Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

saveur.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 415 posts

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#101

Post by stcredzero »

derwiki wrote: post #89
metaphorm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lastly, Chinese people love raw seafood - sushi, oysters, etc. Which Chinese people? There are approximately zero sushi restaurants in Manhattan Chinatown. There are a whole bunch of sushi restaurants in adjacent SoHo, which is filled with non-Chinese yuppies. anecdotal: took my Chinese co-worker to The Pokespot takeout for lunch and he immediately turned around and went somewhere else when he saw that the menu con…

China is not Chinatown, and I think your sample size is a bit small considering how many Chinese exist.

China is not Chinatown

Said dozens of times by my Chinese-born girlfriend in SF Chinatown: "I have no idea what this is." "This is weird."

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#102

Post by gutnor »

look_lookatme wrote: post #74
tn135 wrote: post #66

As a fish loving Indian, I was totally surprised to see that in Capitalist America the choice of fish was absolutely pathetic. At American fish places you only get "shrimps" may be "large shrimps" and "small shrimps". Salmon, Bass, Red Snapper and just few handful of usual fish. My small village fish market offers at least 20 varieties of fish in India's coastal region. A proper fish market would offer at least 100.…

For whatever reason Americans just don't eat a lot of seafood. This is why the choices are so bad in "Capitalist America" -- there's not enough demand. It's literally capitalism at work. Some theorize that this is due to American's avoiding flavor in general [1]. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/01/327248504/the...

Same in the UK btw. The fish choice in the biggest supermarket is smaller than you would expect in local store in the middle of Spain, away from the coast.

Same thing happens with meat. There is a huge reduction of variety, even at the local fishmonger/butcher, compared to continental Europe (I'm sure it is coming though)

A limited choice is available all the time everywhere, but the variety is not anymore.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#103

Post by nyolfen »

look_lookatme wrote: post #74
tn135 wrote: post #66

As a fish loving Indian, I was totally surprised to see that in Capitalist America the choice of fish was absolutely pathetic. At American fish places you only get "shrimps" may be "large shrimps" and "small shrimps". Salmon, Bass, Red Snapper and just few handful of usual fish. My small village fish market offers at least 20 varieties of fish in India's coastal region. A proper fish market would offer at least 100.…

For whatever reason Americans just don't eat a lot of seafood. This is why the choices are so bad in "Capitalist America" -- there's not enough demand. It's literally capitalism at work. Some theorize that this is due to American's avoiding flavor in general [1]. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/01/327248504/the...

i think the answer is simply that most of america is very far inland, and seafood is best fresh -- especially if one is especially sensitive to the 'fishy' taste it acquires after about a day or two, even frozen. every coastal community i've ever spent time in has a plethora of seafood restaurants, though i'm not sure if this extends to grocery stores.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#104

Post by gumby »

This resonates with HN article this week end talking about a lot of recent startups simply being centralizing rent seekers. The Saveur article shows that an "end to end" model can be cheaper, at least for a specific solution point (to whit: get it fresh, cook, don't worry so much about the cleanliness of the rind). While the centralized solution that serves most grocery stores costs more and promotes boring sameness.

Sometimes I want that sameness, but as the economy, or the Internet architecture for that matter, centralizes around a few corporations you end up with a bland world.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#105

Post by stcredzero »

phil21 wrote: post #51
panglott wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market economics always works best in an actual marketplace, where vendors are competing stall-to-stall. Most Americans buy groceries from a large corporate-owned store that they drive to and has everything, which compete with other large corporate-owned one-stop-shop that you have to drive to.

This is absolutely how I feel as well. I always found it interesting the most competitive areas always happen to be where tons of very small high volume shops exist. This is not just limited to the US, but anywhere in the world I've traveled. The older I become the more I realize how absolutely devastating the development policies of sprawl and low-density have been to all areas of human endeavor. You can't have effe…

You can't have effective competition without density and an ability to start extremely small.

This is a good metaphor for Net Neutrality. Maybe most of the US doesn't understand Net Neutrality, because they are trapped in their strip-mall big-box store hell, and don't know about real free markets IRL.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#106

Post by ithinkinstereo »

metaphorm wrote: post #77
ithinkinstereo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese don't eat raw foods at all, and especially not vegetables, which they correctly (by the standards of Chinatown produce) view as being unsanitary until thoroughly cooked. That's not strictly true. There are plenty of classical Chinese dishes - many of them family type dishes - that are composed of raw vegetables. Also pickling is pretty big in Chinese cuisine, but I guess that's not "raw" in the technical se…

> Lastly, Chinese people love raw seafood - sushi, oysters, etc. Which Chinese people? There are approximately zero sushi restaurants in Manhattan Chinatown. There are a whole bunch of sushi restaurants in adjacent SoHo, which is filled with non-Chinese yuppies. anecdotal: took my Chinese co-worker to The Pokespot takeout for lunch and he immediately turned around and went somewhere else when he saw that the menu con…

Sushi is quite popular with the Chinese, both in the states with ABCs as well as in the mainland.

See this article for one datapoint: http://www.worldfishing.net/news101/Comment/analysis/norway-...

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#107

Post by rifung »

metaphorm wrote: post #77
ithinkinstereo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese don't eat raw foods at all, and especially not vegetables, which they correctly (by the standards of Chinatown produce) view as being unsanitary until thoroughly cooked. That's not strictly true. There are plenty of classical Chinese dishes - many of them family type dishes - that are composed of raw vegetables. Also pickling is pretty big in Chinese cuisine, but I guess that's not "raw" in the technical se…

> Lastly, Chinese people love raw seafood - sushi, oysters, etc. Which Chinese people? There are approximately zero sushi restaurants in Manhattan Chinatown. There are a whole bunch of sushi restaurants in adjacent SoHo, which is filled with non-Chinese yuppies. anecdotal: took my Chinese co-worker to The Pokespot takeout for lunch and he immediately turned around and went somewhere else when he saw that the menu con…

Since sushi is Japanese, doesn't it make sense that it would be found in Little Tokyo instead of Chinatown? Maybe there are lots of Chinese people eating it outside of Chinatown?

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#108

Post by criddell »

tn135 wrote: post #66

As a fish loving Indian, I was totally surprised to see that in Capitalist America the choice of fish was absolutely pathetic. At American fish places you only get "shrimps" may be "large shrimps" and "small shrimps". Salmon, Bass, Red Snapper and just few handful of usual fish. My small village fish market offers at least 20 varieties of fish in India's coastal region. A proper fish market would offer at least 100.…

Different markets.

My local grocery store probably has 150 ft of cooler space devoted to beer. About half is Budweiser, Miller, and other huge brands, the rest is from smaller brewers, many of which are local. How does the selection compare at the local Lulu Hypermart?

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#109

Post by XaspR8d »

chimeracoder wrote: post #84
tn135 wrote: post #66

As a fish loving Indian, I was totally surprised to see that in Capitalist America the choice of fish was absolutely pathetic. At American fish places you only get "shrimps" may be "large shrimps" and "small shrimps". Salmon, Bass, Red Snapper and just few handful of usual fish. My small village fish market offers at least 20 varieties of fish in India's coastal region. A proper fish market would offer at least 100.…

> As a fish loving Indian, I was totally surprised to see that in Capitalist America the choice of fish was absolutely pathetic As explained below, the issue is one of demand. For whatever reason, people in the US don't like fish . I'm Bengali, which means our cuisine includes a lot of fish. But in the US, I almost never eat fish in restaurants - only when we're cooking it at home. And that's because the way it's coo…

> People in the US tend to prefer fish that's already bland to begin with (cod, haddock, tilapia, and sometimes tuna or salmon)

To be fair, in the Midwest this is often because there used to be a diet of much more flavorful freshwater fish from local lakes, but overfishing destroyed their populations and pushed prices way up, forcing cuisine to adapt to cheap saltwater fish.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#110

Post by civilian »

sleepingeights wrote: post #75

Capitalism in America means as close to monopolization and price gouging as much as possible. Even Silicon Valley is a very close approximation to a monopoly, sponsored by masses of delusional participants deluded into thinking they're accepted within the same ranks. The people in the US eat only two types of meat, a handful of types of vegetables and crops. Also the cost of fish in the US is very high because the US…

You might get something out of this article: http://www.americanteeth.org/2015/06/21/why-i-m-a-capitalist...

If "Capitalism in America means as close to monopolization and price gouging as possible." is your definition of capitalism, then you're off. (And I think that may be why you're being disagreed/downvoted on.) If you think that monopolization and price gouging is an emergent property of capitalism in America-- well, then, I wanna see some citations.

My (radical, libertarian) view that a free market would only leads to monopolies when they're _market monopolies_-- meaning they've already providing the best service, and will continue to do so. The really damaging monopolies only ever come from government-granted powers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vw6uF2LdZw

Post reply on HN