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.
You figure it out, my siblings and I were always in multiple extracurricular activities. We’d typically eat at like 6-7pm. If something came up we’d move dinner to 5pm or later to 8pm. There’s always someway to make it work. We also tended to have breakfast together so even if we have to miss 1-2 days a week for dinner, we still eat together at least one meal. In the US extracurricular sports and music tend to be aft…
Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
511–520 of 530 posts
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#512Earlier 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…
> far superior to the “fresh” produce you get, which has to survive transportation at room temperature Depends on the distance to transport and water content though. I have never eaten frozen pinneapple, but I guess it would be awful?
I think it depends on the application, in a situation or recipe where fresh fruit is important (like a tart), frozen fruits likely won’t measure up. In something baked (like a pie) frozen can work well. A smoothie, frozen fruits can be amazing.
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the same with with orange juice FROM concentrate vs the shelf stable stuff, everyone calls me crazy for it.
Neither option tastes anything like what it’s supposed to taste like, to me. The process of making concentrate loses most of the aroma, which is then added back using perfumes which are derived from oranges. Because the perfumes are made from oranges, using certain techniques, they do not have to be listed as separate ingredients, and the can will just say “orange” in the ingredient list. One fundamental problem is t…
Completely agree and it’s so much better at least to me.
I’d even go as far to say that many people who are used to drinking the concentrate or shelf stable stuff have no idea how much different fresh squeezed OJ tastes. To the point where it’s surprising and in some cases not to their taste because they are so used to the processed stuff.
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#514I 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…
One of the problems with Americans and food is that we've been conditioned to have sugar in absolutely everything, and the 80s made it worse because of the low-fat fad (they just increased sugar content to maintain mouthfeel). Ask any Gen Xer and they'll regale you with nightmares of the dominance of oat bran in 80s cuisine. On the one hand, you get a muffin. On the other hand, it tastes like cardboard flavored with…
Five years ago I made the decision to eat lower carb, I didn’t want to give up tomato sauce dishes entirely and found most of the canned tomato products still too high in sugar. Moved to just buying decent ripe Roma/plum tomatoes (they tend to be the lowest in natural sugar content), slice them in half and roast them with a head of garlic, stick blend them and simmer with a little chicken broth and white wine, fresh garlic, basil, bay leaf…and you have a really tasty lower carb tomato sauce.
Anytime I taste any jar sauce, it’s now inedible. Just like you said…it tastes more like a jam to me now…way too sweet.
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the app wasn't spyware, they wouldn't be so keen on getting me to use it instead of using a web page.
Nobody wants to use a grocery store web page on their phone, and nobody wants to use a computer instead of their phone.
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
Younger generations are filled with self righteous tiresome scolds. I don’t know where we went wrong.
As someone from the younger generation, it's probably linked to hearing about climate and ecology from 4th grade to now. Many people took the message seriously, which leads to questioning a lot what the people before us did. Basically the older generation not taling responsibility, first for climate stuff, and then for raising "self righteous tiresome scolds".
I think this is a big part of it. We were (and are) okay with teachers and children’s entertainment giving children strident, non nuanced messages thinking that they’d get the more complex picture later. That looks like a mistake.
Basically the older generation not taling responsibility, first for climate stuff, and then for raising "self righteous tiresome scolds".
I specifically said “where did we go wrong,” isn’t that taking responsibility?
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone from the younger generation, it's probably linked to hearing about climate and ecology from 4th grade to now. Many people took the message seriously, which leads to questioning a lot what the people before us did. Basically the older generation not taling responsibility, first for climate stuff, and then for raising "self righteous tiresome scolds".
it's probably linked to hearing about climate and ecology from 4th grade to now. I think this is a big part of it. We were (and are) okay with teachers and children’s entertainment giving children strident, non nuanced messages thinking that they’d get the more complex picture later. That looks like a mistake. Basically the older generation not taling responsibility, first for climate stuff, and then for raising "sel…
That would be taking responsibility as a generation if the generation as a whole was asking that and taking steps to fix it. That doesn't seem to be the case, even if you as an individual are doing it. Just like me trying to not be self righteous won't change the fact that my generation is like this. At least all the generations seems to have people that have a sense of personal responsbility, that's good news.
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#518Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this generalizes, it really depends on where you live in the US. I work in Europe and know many US expats there, so this is something we talk about. The consensus has been that the quality and diversity of fresh foods in the US these days is frequently superior in many categories at the median, though notably worse in others. The paucity of good produce is noticeable everywhere, for example, a fraction…
You're right, I forgot about the cheese shops, because in France I wouldn't have to go out of my way to find good cheese. But, "Bread is indistinguishable"? WAT? Really? I guess we have different tastes. Other than some sourdough there is no bread I've had that I like in SF. That definitely varies by country in Europe. Hard to find good bread in Germany and some of those northern countries have their interesting brea…
I wouldn't have to go out of my way to find good cheese in many parts of the US. It isn't the 1980s, the median availability is similar to the median availability in most of Europe, here in 2022. You seem to be fencing with stereotypes instead of reality. I don't have a dog in this fight but (1) I spend a lot of time, and have spent a lot of time, all over the world and (2) I eat absolutely everything everywhere and in particular investigate their food markets. I'm not guessing about what is and isn't available to the average person in various places, I actually shop in those markets.
Every place has their local specialties, and some places in Europe really do go above and beyond, like northern Spain. But the quality and availability has radically converged in my lifetime for everyone. Americans are not benighted or some such, their markets are quite good this days. The fact that ordinary suburban US supermarkets routinely carry hundreds of cheeses from all over the world is quite a change from decades ago. The actual cheese shops just specialize in obscure cheeses that minimally intersect with the ones the supermarkets carry.
All that aside, Americans have amazing produce. That and beef are two things they do exceptionally well by any standard. I've never been able to get anything comparable in Europe.
Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores
#520Earlier 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...