And like sibling said, there's also a big difference between the quality of fruits and vegetables you find in supermarkets depending on where they come from and the conditions under which they were farmed.

That's why I dislike these over generalist "In Europe it's like this and that" blanket statements. No it isn't, it's just one point on the graph, but in reality it varies A LOT, it's a friggin continent ffs.

You are correct, but the difference is that companies doing that in Europe are breaking the law if they treat cattle with banned compounds, while in USA farmers do this legally and at scale. This is why in this particular case I believe that generalizing is reasonable, because the fundamental approach differs so much.

In large swaths of the country, these "non-grocery stores" are a lifeline, as they are the only option. In others, you don't even have that -- gas station convenience stores might be that lifeline instead. [1]

I am familiar with what the grandparent is referring to, having spent a decade running purchasing teams in US grocery stores. Even in urban areas with many different food retail stores, a typical supermarket in the US is a fairly difficult place to shop for someone with specific food sensitivities. Hopefully folks here who live in the SF Bay Area appreciate that it's a total outlier in both the diversity of stores available and the assortment of products sold in a typical Bay Area supermarket

[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...

For most US supermarkets, shop around the perimeter and avoid anything in any of the center aisles. While individual floor plans vary, that tends to route you to the fresh produce and meats and dairy and avoid most of the ultraprocessed packaged stuff.

I give this advice to anyone I meet who just moved here from overseas.

Is there a better source for that data? I appreciate that you're at least bringing data to the discussion, but honestly I kind of don't buy it, having lived all over the US from rural farm communities to Manhattan. I think I can identify where I live right now on that map, by virtue of being right on the border of IL/IN and Lake Michigan, and it has a little indication of "food desert", but it certainly isn't.

This just doesn't align with reality; your chart is practically meaningless.

Yes, in rural areas you often need to drive further than 1 mile to get to a grocery store. That doesn't mean that normal food doesn't exist for these people.

But it's more than a mile away!

The SF Bay Area is hardly an outlier. There may be more specialty grocery stores here, but the large supermarkets where most consumers buy most of their food are the same as anywhere else. If you compare a Safeway in Mountain View, CA to a Publix in Daytona Beach, FL or a Kroger in Toledo, OH there isn't much difference in the products available.

Safeway has an in-house organic brand, "O Organics". I can easily go to Safeway and pick up only organic foods. I don't know if that's true for Publix or Kroger.

UPDATE: ChatGPT tells me that at Publix it's called "GreenWise Organic" and at Kroger it's called "Simple Truth Organic"

Organic food does not make it any healthier than non-organic choice. Organic UPF will still be UPF with excess of sugar/salt.

I hope that you recognize that your casual-outsider evaluation of the assortments of these stores is deeply flawed and not based on actual data. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll recognize that it wouldn't make sense for a supermarket in one of the highest median income cities in the country to have assortment parity with a chain targeting cost conscious shoppers. The devil here is in the long-tail, which is definitionally less visible to you as a shopper, and in fact may not exist at all for certain retailers -- especially those targeting cost-conscious shoppers.

I lived in rural areas a large portion of my life. What you are describing is limited to areas with extremely small populations. Meaning even my hometown of a few thousand has a Walmart (put up when I was a kid in the 90s) an Aldi, and two local grocery stores with tons of healthy options.

So yeah, there are a lot of towns that fit that criteria (less than 1000 residents). But as a portion of U.S. population it is not substantial in any way.

i lived in one of those small towns through highschool, just a blinking yellow light and a gas station. What we did, and everyone did, was drive the 20miles to the large town with a Walmart and get groceries there. It only takes 20min because there's no lights or traffic in those areas so the time commitment is about the same as living in a city. My mom made meals from her recipes using basic ingredients so it's certainly feasible to eat how you want in these areas. Only in the most rare/extreme cases are people forced to grocery shop at a gas station.

I've got family in the rural Midwest. It would surprise me if their town wasn't a food desert by these definitions. You might go grab a thing of milk or sliced bread in a pinch at the convenience store, but yeah otherwise you just make the short drive into "the city" to get food at a regular grocery store.

Or you just ate the food you were growing on your own lot, or what your neighbors were growing, or from the farmer selling stuff off the highway.

I hope you recognize that your claims are deeply flawed and don't align with the reality that most middle-class grocery shoppers experience. Regardless of what you think makes "sense", major supermarkets throughout the country have rough assortment parity (with minor differences for regional consumer preferences). In some cases the long tail is actually longer in lower median income cities because labor is cheaper and stores are physically larger (cheaper real estate). That Publix where I shopped in Daytona Beach is enormous.

Instead of making things up you can just go look. Many supermarkets have online ordering now so you can see exactly what they stock at each local store.

Yes -- I know that my experiences don't align with most middle-class grocery shoppers: I worked in the food business for a decade where assortment was literally my job. There is a lot that casual shoppers like you don't notice! That's actually built in.

In any case, I love most of what you have written here.

Online ordering enables larger long tails. In which market do you suppose online ordering is more common, Daytona Beach or Mountain View?

If you were managing assortment at a Publix in Daytona Beach, how would you structure your long tail? Would you look to a Safeway in Mountain View as a model to follow?

Safeway is the cost conscious option in Mountain View, compare it with the other options (Whole Foods, Nijiya). The comparison between Publix and Safeway is apt.

Safeway in the Bay Area regularly comes up very close to the same cost as Whole Foods, unless one regularly uses the app and clips the saving coupons for Safeway.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Whole-Foods-vs-Safeway-W...

Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.

The "cost conscious" option in a city with one of the highest median incomes in the US is very different from a cost conscious shopper in a city like Daytona Beach, where practically a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line!

I will also point out that "cost conscious" is one of several shopper profiles that Safeway targets, but broadly speaking Safeway targets a more affluent shopper (although cost conscious isn't the same as non-affluent). The degree to which a particular location services these targets varies by area. But no, these stores target fundamentally different shoppers and think very differently about assortment, at least with regard to the long tail

Ironically in SF it seems inversed. Whole Foods is second cheapest to Trader Joe’s, and Safeway is the most expensive.

I live in Los Altos next to Mountain View and Safeway is very expensive compared to every other option except Whole Foods. There are a few items they have that are the same as others, like bananas so I sometimes walk to the closest Safeway to stock up on those but otherwise one has to be wary of the pricing.

Heh, in Mountain View you also have these choices:

- La Plaza Market

- 99 Ranch

- Grocery Outlet

- Rose Market

- Nob Hill

- Lucky

- Smart & Final

- Walmart

- Target

- India Cash & Carry

- Bharat Bazar

I'm probably leaving out a ton.

>If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.

Also as "an European" whatever that means, I only spent a couple of months in the US as a tourist, and had no issues finding healthy foods from leafy greens, to good meats in places like Wholefoods.

If he couldn't find it while actually living there, tells me he's not commenting in good faith.

I mean, Whole Foods targets upper middle class folks, you’re far away from the average American experience

Leafy greens and cuts of meat are not something exclusive to whole foods.

The real issue is people don't cook for themselves and seek out premade shelf stable offerings of what their grandparents were making from scratch decades ago. It is like knowledge has been lost.

I thought that Whole Foods targets folks who like their food flavored with rat droppings?

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2025/06/26/cupertino-whole-foo...

Yeah, when I visited USA I was shocked to find lots of larger "grocery stores" didn't even stock the basics. In Europe that isn't a thing, everything larger than a regular room has fresh vegetables and meat and other staples, even in immigrant areas.

Sure it might be possible to find that in USA as well, but its so much harder as not every store has it.

Were you actually visiting what Americans would consider a grocery store?

I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.

Those stores are intended pretty much entirely for stuff people want while on the go, and the few "groceries" they stock are basically aimed at the kind of things a drunk/stoned person is craving at 3AM when nothing else is open (say, a frozen pizza), or the few things you might run out of by surprise in the morning/when about to eat and be willing to greatly overpay for being able to grab somewhere close by before your meal/schedule is ruined. (ex: milk, condiments, maybe eggs).

I do wonder if people are stopping into a CVS or Walgreens and thinking those are grocery stores. In a lot of the rest of the world, a small corner market like that would be a grocer, but in the US grocers are much larger stores.

> I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.

But that is the problem isn't it? That you have to drive so far and look on a map to find a grocery store while in Europe you can just walk for 5 minutes and find one where you can buy fresh produce. So in Europe there are these convenient grocery stores that stocks fresh produce and so on, USA not having those is what we talked about.

So sure if you define "grocery store" as a store that sells fresh produce you are right, but then there are very few grocery stores in USA which is still the problem we talked about. It is so much easier and faster to get these wares in Europe than in USA.

That's basically getting into having radically different lifestyles and development patterns and you not liking a car-oriented one. (And hey, I agree with you and live somewhere I can walk to most things, including groceries. But that's not the average American lifestyle).

Approximately 92% of US households have at least one car, 59% of US households have more than one car.

The fundamental point that I am making is: Americans do not typically go to convenience stores to buy groceries, it's not even a consideration. The places most do go to buy their groceries do have fresh produce + meat and so on. They tend to just make less frequent trips and buy more at once.

Since they are getting there by car, it's also easier to buy a lot more at once.

When they get home - they also have a much larger refrigerator + freezer (possibly more than one) than is typically seen in Europe to store it in.

Yeah, I mean, any French person who goes to a Safeway or a Walmart will be shocked to see what the offerings are.

What kind of "basics" did you find missing in actual grocery stores, and what were the actual stores in question?

Not GP, but I can offer: real cheese (not squares of individually wrapped plastic, nor grated and mixed with whatever to prevent caking), Walmart.

Real cheese is not rare. It is a little pricey though. Usually north of $15 a lb.

What makes the cheese in the links I provided below not "real cheese"? None are >$15/lb, at least around me.

Note, I agree, they're not fancy cheeses, they're quite basic, plain, and common varieties. But how are they not real cheeses?

Just my choice of words nothing too serious.

at Safeway or Walmart? Absolutely not what most europeans would consider "real cheese"

What? Just about every Walmart with a grocery I've been to sells blocks of cheese. These are all available at multiple Walmarts around me.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Block-Sharp-Cheddar-C...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Low-Moisture-Part-Ski...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Frigo-Parmesan-Cheese-Wedge-5-oz-...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tillamook-Medium-Cheddar-Cheese-B...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Swiss-Cheese-Block-8-...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dutchmark-Smoked-Gouda-Cheese-7-o...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Castello-Gourmet-Creamy-Danish-Ha...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Kerrygold-Grass-Fed-Dubliner-Iris...

and on and on and on and on and on...

It might not be right next to the pre-shredded cheese (usually those house brand blocks of cheddar and what not are), sometimes they're in a fancier part of the deli area. But I can't think of a time I've gone to a Walmart looking for a block of cheese and not found any cheese.

Its not going to be the fanciest varieties, but once again the question was for "basics" that don't exist. Having cheddar, swiss, parmesean, gouda, etc. is having the basics.

Yeah, no European is going to tell you this is "real cheese"

What makes it not "real cheese"?

The 'cheddars' are a weird colour and look rubbery, the 'mozzarella' is a hard block(‽), the 'Swiss cheese' is... I don't know what, which Swiss cheese is it?

I didn't look further than that; the parmesan looked most plausible - though '10 months' stood out, I don't think I've seen less than 24 in UK supermarkets, possibly it's a PDO related thing regulating the process. (Whereas the US doesn't respect PDO and linked one possibly made in US anyway.)

You're able to tell the actual texture and hardness of the cheese through pictures on website listing. Incredible.

Cheddar is expected to be this color in the US market, its common to add annatto to it. There are other white cheddars as well, but its usually expected to be about this color. Its not weird to be in cheese as its commonly found in Red Leicester, Double Gloucester, Cheshire, and Shropshire Blue, French Mimolette, and even other European varieties of cheddar.

Mozzarella often comes in multiple different varieties. There's the "fresh" mozzarella which is sold in the whey, while there's also commonly "low-moisture" mozzarella that's commonly used for shredding purposes. This is true in the US as in Europe. Either way, "fresh" mozzarella can also be easily found at Walmart.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/BelGioioso-Fresh-Mozzarella-Chees...

"Swiss cheese" is a common name for Emmental in the US. So once again, ignorance. Thanks for showcasing it so clearly. I guess Emmental isn't a real cheese either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_(North_America)

So ignorance and pretentiousness. Got it. Thanks for proving it.

But hey, you also said these products didn't even exist just a few comments ago so its not too surprising.

Once again, I'm not saying these are high quality cheeses. They're cheap. They're not fancy at all. Nobody goes to Walmart to get "the good stuff". But that doesn't make them not cheese. Maybe crappy cheeses, sure. Maybe produced in not the right region for a given name according to some jurisdictions. But the standard given was real and basic, not fancy or high end or excellent quality or whatever. I would agree, for good cheese I don't go to Walmart, I go elsewhere. But if all I need is a block of cheddar or emmental or "gouda" or whatever to make some sandwiches, its fine.

If you had said "good" cheese I'd have agreed with you. It's not great cheese. If I'm wanting good cheese I'll go elsewhere. But instead the standard was "real" cheese.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Please provide some, or retract your claim.

To be clear, "actual" grocery store for the purposes of finding reliably fresh and healthy food includes one of the following:

1. Upscale western grocery stores and markets, ideally located within the biggest and most affluent city possible. Pikes place market would be a great example of what I'm talking about for you seattle folks.

2. Asian grocery stores, like "H-mart"

3. Farmers markets, but these are hit and miss, especially in smaller communities

Most other grocery stores, including Costco, Trader Joes, etc are full of extremely unhealthy trash slop. It's still extremely hard to find reliable low sugar options nearly anywhere, including at health and "organic" oriented grocery stores.

America just sucks for foodies who don't have unlimited time to get through the slop.

Trader joes and costco aren't really the same thing as grocery stores. I know this is confusing for foreigners. Kroger/publix/vons/ralphs/albertsons/giant eagle are the real grocery stores. You can get all sorts of good eats there. baguettes and sourdough loafs cooked daily by the in house bakery staff. All sorts of cheese sold by the pound. All sorts of fruits and vegetables although some are seasonal.

> America just sucks for foodies who don't have unlimited time to get through the slop.

I think by definition, being a “foodie” means you have, and enjoy finding, the time to sort the wheat from the chaff. Nobody has unlimited time for anything.

“I want to be be a ‘foodie’ but really I just want to be judgy” is a weak argument.

Being judgy is a uniquely American trait that's become popular over the past 20 years.

I thought that, an an American. Then I went to Paris in 2013, and realized it was a learned trait!

In America, google rating scores are straight up astroturfed to the point where the total number of ratings is far more important than their score.

When I travel to Japan, for example, I interpret a bad google maps review score for a location as a GOOD thing, because the average white tourists palette is incompatible with the local cuisine.

I can walk to basically any random place, anywhere in Japan, or France, or Singapore and get very high quality food that I don't have to worry about being full of bullshit. That's not true in America.

As long as you realize this is opinion, sure thing.

Depends on the grocery store. If you shop exclusively at Target, a company that caters primarily to those who ‘prepare’ as opposed to those who ‘cook’ you’ll find less healthy options than actual grocery stores.

Target (and Wal-Mart) are not grocery stores. Sure they have groceries, but a limited select selection compared to a proper store.

That's not quite true for Wal-Mart.

There exist Wal-Mart Supercenters which are basically a full-blown grocery store combined with a traditional Wal-Mart store.

There also exist Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets which are regular grocery stores.

It's not uncommon for some people to refer to all of them as simply "Wal-Mart", especially if only one of them exists locally.

That depends a lot on the Target. One location around me only has a very small produce section for their groceries with everything else pretty much being prepackaged products. Another location has quite a large produce section along with a deli, a butcher counter, and a bakery.

I was speaking about SuperTargets, not standard Targets.

And I’m not sure why folks are downvoting this; objectively, Target has limited and terrible selection compared to standalone grocers.

In my travels I've found even the size and quality of the produce sections of SuperTargets can be quite variable.

But yes, I do agree their range of choices for fresh food products is usually more limited compared to good, actual grocers. But that applies to their packaged goods as well, they often don't have as many choices of lots of things. I might find almost a dozen brands of pasta at an actual grocer but only have three or four brands at Target. To me it seems the ratio is about the same, its just the scale is different.

And to be honest, its the same story for practically all the stuff at Target. They don't have the widest supply of craft supplies compared to craft stores like Michael's and Hobby Lobby. They don't have the widest selection of bicycles compared to the bike store. They don't have nearly as many toys as what Toys R Us did. The book section is smaller than a Barnes & Noble. What else is new.

The comment is still true regardless of the fact that Whole Foods exists. It is genuinely more difficult to find healthy food in the US than abroad.

(i'm ignoring the additional fact that the US has many more food deserts than abroad. even within rich neighborhoods with many expansive grocery stores, those stores have more unhealthy options and fewer healthy options than abroad, unless it's specifically a "health food store")

I wholeheartedly disagree. Grocery stores in the US are typically much larger than grocery stores abroad. A Kroger, Publix, Piggly Wiggly, Schnuck's, or HyVee will typically have just as many healthy food options as a grocery store abroad. The difference is these US grocery stores also stock a much larger variety of unhealthy options.

As someone else in this thread used sweet yogurt as an example, it is trivially easy to find unsweetened yogurt in nearly any grocery store in the US. The difference is that there's also a very large selection of sweet flavored yogurt.

You might think that based on a cursory anecdotal comparison, but studies show it is not true.

"Ultra-processed food staples dominate mainstream U.S. supermarkets. Americans more than Europeans forced to choose between health and cost" - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.16.24302894v...

"Price and availability trends by level of neighbourhood deprivation however, remain unclear; while studies in the US have tended to find differences between neighbourhoods and prices for availability of healthier food items, studies conducted in other countries have generally reported no association" - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3679513/

"The distribution of the FPro scores in the three stores shows a high degree of similarity: each store exhibits a monotonically increasing curve (Fig. 2a), indicating that minimally pro-cessed products (low FPro) represent a relatively small fraction of the inventory of grocery stores, the majority of the offerings being in the ultra-processed category (high FPro). Although less-processed items make up a smaller share of the overall inventory, they likely account for a proportionally larger portion of actual purchases, highlighting a discrepancy between sales data and available food options. Never-theless, systematic differences between stores emerge: Whole Foods offers a greater selection of minimally processed items and fewer ultra-processed options, whereas Target has a particularly high pro-portion of ultra-processed products (high FPro)." - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-024-01095-7.epdf?shar...

"“Our research shows that consumers prioritize taste and price when shopping for food, with nutrition coming in a distant third,” Balagtas said. “So the fact that consumers associate healthy eating with high costs and low taste is a challenge for food manufacturers and public health advocates.”" - https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2025/08/how-americans-make-health...

We have more ultraprocessed foods, fewer healthy options, the healthy options are more expensive, and their distribution is uneven (less healthy food depending on the store). Consumers' associations confirm this.

Meanwhile abroad there is less ultraprocessed food, the healthy food is more often subsidized (so it's cheaper), and healthy food distribution choices are more evenly distributed.

> The comment is still true regardless of the fact that Whole Foods exists. It is genuinely more difficult to find healthy food in the US than abroad.

As an european immigrant to US who still spends lots of time in EU, this is not true. It's relatively easy to find grocery stores in higher density areas with fresh produce/meats.

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