Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores • Hacker News Board

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#331

Post by bpye » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:13 AM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #156

prennert wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? Where are you shopping, what are you comparing to each other? I think the segmentation of stores in the UK and Germany are very different. UK has Waitrose and (for some things) M&S for high quality fruit and veg. But they are also highly priced. Germany does not have a posh equivalent. However the common non-discounters (Rewe, Kaufland, Edeka, Globus), are really not bad. I am not sure about the exact numbe…

Everything other than Waitrose in the UK is a “budget” brand. That’s why the selection is poor, and why the presence of a Waitrose makes house prices go up around it.

Waitrose also has their own essentials range which isn't particularly expensive.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#332

Post by klodolph » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:14 AM UTC

w-ll wrote: post #286

ramraj07 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d trust a good can of tomatoes before I touch the borderline unappealing off season strawberries they have in those markets. Happy that you’re trying not to judge but looks like you still have a ways to go before getting off a high horse. As oogway says, “one often meets their destiny on their path to avoid it.” When I remember the solid research showing people taking multivitamins die faster I keep thinking what m…

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 that natural orange juice goes bitter when exposed to air, and that problem isn’t solved by concentrating it… because you won’t drink it all right after reconstituting it.

If you compare FCOJ to fresh-squeezed, the difference is not subtle. It’s incredibly obvious. It doesn’t even matter what type of orange you use for juicing—try them all.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#333

Post by morsch » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:16 AM UTC

Thorentis wrote: post #188

Australia has the best supermarkets in the world, hands down. Why? Because we grow and produce almost all of our fresh produce, dairy, meat, and seafood. There are some exceptions for seasonal things, but the Australian climate allows for almost everything we eat to be grown here. The solution to this problem in the US and the UK is less globalism, not more.

Australia is so large that that's not very meaningful. Early in the year and throughout, a lot of fresh fruit sold in Germany is grown in Spain. That's 2000 km, around half the distance between Perth and Sidney. If I consider that as Australian-local, food from the entire Mediterranean is locally grown.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#334

Post by klodolph » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:17 AM UTC

quartesixte wrote: post #228

DubiousPusher wrote: post #172

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…

As a child of immigrants (who were farmers/rural prior to coming to America) sit-down dinner with family was tantamount if you were eating at home that day. I assumed everyone did this, until I found out most of my friends did not eat dinner together with family. My shock at this was immense. I wonder if Thanksgiving dinners are equally so contentious as they are cherished because of how rare family dinners have beco…

American. Everyone I knew had dinners with the whole family most of the time. The Thanksgiving issue is when your bigoted aunt / uncle / cousin / grandparent shows up. Or your dad and uncle fight over something that happened fifty years ago, or your grandma acts like an ass to your lesbian aunt, or something. Just to pick examples from personal experience.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#335

Post by jfoutz » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

mgraczyk wrote: post #192

It would be hard for me to believe any generalizations about grocery stores in the US. In San Francisco where I live, there are ~5 grocery stores within walking distance that span an order of magnitude in price and markup. Some items are only available at the higher end stores, and items that overlap are sold for up to 10x the price at the smaller, more expensive stores. For example I can get a pint of heavy cream fo…

I lived around Geary and 7th. Similar experience. So many grocery stores. They're all tiny, and heavily focused on different ethnicities of food. The halal butcher was great. Meraki permanently closed, but it was great for fancy food.

The thing that was most mind blowing was the corner liquor store having fruits and vegetables. Not much, and different every week - but something.

I was living in that area for the lockdown. A few different places I regularly visited offered toilet paper. They let me know if I needed some they would help me out.

I grew up in a small town, I moved to the "big city" for school. San Francisco is really special in regard to food. I don't know, but I'd guess old parts of all major cities have a pretty spectacular grocery stores. Let me assure you, you're in a special situation, that most folks aren't. Old cities aren't enough, they need that daily foot traffic, consistently, forever.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#336

Post by MrJohz » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:23 AM UTC

asiachick wrote: post #310

jandrewrogers wrote: post #278

Earlier 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…

> Hard to find good bread in Germany

This sounds like a wild claim to me - the Germans must be the most passionate people about bread that I've ever met. Every time I talk to Germans who've lived abroad, they bring up the poor quality of bread that they experienced. Sometimes just a visit will do - Germans who've visited the US usually have a horror story or two about the sweet brioche-like loaves. Our neighbours visited recently and it must have been the second or third thing they mentioned about their visit...

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#337

Post by klodolph » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:34 AM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #295

WalterBright wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly grind up a pile of vegetables in the vitamix and drink the result. Prep time is 5 minutes. Cleanup is 1 minute. I'm not really buying the "no time to eat healthy" thing.

The time involved in living healthy is not in the time it actually takes to make a meal (which is trivial, and can easily take less time than the round-trip to a fast food outlet.) The real time it takes is in the time you need to learn a bunch of skills that make that possible. In an ideal world you learnt those skills at your mother's knee, but we are now 3 generations into "fast food" so it's probable that was mis…

I learned those skills initially at my mother’s (and father’s) knee, but I have better access to good equipment, good ingredients, and information than they ever did when they raised me.

It’s easy to say we “seem to be incapable of doing anything ourselves” but home-cooked meals are still de rigueur for younger generations.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#338

Post by klodolph » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:36 AM UTC

iancmceachern wrote: post #244

DubiousPusher wrote: post #172

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…

Well said. It's about priorities. My wife and I have found we are more culturally aligned with France and Italy. Focusing in enjoying the simple things in life, like a meal made from a few simple, delicious high quality ingredients.

That is also how California style cuisine is described.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#339

Post by Gunnerhead » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

lisper wrote: post #70

kome wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This extension for Firefox is super handy in those cases: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...

Or you could buy a subscription.

Honestly, with the amount of paywalled sites posted on HN, it's impossible to have a subscription for each one.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#340

Post by klodolph » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 6:46 AM UTC

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #327

jessaustin wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means, eat what you want to eat. No judgment. I was just trying to understand the difference between "dessert topping tomato sauce" snobbery and "gravy from a mysterious powder that is secretly mostly corn starch" hypothetical practicality. There seems to be a contradiction? Scratch gravy takes like 20% longer than envelope-of-mysterious-powder gravy, while good tomato sauce takes hours . Of course, you can ma…

It was specifically about the sugar content and how American tastes have morphed to expect those things. Good tomato sauce does not take hours unless you're trying to cook it in a skillet on a sidewalk in Arizona. Sunday sauce is a bit different, but that's because you're simmering meat in it. Gravy is an entirely different animal. Yes, it's mostly flour and corn starch, but it's also not the star of the dish the way…

I think there was a bit of a backlash against sauces from the gen-x and millennial crowd, and that may explain why they can’t make gravy. Popularity and fashion explains a lot, and gravy was NOT popular during the gen-x and millennial eras. I think this is just because we got bad TV dinners drowning in sauce, nothing more or less than that. The baby boomers I know had a similar backlash against canned goods—boomers had plenty of awful canned Lima beans made into casseroles growing up, and it put many of them off canned goods in general, for better or worse.

Just another example of fashion in food—lard is coming back in fashion as an ingredient in home cooking, and in the UK, brown sauce is going out of fashion.