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Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

economist.com

441–450 of 530 posts

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#442

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.

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?

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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 b…

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 fre…

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Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#444
post #5

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What's a dark grocery store?

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.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#445
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

"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 increase…

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

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#447
post #362
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 amazin…

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.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#449

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…

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.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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).
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