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Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

economist.com

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Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#501

Post by JJMcJ »

WalterBright wrote: post #288
JJMcJ wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another way. Fruit/veggie balance up to you. Add Spirulina powder or similar if you want. Do you find the Vitamix ones reliable. I've run though a number of blenders from other companies and had them fail after a while. Usually the motor just stops working.

I know many people who use them. The only one that burned out did so after about 10 years of 3x per day use. Also, the optional stainless container is a lot easier to clean than the plastic one that comes with it. I've had various juicers and blenders in the past, the vitamix replaces all of them. No, I am not shilling for vitamix. I'm just a satisfied customer.

TY for the recommendation thinking about doing this again, will look into it.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#502

Post by spywaregorilla »

burnished wrote: post #392
klodolph wrote: post #326

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.

It is necessary to freeze fish to kill parasites. All the fresh fish you see in a supermarket was frozen at some point.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#503

Post by spywaregorilla »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #280
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…

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…

The problem with tomato sauce is that it's cheap. The sugar is there to mask the poor quality. There are good tomato sauce brands, and they taste much better, but they cost twice as much. I like Rao's personally.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#504

Post by spywaregorilla »

stackbutterflow wrote: post #448
jandrewrogers wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US is immensely different in terms of culture. Europeans have language differences and they've got old historical stuff, but the difference between Masschusetts and Texas is huge. Including food. This is complicated by large liberal cities falling into pockets of similarity.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#505

Post by treis »

klodolph wrote: post #496
treis wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Neither option tastes anything like what it’s supposed to taste like, to me. That's because the not from concentrate is mostly bullshit. They store the juice for up to a year and preserve it by deoxygenating the giant storage containers. That destroys most of the flavor and so they add in artificial flavor packs rendering the end product an orange flavored beverage instead of juice. From concentrate is actually bett…

> You lose flavor from the solidification process but the end result is all from the orange. "All from the orange" is a clever conceit. It's a processed food product. If you get Minute Maid, it incorporates a flavor pack created by Coca-Cola. It's not listed in the ingredients because the flavor pack is made from orange.

Unless I've been grossly misinformed those aren't added to the concentrate.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#506

Post by fredley »

KuiN wrote: post #492
fredley wrote: post #32

UK supermarkets are crap, and have got noticeably crapper in recent years. At even large mid-tier supermarkets you will find a paltry range of fruit and veg, and a maeger selection of almost entirely prepackaged meat and fish. I have noticed many things are routinely out of stock and it can be a lottery shopping for a specific recipe. I recently visited Portugal, and in a small city supermarket there was a bakery, me…

My greatest frustration with UK supermarkets is the illusion of choice. You'll find metres of shelving with the same product in different branding / price points. Went looking for Thai Jasmine rice, but the rice section is just 40 variants of Basmati, & one box of Arborio. There's 5 metres of fridges packed with fish but it's all Cod, Haddock and Salmon in various guises. If you want any ingredient that's remotely of…

This fucks me off no end. As someone who eats vegemite, to find a full meter of shelving dedicated to Marmite in various formats almost everywhere is very frustrating. For long shelf life goods what's the downside of just providing more options?

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#507

Post by MisterBastahrd »

alistairSH wrote: post #456
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I came up with one day because my gf wanted a cabbage dish: Slice a head of cabbage, an onion, and 5 slices of bacon (or alternatively use smoked ham hocks or turkey necks). In a large pot or dutch oven over medium heat, saute the bacon until not quite fully cooked. Add the onion to scrape up the fond and cook until soft. Add a cup of chinese cooking wine, cook for 3 minutes, then add two cups of chicken st…

We eat that as a main regularly (with ground beef or turkey). No rice, just the veg and protein. Although we dumb it down even more and skip most of the liquid steps you mention - just cook up the cabbage and onion in some oil, with seasoning, toss in the meat, and done. Yours sounds richer, but ours takes all of 10 minutes from start to plate.

I came up with it as a riff off of hers, which was... chop a cabbage into large chunks, throw in a pot with bacon strips and water, and cook for an hour. You ended up with wet, bacon-flavored cabbage. Was never a cabbage eater outside of eggrolls and cabbage rolls before I met her, but this is a staple side nowadays.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#508

Post by annoyingnoob »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #212
annoyingnoob wrote: post #108

I visited Barcelona in 2019. I was shocked at how much better grocery stores were, and how much cheaper, than in California. We are getting shafted in CA at the grocery store.

Did you get yelled at by an old lady for touching the produce with your hands?

Nope. I did get some funny looks for buying peanut butter.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#509

Post by drewzero1 »

KoftaBob wrote: post #442
drewzero1 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The latter. (It wouldn't be fair to complain about stock shortages; everybody's suffering from those in some way or another.)

I live in a small city in a rural area of the midwest that has a handful of grocery stores. We had two locations of a pretty good regional chain that offered what I would consider a broad enough selection of items, but several years ago they were acquired by a national chain and the selection was greatly reduced. I've been to that chain's stores in larger cities and they had a much wider range. Honestly I think they just made some (IMO) unfortunate value decisions when scaling down for a smaller market.

Other grocery stores in the area each seem to have one thing they're really bad at: one is known for their terrible produce, another refuses to carry specific common items or brands, another is highly variable in what items they carry at any given point in time (regardless of recent shortages).

It's certainly a modern marvel that we can have access to all of this food concentrated in one convenient place, I don't mean to diminish that or the work involved in getting it there. But I do think it's a space in which most if not all of the players (in my area, at least) could use some improvement.

Re: Americans are poorly served by their grocery stores

#510

Post by b112 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #482
b112 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corn is a new world thing, although I admit that early Chinese immigrants could have discovered it as a replacement for some Chinese starchy thing...

Corn shows up in China during the 1500s via the Phillipines. https://amp.goldthread2.com/food/how-corn-ended-china-americ... The traditional starch is water chestnut, and you can still buy it, but corn is a lot easier to turn into a starch. In general, a lot of things went via the Pacific as well during the Columbian Exchange. East, Southeast, and South Asian looks very different without chilis, tomatoes, or sweet po…

Earlier than I thought, I figured a couple of centries later.
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