The creation of a free trade zone for agriculture from the Arctic to the Antarctic along the American side of the Pacific Rim is a significant contributor. Everything is in season somewhere. I don't know if younger generations appreciate the magnitude of the change in American food markets.

Younger generations grew up on a message of climate change and it can be disconcerting to walk into a grocery store and find the entire produce department to be a geography lesson. This from Peru, that from Mexico, the other from Alaska, all flown and trucked in on a cold chain straight from some far-away monoculture farm.

If anything I suspect the increased supply chain insecurity (2020 through today) will help a lot of younger folks (unfortunately) develop an appreciation for the marvel of megamarts' supply chains.

Deglobalization of agriculture -- as a downstream result of trade policy, political instability, shifting weather patterns, or some combination thereof -- isn't exactly hard to imagine. Or even hypothetical! See: East Africa, right now: drought at home + major trading partner at war = starvation.

Looking at the shelves of a grocery store and thinking "the set of social and physical conditions required to make this possible might not be stable throughout my lifetime" is not "scolding". Hell, it's not even unreasonable, especially given that the very premise of the thread is that this is all quite new to begin with...

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?

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.

I'm moderately young (36) and I consider myself an ecologist, not the one who buy the hat but the one who really care, and I fail to see solutions and even ecology in much of the so called "ecological moves"/Green Deal.

Entomophagy to my eyes is sold as ecological, but sound much more a way to industrialize even more the food production chain simply because we can't produce anything good from insects without a full-scale industry behind, while we can all raise chickens nearly everywhere in the world. Industrialization per se is not bad nor good, it might be one AND the other in various proportion, but so far food-production industrialization have created abundance bubbles and deep crisis vanishing most of the initial production stability it have given, so I highly doubt insisting in that direction can be of help at least IN THE ACTUAL TERMS.

I see proposal for fully-automated factory-farms and I've no doubt they can work BUT I doubt they can scale. They might be able to grow some veggies in Island and Chile, i.e. in unfriendly climatic conditions, they might do that with nearly local-only resources at least to sustain the production once the factory is built but the output is still far less than a classic "grandfather's garden" behind the house, in those areas of the world where it can exist witch are not so vast but also not so few... Now IF we push all of that because we think we are doomed and it's time to plan an artificial life in bubbles planning a migration to Mars in a century... Well... Ok, it's clear that such move can be done only by VERY FEW, probably so few that they can't reproduce with healthy children, even with genetic engineering help. If the target is "let us create some small artificial pseudo-paradise bubbles while most will feel the disaster in their own skin and only the most adaptive of them will survive allowing us few to be the new "élite" who holds scientific/industrial knowledge and survivors are just young and strong slaves to exploit... Again I doubt it can't work for more than few generations.

If the target is a mass civilization shift to really adapt as much as possible to climate change... Well, I see veeeery little sustainability in all modern "green" tech innovations.

I'm curious to see other outline-scenarios about the future to just try imaging how can they possibly work, in mere theory at a high sight.

Let's say we can push anyone in modern buildings (who need to be built, BTW) so the civil energy needs goes down much. Industry needed behind? Let's say in my new house (built few years ago with p.v. etc) I can sustain intermittent grid electricity services, I do not need gas to heat/cook. Good. What about my solar panels (made in China), inverters (made in Austria and India), batteries (China, perhaps with South-American or Russian lithium and some others raw materials)? How can be made in the new world? Who will be able to build them? Let's say I also buy an EV so I can go around with my own energy (for just few years, cfr battery lifetime), did the farmer can do the same? Maybe, I'm pretty convinced that agrivoltaic can made us erase tractors needs, but it's just an idea so far AFAIK, did the supply chain can do the same anyway? And so on.

Long story short: IF/when a day we will be able to build Star Trek alike ships/isolated environment that once built can self-repair and work for decades, we adapt to live in them, with no genetic issues due to a low variety of seeds etc well... We will/would have found a solution. But we are probably more than a century behind such tech. I see no really feasible recipe so far in little time and on scale. Not counting the fact that when things start to go bad people tend to be a bit upset so unrest and revolutions and wars happen and they are not exactly ideal to build something new, in the short time span they just consume and destroy and MOST on the from the history have no more plans than the short-term win.

Can't you see that the majority of people don't care? Leave us alone already.

This is the context in which that term is being used.

Try making a traditional tomato sauce using canned tomatoes and follow the recipe exactly... then compare that to Prego or Ragu. The store brands taste like a freaking dessert topping comparatively.

Most people don't eat enough low-cost, high-availability items like cucumbers and spinach, and they don't manage to learn how to do things like make their own bread, which is far superior fresh from the oven than anything you can get from a supermarket bakery. They also don't appreciate frozen vegetables, which are just as healthy as the fresh stuff, even if it might not taste quite as good some of the time.

One of the things that the Food Network did a HUGE disservice to people is that a couple of entire generations (Xers and Millennials) were convinced into believing that everything needs to be cooked from scratch and that any meal that involves a kit or a flavor packet is inferior. There was maybe one show on that entire network with a host who would use kits and flavor packets and other items, and she was regularly panned by the audience for not being "authentic" enough.

I don't think that most folks can make their own bread simply because of time constraints. And honestly, we have a long history of folks not making their own bread.

See, I do make bread. Daily. But I also don't have a job. It takes a few hours a day, but that's OK for me. At some times, when I've been poor, I've made bread on weekends, but freezing that bread to eat later isn't quite as lovely. But again, it takes hours and requires a working oven too (I had a toaster oven when I couldn't afford natural gas.

And really, that last bit gives us a view into the past: Kitchens used to be dangerous and a lot of folks didn't have proper ovens if they lived in cities. Folks have been buying bread from the baker for... um... centuries. And it was better for everyone because it kept some of the fire risk contained. Plus the bakers could make lots with less fuel than individual folks could do, which is honestly even a bonus now.

I'm not sure we are really losing stuff by not making bread - even if I make it and enjoy the fresh bread. Anyone can look it up online if they really want to.

In most of Europe, high-quality bread is cheap and available everywhere. In the US, high-quality bread is extremely expensive and only available in specialty bakeries. People who are really into bread in the US often make their own. In Europe, where you can buy fresh bread on every street corner, why bother making it yourself?

I don't mind cooking from scratch. I find it rather fun and relaxing. Fresh ingredients are problematic, though. I can store a ton of frozen/canned food that's good for a long time and eat what I want, or I can buy fresh ingredients and then I'm pretty much locked into those choices whether I want it or have time to cook or not.

Places like TGI Fridays, Chilis and services like Doordash give people a huge range of options that you just can't replicate without frozen/canned foods. If I tried to buy ingredients to make anything a Chilis can, the vast majority would spoil before I could cook them. The food would probably be better than Chilis while it was around, though.

We got used to getting what we wanted, instead of what we had. The only way to replicate that is long-lasting food.

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.

True!

...convinced into believing that everything needs to be cooked from scratch and that any meal that involves a kit or a flavor packet is inferior.

These kits and flavor packets also come from the store, and also contain unnecessary ingredients. Family members from other generations insist on using envelopes of powder for everything, and they eat more poorly as a result. They need the powder to make gravy, while we gen-Xers whip that up from fat, flour, and any flavorful liquid. Watch Alton Brown for ten minutes, and eat better for the rest of your life.

But for a brown gravy to be served with dinner, most people own one fridge/freezer. They aren't going to sit there and reduce chicken or beef broth to make stock, doing the little ice-cube-in-a-ziplock trick, and virtually all store-bought shelf-stable stocks are horrible and virtually indistinguishable from broths. Most don't have the room and don't want to spend the time.

It is vastly easier and more time efficient when getting home from work with mouths to feed to use an off-the-shelf product and doctor it up than it is to go through all the steps needed to produce a similar quality gravy, and there's virtually no nutritional difference between one and the other despite the snobbish protestations of people like Alton Brown, who has never been involved at any level of professional food preparation. He's a drama nerd who found a niche, not a chef.

Go look at a restaurant supply store website. Marvel at all the fun powders and bouillon and other flavor enhancers they have. If Michelin star restaurants can use them, so can you.

Anyway, say you want to make fried chicken. You know that buttermilk is a great marinade. How many different things can you use to achieve a similar result?

You can:

1. Just use buttermilk

2. Rehydrate buttermilk powder and use that

3. Use ranch dressing

4. Use a ranch dressing packet

5. Thin out yogurt and use that

6. Use kefir

7. Literally use any other slightly acidic dressing

The important thing is NOT the buttermilk. It's the acid in the buttermilk that helps keep the meat tender, and the viscosity that keeps it stuck to the meat. I rarely use it, because I don't keep buttermilk around. I usually use either ranch or off-the-shelf Italian dressing.

I literally do have multiple boomer-generation family members who cannot make a gravy from scratch. The "greatest" generation folks in my family, while we still had them around, were also not outstanding cooks. They had an excuse, because they grew up in shotgun cabins eating government commodities. I'm not so sure about the boomers...

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 that tomato sauce is.

I don't know anybody in my family aside from my Gen X sister and millennial cousins who can't make gravy from scratch. My "Greatest Generation" grandmother in particular only cooked about 30-40 dishes, but she cooked them so regularly that she didn't need a cookbook, and they were never anything but great (except when she tried to feed me frozen pizza when I would stay over for the week. She'd throw American cheese and ham on top because she didn't believe it would be filling enough).

I don't get why people would use flavour packets when making gravy, or why people would use corn starch.

Not saying it's wrong, but that it seems unneeded.

For example, let's say I fry up a pork chop. I may put 1/2 a spanish onion in the pan, and I'd definitely add some cayane pepper and mustard powder. Maybe some fresh garlic.

As the cooking nears completion, I'll add flour over everything, until all the juices and grease is absorbed.

At this point I want to brown the flour a little bit. My heat is little below medium, I want browned, not burned.

So, I try to flatten the flour against the cooking surface, spread it out, make sure it gets heat.

This takes maybe 4 minutes, with me making sure the flour gets moved around, re-flattened, mixed up a bit, so it all browns.

When ready, add in cold water. The amount is try-till-you-learn amount. If it starts out too thick, add more! Now set pan to full heat, and stir repeatedly.

When the water is hard boiling, keep stirring, making sure that during this entire process you are cleaning the bottom of the pan.

If you're using nonstick, instead of stainless or iron, you probably can't do this right. You need to scrape the pan here. You need to forcefully agitate. Right tool, right job.

You may need to turn the heat down a bit, as things thicken. Again, you need to start thin, make thick.

(When you first add the cold water, it will be very water like. Thin. But what happens is the flour breaks up, and makes it thick, so first timers will need a lot more water than they think.)

Two things will happen here. You will collect all the flavour from everything you have just cooked, and the gravy will start to thicken on its own.

No corn starch is required, or flavour packet. Full, lush, flavourful, thick gravy, no lumps, cold water is part of this, and the hard boil after.

It will take a few tries to get it right, but once learned, all things become gravy.

Note: thanks for lettimg me hang my comment here. Also hi.

I think this phenomenon started in USA with the "Betty Crocker" and "Bisquick" product line. This was marketed as easier than scratch cooking. There's nothing wrong with the concept (I'm sure there is a box of Bisquick in my kitchen), but it doesn't always make sense from a value standpoint. Also it is less flexible. You could apply the technique you describe no matter what you were cooking, and you could vary the timing and amounts a great deal. The "kit" stuff is more like a chemistry demonstration, which must be carried out fairly closely to the directions on the box in order to remain somewhat flavorful.

https://tastecooking.com/the-thing-about-bisquick/

I think it really extends to everything, others have mentioned pre-made tomato sauces here, also baffling both for price and taste.

When I left home, pre-internet, and started grocery shopping for the first time, I recall wanting spagetti. Well ground meat, that made sense. Pepper. Salt. Noodles.

But until years later, I didn't think about the spagetti sauce I bought. I just kept buying it. It was just there, labelled as a natural ingredient.

You want to make spagetti? Why, there's the sauce!

In retrospect, I think labelling is quite effective in this way. Get 'em when first out of the house, latch on to their inexperience then.

Starch also has the nice property of tenderizing meat and locking in juices when used in a marinade, in a process called “velveting.” https://www.bonappetit.com/story/velveting-meat/amp

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 potatoes to name a few.

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.

However a little bit of milk already does the trick. No need for whatever sugars people throw in there. The Industrie would never use milk for several reasons.

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 become. People aren’t just used to being stuck together with family at home at one table like that anymore.

Families eating dinner together was the norm, and this was not a rich area.

Today this is probably less the case, the past 25 years have not been kind to the area. Loss of opportunity and rampant meth abuse has caused a lot of issues.

I don't view meth as the source, but a symptom of the economic situation(hopelessness), which then causes further socioeconomic decline in the pursuit of more drugs.

Drug addiction, for many, is trying to fill a hole. That hole could be poor choices leading to a bad situation, absent or abusive childhood relationships, a self esteem model that has been largely destroyed by the culture that person lives in, a lack of role models, many things. They can be internal issues that the individual is primarily responsible for, or external issues that are the result of being dealt a bad hand in life. Most likely a mix.

It’s honestly the most important thing you can do as a parent. Let’s you know about your kids lives, share in the ritual, and generally bond.

I ask because most of the dinners I missed growing up were due to sports.

In the US extracurricular sports and music tend to be after school 3-7pm range.

I plan on having dinner together as many nights as possible when I start a family, but not to the extent of disallowing extracurriculars. But I also think that I would discourage my kids from being so involved elsewhere that we can’t have dinner together as a family a couple times a week.

My beef with US supermarkets the only time I went there is how poor is the quality to price ratio is particularly for vegetables. Generally speaking you could shift every thing one price band compared to France.

I think it has more to do with extended family whom you don’t ordinarily see; from the stories I’ve heard, there’s usually one obnoxious uncle who picks stupid arguments or someone like that.

The bread here in SF is horrid and that includes that massively over rated Tartine, not to mention how bad the baked products are at most supermarkets. They're shovelware baked goods. The produce selection is 1/3rd what it is in France and much of it is tasteless compared to the good stuff you'd find in Japan or France. There's 1/6th the selection of cheese. !/10th the selection of pâté. But hey, we get fresh tortillas so you win some you lose some. Even the milk here is off. Our beer selection is 1/50th of Belgium and zero of the sweet ones. Our cider selection is 1/5th of the UK's.

It's all relative. If you were at a 1 and entered a 5 then it seems like a huge step up. But if you then experienced a 10, that 5 no longer seems so great.

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 of what is available in (my case) Seattle. Meat quality in the US has always been relatively excellent, though depending on what part of the US you live not always diverse. European butter is superior on average, but cheese shops have a similar range in big cities. Seafood in Europe is excellent along the coast, better than the US outside of a handful of fishery adjacent cities, but often poorer than the US once you move inland. The bread is indistinguishable for the most part.

Processed and cured meat products is still an area where available European products are unambiguously ahead of what is commonly available in the US. The US has improved a lot in this regard but it hasn't caught up yet.

Some of these are arguable of course. The one consistent thing everyone notices is the limited diversity and availability of fresh vegetables in Europe, and beef quality, but that is a pretty natural consequence of geography. All of which should be separated from the cuisine produced with said fresh ingredients.

The average produce, meat, cured meat, and seafood in the western EU is vastly superior to the average available in the USA.

Bread is especially disgusting in the US compared to EU.

Hence why I referenced the median. It wouldn't make sense to cherry-pick a US city like Seattle, which has amazing ingredient quality and diversity that few cities can compete with, and generalize it to the entire US. I've lived a lot of places and recognize the variance. The ingredient quality isn't even consistent within single European countries, having surprisingly high variance over -- by American standards -- relatively small geographic areas.

If you compare blue collar city against blue collar city, the US is definitely competitive in my experience. I think many people have an outdated view of the food available in flyover country. I split my time between Western Europe and the US, and get around both. I am having a difficult time finding these "vastly superior" ingredients in Europe that you speak of.

The quality of supermarket meat in your average Tesco, or Asda ranges from acceptable to good. The quality in a Target or Walmart ranges from very very poor to good in my experience. As a textbook example the fabled wooded chicken breast is for the most part not a problem here, but was something I experienced on more than one occasion during my last month long trip to SF.

Sorry for the bluntness, but you lost me at this part. I lived in the US for a long time and traveled to Europe often. I could never get bread as good in US, even at the new fancy bakeries that keep popping up. The one-euro baguette (or tradition) from any random boulangerie is way better that any four-dollar baguette I found in the US. Is it the water, the flour, the technique? I think I've seen this question being asked, but not sure there is a good answer.

Anyway, I am now in France and not much has changed. Food (stuff that you find easily in a supermarket or corner shop) is still way better than similar stuff in US. And costwise, compared to the part of the US where we lived (northern NJ) almost everything is cheaper.

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 breads that are an acquired taste I have yet to acquire.

My impression of fish in SF, LA, Seattle, NYC, Baltimore, is it's not close to France and Japan. The selection is small, the quality mediocre. Maybe like cheese there's some speciality shops I'm forgetting.

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...

As others have said that's the most hilarious claim I've read in a long time. Unless you like "toast bread", i.e. white, sliced bread in plastic bags that typically taste like card board, Germany is probably the place with the widest variety of bread types and with the people who feel the most strongly about bread. Also if you search for high quality bread in any other country, you almost always find that the bakery is run by some German immigrant (my experience in NZ, OZ, Sweden).

Must be a different Germany in a different Universe..

Back in Germany anybody who (realy) cares about bread wouldn't even think about buying those mass-baked chemicals from the stores. For bread you go to a craft bakery which you can find everywhere - if you don't just look for around the neighborhood of the big Supermarkets.

And in those magical craft bakeries you'll find it hard not to buy anything at once, but at least a good dark, handmade in the night before, bread.

I've been around quite a bit, it's hard to find something comparable to a German or Central European dark bread enywhere else.

Of course German bread has a thick crispy crust. If anything it's the Anglo box shaped bread which is soft and doesn't have a proper crust.

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.

Well, that can o ly be because our bakers are opening shop in the UK and tge US then. Arguably bread quality decreased considerably in Germany so. Mostly due to the fact that big chains dominate the bakery market. Same goes for local butcher shops. German bread still beats, say, Italian bread on average. And don't get me started on what passes as bread in the UK or Scandinavia, even if those countries improved a lot.

You clearly haven't been to Berkeley Bowl (not very far from SF...). Or Monterey Market (also in Berkeley).

> There's 1/6th the selection of cheese.

Strangely, also in Berkeley, https://cheeseboardcollective.coop/bakery-cheese/cheese-shop... - it's been Covided alas, but the photo there should give you an idea.

But some of your items, especially the pâté are definitely in the category of "Why isn't this just like at home?", which you really shouldn't use as a measure of quality.

It’s also what has enabled us to diversify. Easy to obtain any food, any time, without much meal prep.

I personally am still looking to grow, store and remain self-sufficiently. But it’s entirely a life style choice; built out of my fear for the further.

Ask yourself, can the next generation build supermarkets? I don’t know if they could. It’s an amazing work logistics. Further, it requires California and growing food in desert. It also requires an abundance of energy for transport AND international trade. All of which is under tremendous pressure.

Yep. You're saying the quiet part out loud. Ssshhh.

Easiest thing that should happen but never will. Can’t wait to see how things turn out, that being said.

Line surface area of cone w/heavy mirror array. Desalinate thru concentrated sunbeams.

Or something like that.

I wish I was joking.

I live near several supermarkets now and they have literally everything, all the time. But it's like you said, it takes time to cook good food. In addition, when you grow up having so much access to quick meals (including restaurant options), you grow up never learning how to actually cook and I think it takes you a lot longer than it would have otherwise. It seems to me nobody knows how to cook anymore because it's barely necessary.

Like your railing on frozen food. You realize frozen food is far fresher and less likely to have “chemicals” or whatever is your choice enemy right?

I think you're making stuff up here.

When frozen they can pause the aging of the food at a chosen time vs shipping it both the consumer and shipper are hoping to get the timing right. So frozen goods have much better control over the state of the food the reaches the consumer. Freezing also physically protects foods by making them harder.

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 it, but there are tons of scenarios where you should prefer frozen foods.

Certain foods are clear winners frozen, like peas, corn, spinach, if they are going to be cooked. If you’re making sauces, fillings, pies, etc from berries, frozen berries are your best bet. The non-frozen berries have to be shelf stable and the shelf stable ones don’t taste good. The good tasting berries keep well frozen.

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.

Depends on the distance to transport and water content though. I have never eaten frozen pinneapple, but I guess it would be awful?

Frozen and thawed watermelon (and other similar melons) would likely be dreadful.

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.

Please don't build a illusion of fair, non organic farms somehow working in a natural way when they actually are just as profit oriented as any other big company.

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.

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 better. That's 100% from an orange. 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.

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.

(Florida’s true delicacies are the keylime and the stone crab. I’ve never gotten a keylime in a grocery store that comes close to what grows on the trees in the state. And stone crab you’ll never find in a grocery.)

> Harvesting is accomplished by removing one or both claws from the live animal and returning it to the ocean where it can regrow the lost limb(s).

Incredible ... sounded so wasteful at first to not eat the body.

Do you think that could possibly be because people who are more sickly are more likely to try taking vitamins, as a curative? So it isn’t the vitamins killing them, but the disease making them take vitamins? Of course, I’d have to see the actual study you are referencing to see if they discussed causality.

Instead we had fruit stands selling produce, a bakery, a butcher, fishmonger selling seafood. And this isn't mentioning all the ethnic food stores. All of this was on two or three short blocks. The first time I saw a supermarket was when we went to New Jersey. It was a Wegmans and I think what was amazing to me was just how much stuff a single place could have.

I think ultimately it does come down to convenience. I think it's easier than ever to have decent meal at home. You don't even have to peel your own carrots or tear your own lettuce anymore. Sure something with more complexity might take time, but that's better for a weekend.

Slice an onion.

Slice mushrooms.

Fry up with ground beef.

Add a little water or soup stock or bone broth.

Let simmer for a minute.

Quick meal.

Just one of a million examples for quick recipes that take minimal skill. You can even run the veggies through a chopper or food processor.

I'm not really buying the "no time to eat healthy" thing.

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 missed.

It takes time, and effort, to regain those basics. From something as trivial as boiling water, to using a knife, to "knowing" how long things cook for. Then experience as to what ingredients go together (tomatoes love Basil, chocolate doesn't like garlic).

A skilled person can make a lovely pasta dish in minutes, an unskilled person has literally no idea.

My mother learnt to cook with minimal information (recipe books and magazines), my children can get a master-class in anything on YouTube.

We live in an age where we have access to any knowledge we want, and yet seem to be incapable of doing anything for ourselves.

Mole (https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/223261/authentic-mole-sauc...) would like a word with you...

BTW, not learning math can be very costly to your financial future.

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.

That could be "learned" in 1/2 an hour if you don't want nice TV chef uniformity in the veggies.

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.

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.

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 stock and a tablespoon of chicken bouillon. Add cabbage. Cook with lid on for about 45 minutes over medium heat and then another 15 minutes with lid off, stirring occasionally until the liquid is evaporated. Finish with pepper and season to taste with a bit more bouillon. It's slightly sweet, savory, smokey, and salty. My kids tear it up.

Want to make it a main course? Add some cooked ground meat and a few of cups of cooked rice. Now you have a meal that can last you all week. LOL.

And you also need rice/potato with it unless you go keto in which case you need much more cleaning/slicing mushrooms and more meat.

FWIW, in my ~10 year professional cooking career I think I've washed a batch of mushrooms a grand total of 2 times, only because they were uncommonly dirty. You've probably eaten unwashed mushrooms many times in restaurants. Eating a little dirt probably isn't going to hurt you. If there's anything pathogenic on them a rinse in water isn't going to do much.

I should mention that the mushrooms are always cooked well.

Rice can be put in a cooker and prepared ahead of time. Some cookers even let you specify a time in the future when it should be ready. Similarly, marinading develops a lot of flavor over time that you could be doing work or errands.

Bread in most instore supermarket bakeries is a matter of cooking frozen dough that arrived on a truck rather than making anything from scratch. What you buy was produced a lot more than 48 hours ago.

I make no-knead Dutch oven bread and used to make my own sourdough. It’s hard to top that, and almost everything is downhill from there.

Canned, frozen, and boxed foods offer a much higher "calorie/dollar" ratio. Berries, in particular, are wildly expensive on this metric even in-season.

A family with 3 kids, 2 cars, and median earnings (one part-time, since working to pay for childcare often makes no financial sense) literally cannot afford to subsist primarily on "meat, cheese, and fresh produce".

Apples also are better because supermarkets have the ability to harvest from a large geography whereas small markets only provided provincially available varieties like red delicious.

Most metropolitan supermarkets can provide air chilled chicken which has never been frozen.

But in contrast, no steak will surpass what you can get in Montana from a rancher raising grass fed beef.

This really depends on the cuisine. I've really been getting in to Indian food recently and the recipes in it are nothing like what you're describing.

Relatedly, one of my main complaints against American supermarkets is that they all seem to be catering towards makings Italian food. Some have "ethnic" food sections, but those tend to be tiny and mostly filled with Chinese/Japanese/Mexican food... And even there have nowhere near the selection of a grocery store specializing in that cuisine.

American supermarkets also tend to be full of meat dishes, with few selections (outside the fresh fruit/vegetable isles) for vegetarians... Though that's been getting a little better in recent years in an some parts of the country.

If you add raisins to a salad for example they'll just collect at the bottom; Hope you like finishing your salad with a spoonful of dried fruit covered in ranch dressing.

There’s apparently a variation of fried rice that uses raisins as an ingredient. It doesn’t really taste like anything else that would normally go in one.

They’re garbage grapes. And they often add sugar, directly or indirectly. Dried wine grapes are delicious.

Same with grapes, but from what I understand raisins are worse for a reason that is not currently understood.

However you can make lots of good food ahead of time and freeze it. I spend a few hours every Sunday and it makes for quick 30 minute no effort meals for about two weeks.

Or 10! or 12!