I can't speak for all of Europe, but here in Amsterdam most people have a decent supermarket within walking (<15min) or cycling (<5min) distance, with plenty of unprocessed / raw ingredients (so not mini-markets that mostly sell sandwiches and microwave meals). So we tend to buy groceries often (daily or every other day) and in small portions, or even on a whim. We also don't own a car (yes we do have a child, and we know plenty of multi-child families without cars).

AFAICT, that's a lifestyle that's not available to most Americans. The flipside is of course that our houses are tiny by American standards.

In the few Asian cities I visited, there were also plenty of small cheap eateries in walking distance.

>I can't speak for all of Europe, but here in Amsterdam most people have a decent supermarket within walking (<15min) or cycling (<5min) distance

I lived in downtown Boston (USA) for a number of years in 4 different apartments. In each, the kitchen and fridge were fairly small, but I had a neighborhood market no further than a 2-3 minute walk away. A larger market was only 10-15 minutes away. As a result, I tended to eat far more fresh produce since I went to the market almost every day and had little space for storage.

Now that I'm in the suburbs, I have to drive to the store, but I generally don't more than one to two paper bags' worth of goods at a time. I still don't shop for a whole week, even though I have the space.

Where I lived in Florida bodegas were common. It's definitely possible but high real estate prices don't help things. There is new retail space being built in the neighborhood where I live now and unfortunately it most certainly will not have cheap, whole foods available.

This is how I live in Australia. Got a supermarket on the same street so I’ll think about what I want from lunch, and go buy as close to the exact quantities of what I need to make it.

As a result I have close to no food wasted.

You may not waste food but you probably produce a lot of packaging waste. At least that’s what I saw in UK and France.

The UK especially produces an astonishing amount of grocery packaging trash compared to the US. I probably produce more food waste in US but I compost so don’t feel too bad about it.

Life is full of trade offs.

In the US, a single grocery trip can result in 10-20 plastic bags. Not sure about the UK, but in most European countries people bring their own tote bags.

Not a whole lot I don’t think. I take a bag with me and grab unwrapped fresh foods. The only packaging is meats which seems fairly unavoidable. Single use bags have been banned here for about 10 years now.

I always wonder why literally everything is wrapped in plastic here

Doing everything right!

Not actually relevant.

Household size in the US has been trending down. We have more 1-3 person households and fewer large families.

When I got divorced and my family size shrank from 4 people to 3, we had to start putting extra stuff in the fridge so the milk wouldn't spoil.

Of course it's relevant. Household sizes have also been trending down in Europe and Asia. But even for small households, if you need to drive >20min to buy milk, bread, eggs and unprocessed veggies, you only do that once per week or two weeks and need a bigger fridge. OTOH if you you have a big supermarket in the same building or block, you barely need any fridge at all.

> OTOH if you you have a big supermarket in the same building or block, you barely need any fridge at all.

I don't agree. Case in point: a friend of mine grew up without a fridge in her household and it's a massive pain, because now you have to shop daily and frozen goods are of course out of the picture entirely.

All that additional time spent going back and forth and standing in line adds up.

My personal experience is that replacing the fridge from one that keeps four days worth of groceries to one that can hold a week's was a massive improvement in quality of life.

For one it gives you a buffer should the shops be closed or out of the goods you currently require.

And, mind you, I've always lived less than 600m from a supermarket with fresh produce etc.

We shop daily for a family of three. I’ve never had to stand in line either. I walk in, grab what I need, scanning as I go on my phone, then walk out. It’s that easy. Sure, occasionally they want to check my backpack to see if I missed scanning some items, but that’s only once every few weeks.

To be clear, I would like to see more mixed use, walkable neighborhoods in the US. I have lived without a car for more than a decade in the US. I've been extremely poor and living in small spaces and spent some years homeless.

You're theorizing. I'm speaking from firsthand experience (plus substantial research).

I'm not theorizing, I'm relaying experience from visiting relatives in San Francisco and NJ, and from staying with friends or for work in DC, Chicago, and Austin at various points. There is of course variety in all those places, but grocery shopping was always a lot less frequent and longer distance that what I was used to (with the exception of a friend who lived alone in DC about 10min walking from a Target).

If you have relatives living in housing in San Francisco etc, those are probably not the kind of housing or demographic or lifestyle I'm trying to talk about here. And if your well heeled relatives can shop infrequently and fill a big fridge and it's an asset to them to have that big fridge, they aren't the demographic I'm talking about.

Please do not tell me what solutions I'm allowed to desire for my country. I don't tell you how you should run things in the Netherlands.

What was actually "told to you"?

Where in Chicago because I've got like 7 grocery stores within a 20 minute walk + 3 targets and a Walmart I can also get groceries at.

You mostly adapt your fridge size to your way of living. Living off of sales, not having a decent convenience store nearby, making meals preemptively etc. all contribute to having a bigger fridge. This was still pretty bad here a few years ago when most shops in a 30km radius would be closed for multiple days on end for religious holidays, most big families would stock up big time.

That's the big thing Tokyo does best. If going to a convenience store is actually convenient, you don't need a large fridge at all, except for some niche situations most people don't care for anyway (cooking dishes which require a lot of space in the fridge/oven/freezer). I'd also wager eating staples kept in cupboards helps.

Can't speak for the remainder of the kitchen though. You don't need 4/8 stoves, an oven etc., but appliances don't take that much space when packed together. Even fridges don't really take that much more space.

Most Japanese kitchens have a combined microwave and oven; the oven is consequently small compared to one in the US but works well enough. Woks are used for Chinese cooking and so aren't standard in a Japanese kitchen.

The fridges are small by comparison but, especially in cities, most people shop several times a week and so space isn't a problem.

Having a walkable city makes frequent grocery shopping much more comfortable. When I lived in Osaka there was a grocery store between my apartment and my nearest station. I only had to meal plan a day at a time, my food was always fresh, I never bought more than I needed and ended up tossing out food that I didn't get around to cooking. Every grocery store was walking distance to another grocery store, all the way from my place to the downtown Namba. Grocery shopping in the states is such a pain in the ass that I don't want to do it more than once a week, and my friends have trouble understanding why I hate car culture.

Thank you.

Trade-offs. Americans might have huge kitchens, but you don't usually have several cafes and restaurants that make great food 10-15 meters from your house entrance. Last place I lived at in Istanbul had it right on the first floor — I didn't even have to go out to "go out".

I'm all for adding those cafes, please and thank you.

As I said: trade-offs. Huge spaces, cafes and other amenities of an urban walkable center, (relatively) affordable — you can only choose two. I don't see how a first-world city (where a barista gets $15 an hour and not $200 a month) can have apartments that would be the same size as a typical american suburban home that would cost less than $1 million.

Europeans choose urban centers with small or even tiny (Paris) apartments. Americans choose suburban huge homes.

> Europeans choose urban centers with small or even tiny (Paris) apartments

Some Europeans choose that. However, a bit more than half (56% in France, similar elsewhere) choose single family houses. That percentage is highest in Scandinavia, lowest in Spain (~33%) and Eastern Europe.

Quick googling shows US has ~75% of the pop living in single family houses, similar to Scandinavia. It seems when people have the means, they choose to live in houses.

> It seems when people have the means, they choose to live in houses.

I’m not sure why this point escapes so many people. When your country is vast in size and all it takes is a little bit of driving to get where you need to go, most people are going to choose big, cheap houses to tiny, expensive apartments all day long.

As a person living in a tiny,expensive apartment. I dream of medium sized suburban home without HOA.

Lots of Americans are homeless. Most of them don't want to be.

Many Americans would like other options on the table. I'm one of them.

Of course most people want options, codifying how to have options is tricky though.

That also doesn't change the fact that most people in Europe and US choose to have large single family homes if the option is available.

Where are these home sized apartments you speak of?

George H. W. Bush said "The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period."[0]

Where do Americans stand on this in 2022?

[0]https://www.ipsnews.net/2012/05/us-lifestyle-is-not-up-for-n...

Oh, let's all go back to farms without electricity and horse and buggy, shall we? God forbid anything should change. Status quo is God.

Lol, it's something to escape, not something to defend.

Can you clarify what is meant here by minimum standards? I'm not American.

Over here in the UK no-one is stopping me from replacing my fridge with whatever fridge I want. It's weird for me to imagine that this could be otherwise. Like, it's just plugged in.

I think Doreen just meant expectations.

There's a mildly amusing joke I don't quite recall right now about how everything in America is big. Serving sizes, houses, cars, political parties, theme parks, the people...

In the case of housing standards, a lot of stuff is codified in zoning laws and such.

Our legal standards for what constitutes minimum acceptable housing actively fosters homelessness and any discussion of how those standards are excessive -- even in comparison to other developed countries with high quality of life -- gets ridiculous replies completely shooting down the idea that if civilized, well heeled people in other developed countries can feed a large family with a smaller kitchen, then maybe we have room to design smaller kitchens in some of our housing units.

Ah, gotcha.

IMO these standards just make no sense at all, scrap them. The market is literally designed to sort this sort of issue out - if you want a bigger kitchen pay for it, someone will provide.

Artificially restricting the minimum size of dwellings is just forcing people to either overpay for housing or be homeless.

If one’s standards exceed what they can provide for, they are beholden to that which can.

Seems to be “a feature not a bug” because as you suggest, this is actually problematic for people trying to live a simple dignified life.

I guess I don't really get what is meant by 'expectations' on a country-wide scale. The US is massive and has loads of people in it.

Like, there's NYC and SF and then there's rural Kansas. There's people earning $10k a year and people earning $10M.

In the UK we don't have any sort of national expectation from what I can tell. I have friends living in house shares, in apartments, in houses, and in really big houses, they all have different kitchens, obviously they do. You get what you can afford, having an expectation is meaningless.

If there's some sort of building code that says fridges have to be massive, then yeah, that's bloody stupid, but that's not specifically a kitchen issue, that's just anti-poor law.

When I lived in Germany, rentals did not come with installed kitchens. As an American military wife, the US Army installed a fridge, sink, etc so I had a kitchen in one of my apartments.

My German relatives told stories about moving in and having no kitchen at first. That's inconceivable in most parts of the US.

Rentals here typically have a fridge that is property of the owner. And you aren't supposed to change it.

Edit: To be clear, they installed a kitchen of their choosing over time. (I also cleaned up typos.)

Many Europeans today would scoff at the idea of not having a kitchen, FWIW. Pluggable electric stoves have made it easier, but most still want a functionable sink with drinkable tap water outside the toilet / bathroom and a few counters to prepare food on.

Yeah. I've seen some old apartments where the kitchen is basically a few shelves, a mini-refridgerator a small sink and a couple of hot plates. That's pretty much the bare minimum, though. Without a kitchen, I'd consider it a dorm room and not an apartment.

I'm not sure I understand the link between how full the fridge is and how well it can maintain the temperature of the milk?

In Europe, the milk is pasteurized at a higher temperature so it can keep for much longer

When you open a fridge full of stuff, it stays cold. When you open a fridge full of air, warm air enters.