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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

But what does a typical American eat then? In my country (Netherlands) we eat fresh vegetables every day, we cook every day using many different ingredients and usually Rice, Potato of Pasta as the basis. Is it so typically American to eat highly processed foods? Don't you have a vegetable department in the stores? Here it would also be quite expensive to buy prepackage stuff as one gets peppers, cucumbers, zucchini etc for under 40 cents a piece, a bag of washed fresh spinach is about 1 euro, potatos costs less than 50 cents/kilo. Veggies are even cheaper now that we are not allowed to sell to Russia.

I have worked with Italian colleagues, they are even more puristic. Is this really a cultural thing or are vegetables just so expensive in the US? Are you not taking the time to cook? (about 30 min hands-on a day for preparing warm meals is considered normal here.)

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Vegetables are relatively cheap. It's just that in the US, cultural traditions are mish-mashed and weaker, and the food industry is motivated to increase their profit margin though selling "value add" which is really just "perceived value add" and amounts to processing and packaging.

I do all my own cooking, exclusively roasting and steaming, and don't even use carbohydrate rich foods like rice or pasta as a staple. I have steamed or roasted vegetables every day with almost every meal.

One thing I've noticed is that my fellow Americans tend to make a lot more work of vegetables than they need to. They're much too elaborate with washing, and are way too fussy with ingredients and extraneous prep. Just boil, roast, or steam vegetables. Add some salt and butter or olive oil, and you can call it done. So long as the vegetables are fresh and not overcooked, they will taste amazing! (Also, get as fancy as you want, but the best and most complex flavors come from fresh foods.)

It is mostly people not taking time to cook due in large part to a rushed lifestyle. Fresh vegetables are ubiquitous, diverse, and cheap. Also, in most parts of the US, you have to drive a significant distance to the grocery store; it is much easier to cook interesting food if you only need to walk down the street to get fresh ingredients.

One thing to understand is that the typical American diet tends to be regional and varies considerably across those regions. For example, where I currently live (Pacific Northwest) people eat relatively little processed food, in part because they have unbelievable access to fresh ingredients. On the other hand, when I lived in the central US, it was a blend of heavily processed food and fairly limited central/eastern European cuisine. This reflects what is available locally as well as the ethnic history of a region.

In my experience, some parts of the US have a much more diverse and widely available fresh vegetable selection than Europe. This is particularly true in the western US, which is where many vegetables come from. If you are lucky enough to live on the west coast of the US, you can buy a very wide range of fresh vegetables for almost no money all year long. What is available locally is seasonal but augmented by vast greenhouse operations and vegetables shipped in from other latitudes, which is simple in North America. In fact, the lack of vegetable diversity at any point in time compared to what I am accustomed to is one of my complaints about eating in Europe, especially in winter.

>Is it so typically American to eat highly processed foods

Yes.

>Don't you have a vegetable department in the stores?

There are a large number of Americans, especially the poor, for whom the only nearby "grocery stores" are bodegas, convenience stores, minimarts, etc, from which the supply of fresh foods tends to be limited at best. Add to that how spaced out everything in the US is and how poor Americans may not have a car or the free time to drive a considerable distance to a proper grocery store and back and stocking up on anything but the shelf-stable basics can be pretty hard. Take a look at "food desert" maps for more information.

>Here it would also be quite expensive to buy prepackage stuff as one gets peppers, cucumbers, zucchini etc for under 40 cents a piece, a bag of washed fresh spinach is about 1 euro, potatos costs less than 50 cents/kilo

Where I live, in a fairly low cost of living city, prices from a local grocery store start out at $1 apiece for bell peppers for cucumbers, $0.80/pound for potatoes, and $2/pound for apples or broccoli. Increase from there for most other big cities, or for people living in food deserts who have to spend their time getting to a real grocery store if they want anything approaching reasonable prices for fresh stuff.

By contrast, even convenience stores and minimarts will often have processed foods available at a cost low enough to approach those of "real" grocery stores, since canned foods and frozen dinners don't go bad if they're left on the shelves for too long.

As a Dutchman, I want to point out that you can multiply those prices by about 1.5 unless you like to shop around a lot, have access to some extra cheap streetmarket place, or the vegetables in question happen to be in season (which is not right now, for most vegetables). A cucumber is 89 cents at the AH, last I checked.

Street markets are cool, but they happen to cost me over 30 minutes to shop (lots of impressions), and are not any of my regular bike routes. They do indeed have cheap veggies but you need to walk around and check to get the good deals, which I am usually too tired to do at the times I ride past them. So I often choose to use a supermarket anyway, where I know what I can get, where it is, and get out within 10 minutes or so.

Southern California native now living in Chicago. Most of the meals from my childhood were packaged TV dinners we microwaved. Nowadays I will slow cook a soup once a week in a large crockpot. Maybe cook 2-ish other times during the week and the rest is pre-packaged or eating out. Others probably do better, but to your point, people like me exist. :)

US people in general eat a lot of processed, canned and frozen food. Even in the areas where fresh foods are available. I see even many immigrants who don't do it in their home countries do it when they come here.

I do think vegetables are overpriced in general grocery stores. The large asian grocery stores are pretty fairly priced.

> we eat fresh vegetables every day

that shit's very very expensive here.

No it's not! Green Beans. Cauliflower. Broccoli. Brussels sprouts. None of that's "expensive." I've been feeding myself exclusively on ordinary grocery store veggies, steak, and fish. It's not expensive or time consuming at all, and it's quite delicious when you catch on to how to do it, which you will very quickly, if you cook all your own meals.

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