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Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

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Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#261

Post by satori99 »

mtempm wrote: post #254
culot wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live near the Great Lakes, so there is literally no such thing as a safe fish to eat. Every fish has a limit to how much you can eat and how often -- that is if you are an adult male, if female or child you are far more limited yet. Especially near me, where the waterways are also toiletways. You'd have to go out into the lake to escape the toilet and dioxin-laden water, where the fish should never be eaten, and ev…

I lived in Houston where you cant eat anything near the coast. When I went to Australia it was incredible you can fish and eat almost everywhere/everything near the coast.

Don't fish for dinner near big cities in Australia though. It can be just as bad as anywhere else.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-16/health-warning-over-fi...

http://www.fishingworld.com.au/news/toxins-found-at-popular-...

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#262

Post by smallnamespace »

tw04 wrote: post #172
look_lookatme wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Which we should all rejoice. Because the oceans are already being over fished to the point we're facing a very real likelihood of collapse. If Americans were pulling at the same rate as nations like Japan or India, we'd all be in a very bad place already.

No, this is actually a terrible thing in the long run for one simple reason: fisheries are being destroyed everywhere [1], and the US is the only nation currently with the clout to really push to change this. But since seafood isn't even on most Americans' radar and we live in a democracy, it's very unlikely any politician will ever spend political capital on it.

Fisheries are being destroyed is because blue water fisheries are a commons -- no nations own them, so whoever vacuums up the fish first reap the profits. Not to mention global warming and ocean acidification are stressing fish breeding grounds worldwide.

This model made sense up until WW2, and was in line with how international waters were historically governed, but it is an ecological disaster in the making because technological developments during the war (sonar, deep sea nets, etc.) allowed huge fishing fleets to completely destroy blue water fishing grounds.

The only way to change this is for someone to push at the international level to rewrite the agreements on fisheries (restrict them by quotas, manage them by an international body with an eye towards conservation, etc.), and the only superpower that has the political capital to really get the ball rolling is the US.

But most Americans don't eat much seafood so it's not on anyone's radar. Enjoy your seafood while you still can. Maybe rich nations will have farmed fish or domestic freshwater sources, but cheap seafood from the ocean will basically not exist within a few decades.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/07/global-f...

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#263

Post by davidw »

Alupis wrote: post #248
davidw wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good steaks are more expensive than chuck, too. And yet people consume both.

Few people eat steaks every night, let alone good cuts of steak.

And yet... you can get them in stores. That's kind of the whole point. Not everyone in Italy eats clams or octopus or whatever every night either.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#264

Post by wahern »

jessaustin wrote: post #199
a3n wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fresh water fish strikes me as likely very labor intensive, and labor is searched for and destroyed in this country, in favor of industrial sized processes and yields. I see big fillets of salmon and other large fish in Krogers, from the large industrial supply chain, next to the occasional little trouts and whatevers, and I often wonder "where do those little guys come from? How is it possible for them to get into t…

Someone in USA Midwest who doesn't just go fishing for himself in any of the many lakes and streams that are open to the public, has very little basis for complaint about selection of fresh fish to eat. The reason we have a variety of sport fish in our inland waters, is because commercial fishing is not allowed.

An aside: I visited Mongolia a few years ago and learned that Mongolians almost universally dislike fish. And given that the vast majority of Mongolians were pastoral and nomadic until about 10 years ago, the many pristine lakes and streams of Mongolia are filled with ridiculously large fish. The waters are very accessible, too, because the vast majority of the land in the country is open to allow the population to freely roam and graze their livestock.

I'm not an avid fisherman, but anybody who is should seriously consider visiting Mongolia before it's too late. An exceptionally brutal winter in 2009 killed many livestock and drove millions of people to the capital city. And in the past 10 years the mining industry has exploded. The population is rapidly moving away from nomadic pastoralism and toward industrialization and private property. While I'm sure most of the country will remain undeveloped for quite some time given its size, with the mining operations the waterways are likely to become increasingly suspect.

FWIW, it's not that Mongolians are like some isolated tribe in the Amazon. They're fully aware of the world and enjoy a decent literacy rate. But the Soviets kept the Mongolian economy relatively undeveloped, perhaps because the pastoral culture fit the communist ideal. With the collapse of the USSR the country stayed on the same course until about 10-15 years ago when outsiders (especially South Koreans) poured in to develop the resource extraction industries.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#265

Post by mtempm »

satori99 wrote: post #261
mtempm wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Houston where you cant eat anything near the coast. When I went to Australia it was incredible you can fish and eat almost everywhere/everything near the coast.

Don't fish for dinner near big cities in Australia though. It can be just as bad as anywhere else. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-16/health-warning-over-fi... http://www.fishingworld.com.au/news/toxins-found-at-popular-...

Those links appear to warn of fishing around Sydney harbour and Oyster Bay. I still would bet almost anywhere along the proper beach is at least an order of magnitude safer than in comparable regions of the states. Many beaches I consistently saw heaps of guys surf casting.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#266

Post by melq »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #237
davidw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is a pretty wealthy place. I lived in Italy for something like 15 years, and people there eat a lot of fish too, of varying kinds. By and large, they do not have as much money as people do in the US. If it were only about efficiency, you'd probably just eat beans and rice, day in and day out, with a bit of this and that thrown in. Edit: BTW, this book has some interesting ideas about the US and food: http://am…

The US is a pretty wealthy place. I lived in Italy for something like 15 years, and people there eat a lot of fish too, of varying kinds. By and large, they do not have as much money as people do in the US The US is a wealthy place, but a lot of individual families aren't wealthy at all. Cheap, mass-produced, pre-prepared food (either frozen or in cans/boxes) are the cheapest things to eat. Where I lived - a few hour…

FWIW I live on the coast in a place where people eat a decent amount of seafood (anecdotally), and fish is also one of the most expensive protein options. Significantly more expensive than chicken/pork and often even beef. Up until I got my first post-college dev job, my family could not afford fresh fish and thus didn't eat it. Now I live comfortably and can afford it, but it costs as much as a nice piece of beef (like a ribeye), and since I didn't eat fish growing up, I'm going for that ribeye 9 times out of 10.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#267

Post by int_19h »

civilian wrote: post #253
int_19h wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that a lot of it is based on the general premise that market actors are nearly perfectly rational (which is the general premise in a lot of libertarian economic analysis, and, more broadly speaking, the Austrian school), which just doesn't hold up to practical observations.

Cool, so this is a good response to that https://fee.org/articles/do-free-markets-require-rational-ac... > What Austrians and their fellow travelers can argue is that it’s not the rationality of market participants that matters, but the institutional context within which they act. In other words, rationality is not a feature of the individual choosers but of the market as a whole. Even if people make “mistakes” by no…

IMO that is also not consistent with observations of real-world markets. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that such feedback would only exist if a relatively small part of the market is irrational, while the rest of it is - then the irrational part is, in a sense, "punished" by the rational part for deviation. But if the entirety of it is irrational, then it's not at all a given that acting irrationally would actually produce a worse result for that particular actor - it may well produce a better result due to irrational behavior of other actors.

It could be argued that so long as someone in the market is worse off, they would "correct" their behavior, and that would cause a cascade of punishment/correction for other actors in the chain. The problem with that is that it's not an instant process, and the time scales on which it works - especially when the actors that get the short end of the stick also have relatively little market power individually (and so often would need to organize to effect any meaningful pushback), and so this process is simply too slow - it doesn't actually produce an observable result on a scale on which individual humans feel it, and so it's insufficient to affect their behavior. And by the time it does happen, other irrationalities may well be introduced that may often mask the effect, or simply make it irrelevant.

(FWIW, I'm generally very suspicious of the Austrian school precisely because it actively rejects empiricism in economics, and substitutes hacks like "praxeology" in its place.)

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#268

Post by eropple »

vram22 wrote: post #256
smhost wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stereotype is pass around among restaurant owners as well. It's not a secret that the American palate is picky and easy to understand. Avoid foods that are mushy, gooey, slimy, or "weird" (even though most food is like that), and try to make it crispy, sweet, and/or salty. Sushi is gross, but put the rice on the outside (beacuse eww seaweed) and cover it in sweet sauce, and suddenly it's delicious. Chinese food i…

>crispy An abomination of a word :) It should be crisp, AFAIK.

No, he's not wrong. An apple might be crisp. A French fry might be crispy.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#269

Post by icebraining »

xiaosun wrote: post #111
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.…

I think this has to do with the type of fish typically used in western cuisine, which is heavily biased to larger fish that can be cooked as filets or have less bones. Asian cuisine makes much greater use of smaller fish that are oftentimes cooked whole, so the range of options tends to be larger as well.

Western cuisine is far from homogeneous. We use plenty of small fish in Southern Europe (and we eat a lot of fish) - sardines, blackbelly rosefish, atlantic horse mackerel, blackspot seabream, etc.

Re: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

#270

Post by caf »

CPLX wrote: post #260
vram22 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The largest national/ethnic group contributing to the American population is German, followed by the British Isles/Ireland I would have thought people from the British Isles were the largest group, based on what I've read about America, the Pilgrims, etc. Is that wrong?

Yes that's what people think instinctively but it's incorrect. Part of the issue is that two world wars served to erase tremendous amounts of the visible cultural legacy of the German influence on the US, streets and towns were renamed, biergardens turned into bars, and so on. The culinary influence is right there in plain sight though if you look for it, from the names of our big mainstream brewing companies to our…

Maybe I'm slow, but I've sometimes idly wondered why Hamburgers contain no Ham - and your comment finally made be twig: it's Hamburger as in /ˈhambɜːrɡər/ not /ˈhæmbɜːrɡər/ !
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