The weird thing is going to other cities around the world after visiting NY / SF and such, is that even NY / SF feel overpriced and subpar. It's odd just how much better food is in Tokyo / Melbourne / other great cities around the world. And cheaper!

Currently living in Melbourne and it’s so hard to bother cooking at home because I can go on a 5 minute walk and find somewhere that will serve an absolutely delicious meal that looks like it could be put on display in an art gallery and it costs only a little more than cooking yourself.

Not only that, the folks working there are usually happy! It's nuts how often I go somewhere in the USA and everyone is just miserable.

> costs only a little more than cooking yourself.

that absolutely cannot be true. Eating out in melb is on average 2x more expensive than cooking yourself, unless you are not a bulk buyer, and is buying _tiny_ quantities (which are expensive), and is cooking _to_ a recipe, rather than buying what's in season and adjusting the recipe for it.

I’m single so it’s hard to cook for 1 without re eating the same thing 5 times in a row or having wasted food. Eating out _is_ more expensive but it’s only a bit more expensive and it’s massively more convenient and tastes much better.

I can go out and get a lamb wrap or a Bahn mi for $13 and a 4 minute walk and it’s extremely tasty. I really couldn’t beat that cooking for myself.

If I was cooking for a whole family then the numbers change since it’s about the same effort to cook no matter what quantity.

> I’m single so it’s hard to cook for 1 without re eating the same thing 5 times in a row or having wasted food.

That is what a freezer is for? Cook once, eat 4-5 times when you want it, not dictated by leftovers going off in the fridge [1]. That's what I did when I was single and it is what I still do since having ready-made food in the freezer to take along as lunch, for when my daughter comes home hungry from school, (etc.) is quite handy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH3UncRagXY

That's fine, but their point still stands. They find it economically similar and much higher on difficulty to cook at home. If they adapted a different system, this may change somewhat - although it's unlikely to have the same yield for a single in an apartment.

You are bad at managing money if you think eating out is just a bit more expansive than cooking

The weird thing is in Melbourne, you can get top quality food for less or around equal to buying groceries. It's an actual "economy of scale", same with Tokyo. It's hard to comprehend for folks in places like the USA, where it's definitely way more expensive to eat out (and typically worse for you).

I lived in Tokyo

When I lived there you would be able to get a gyudon for roughly 300-400 yens

It will get you full but it’s not very nutritive

You can eat many eastern / western fast food dishes for around that price, but if you want to go to an actual sit down restaurant it’s much more expensive

I didn’t cook in Tokyo because I was on a scholarship so I didn’t care, but friends told me it would be cheaper to cook too

I can go out and buy a Bahn Mi for $10AUD which includes fresh bread baked that morning, fresh vegetables and grilled chicken. It's basically impossible to match this without doing it all from scratch and baking your own bread/grilling your own chicken. At which point you have to produce like 20 in a single go to match the value of the one I can buy pre made.

Then Australia is incredible expensive

I can get the same dish in Canada for 8 AUD and can cook for less than half the money, and Canada is not a cheap country

We also have minimum wages, social safety nets, and broadly a high standard of living on most metrics compared to North America.

this is more of a comment on cost of living than anything else

Eating out in Tokyo really is cheaper than the COL would imply. $8 will get you a nice set meal at a sit down restaurant, all included, and tip doesn't exist.

And a healthy meal at that!

Supermarkets are not a result of cars. They are the result of people not wanting to spend 3 hours in 10 different shops to get what they need. Your logic is all wrong.

First, I don't know why this is going grey at my time of writing because it's true and if that's unsexy I guess me and a lot of Americans are just not meant for a life in France because bouncing around small specialty stores sounds like hell. Second, I honestly don't get the hate for super markets. You might not find high-end wagyu beef at Wal-Mart but you'll find basically any spice you want, a few different varieties of fish, lamb, beef, basically the same staple meats as any other country, and lots of regional 'niche' things from around the world. If the variety was bad it'd defeat the whole point of going to a supermarket. Yeah I guess you might miss out on the "opportunity" to buy a twelve dollar loaf of bread but if you can't make at least ten different good meals out of what's available in a supermarket your issue is frankly skill and not ingredients.

Except in France the bread is pretty cheap even from an independent bakery because there’s one every 50 metres so the competition keeps the prices down.

Bread has become way more expensive in France even in small bakeries. Easy to remember the price before the euro introduction and now and you will see the huge inflation in bread prices

Before the euro it was somewhere between 1 and 2 francs, IIRC. Now it's between 1 and 2 euros. Checks out.

a good 7x increase.

Inflation is huge. Doesn't change the fact that compared to anything similar you can get in the US, a €1 baguette is vastly cheaper

Come to Montreal. We have a pedestrian culture, with supermarkets but also tons of small shops.

People like both. But when you have enough cars and lose the density you lose the small shops.

Never said you cant have both at the same time. But supermarkets clearly win on convenience.

Just like most us cities too. I love Montreal but it's not more pedestrian than say, NYC. Shutting down 2-3 streets in the summer is basically the biggest difference.

NYC is the exception in American cities. What other examples in America are comparable to Montreal/NYC? In terms of just having entire swaths of the city be walkable with lots of small shops.

I mean Montreal is the exception in Quebec too, but I get your point. I think north america in general is just not very walkable. Even cities like Quebec City (very walkable old city) only have a very small area that I would consider walkable. Another example here in Quebec would be Laval, which is very close and well connected to Montreal yet still almost always requires a car to get by outside of rush hour.

Suburbs get such a bad rap in certain online circles, and yet so many people choose to live in them. I'm from Europe and live in a flat in a historical city centre, but I think I'd prefer suburbs, if such a thing existed around here. Sure, historical city centre definitely has its charms and conveniences, but the peace and quiet of suburbs sounds amazing compared to the soundscape (cars, dogs, neighbors) I have to endure every day. I've even set my sleeping schedule to the schedule of the yappy dog in apartment below me - there's no point in trying to sleep till 8 am when the thing starts barking at 6:30 am anyway.

Yeah. These romanticized threads always give me a kick. Every large city here in Germany has a chronic smell of diesel and dog piss. There's a level of grime to everything that would really bother someone used to an American suburb. Not to mention the majority of apartments are in old buildings with no ventilation or cooling.

Like you said, there's advantages but ignoring the downsides is amusing if you've ever actually lived in a large city.

It's a bit different in Australia in Melbourne/Sydney. You have suburbs but they have all developed micro cities around the train station. So you have these spots that don't smell like piss and smog, have a supermarket, bars, restaurants, and brand new highrises with high quality apartments.

Super easy to live car free since your day to day stuff can be accessed by foot, and the train to the CBD is super easy to access as well.

Never had the pleasure of visiting but if this is accurate it might sound like the best of both worlds.

One word: earplugs. It changed my life. Yes it's weird at first but sleeping like a baby beats any minor and temporary weirdness.

Can't really use them because of my tinnitus...

The 'peace and quiet' of suburbs is only assuming that you get lucky. Much like any place, if you have a horrible neighbor they can and will make your life hell, but in the suburbs you're stuck.

As someone that lived in the suburbs as a kid I hope to never go back. Being in the city proper and having easy access to everything and nature within a bus / bicycle ride away is far better than living in the burbs and everything is 5-10 miles away. It's even worse if you're a kid, because I frequently had to wake up at 6AM for school, take a bus at 6:45 and get to school by 8AM. That was partly why I did so horribly in highschool.

Your chances at peace and quiet are much much better in the suburbs though, where there's probably less than 5-8 families which could disturb it, whereas my apartment buildings alone has 25 families, and the neighboring buildings (definitely within earshot) have dozens if not hundreds more. All this density also translates into much more car traffic outside my window, much more dog barking (when people walk their dogs), much more children making a racket when playing etc.

Another European historic city center flat dweller. I grew up in the suburbs (small city suburban, very quiet when I was a child, and even with new buildings behind us as a teen it was quiet and calm. The closest multi-tenant building was about 600m away, the city center was only a 20-minute bus ride away). But despite the annoying churches (no place in the center where you are more than about 800m away from one), I prefer it here. Everything is in walking distance, I have the choice of almost all drugstore and supermarket chains, even specialty stores.

I don’t mind some dogs, still better than villages. My sleeping schedule is my own, if I wake up from some partying drunk kids, I go back to sleep.

To a hammer, everything is a nail. To some people, everything is the fault of cars. I find this broken record to be uncompelling and tiresome.

> It has bad community culture of all sorts.

On this I agree. The irony is that rural America, highly dependent on cars, has, imho and experience, radically stronger community than dense urban centers!

When it comes to food I'm far more inclined to blame the economics. American restaurants try to get as many patrons in and out as possible. Clear that table and get the next guest in. This is just as true in SF and NYC as suburbia. TBH I genuinely do not understand how the economics of restaurants in Japan and Paris work. I've been to both and when I look at the prices, patrons, and staff I don't get it.

If there is any root cause to the woes of America it's probably the cost of land/housing/real estate. The monthly lease for a half decent commercial space is so astronomical there's no option but to cycle as many patrons through as possible.

> On this I agree. The irony is that rural America, highly dependent on cars, has, imho and experience, radically stronger community than dense urban centers!

This isn't particularly true. There's been many writings on the 'loneliness epidemic' that hits the hardest in the rural parts of America, where people die of drug abuse or alcohol or health issues alone and ignored. The community effort fully coalesces around the religious experience, but sharply ends after Sunday for most people. It's been noted multiple times over that Americans generally trust eachother lower than ever, the amount of close friends has gone down and more.

This is before we get into the community dynamics of rural communities being very exclusive towards certain groups of people.

I think it's important to separate rural and suburbia.

I agree that the sense of community can be high in rural areas. People who live there can be very strongly rooted in the place. Depopulation is taking its toll though.

Suburbia on the other hand...

The poor quality of US food is not about cars, but about the ingredients. When you compare US food vs EU food, you immediately notice that US food has a lot more ingredients and those ingredients are often very questionable. Much of that comes from how profitable it is and how EU tends to restrict things until proven safe, whereas US tends to allow until proven unsafe.

Take bread for example. Bread needs nothing more than flour, water, yeast and some salt. Here are the ingredients for Wonder Round Top White Sliced Bread: “Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% Or Less Of Each Of The Following: Calcium Carbonate, Wheat Gluten, Soybean Oil, Salt, Dough Conditioners (Contains One Or More Of The Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- And Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, Datem, Ethoxylated Mono- And Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Vinegar, Monocalcium Phosphate, Citric Acid, Cholecalciferol (Vitamin D3), Soy Lecithin, Calcium Propionate (To Retard Spoilage).” Source: https://www.target.com/p/wonder-round-top-white-sliced-bread...

That’s a lot of ingredients for the most basic of foods. I’d argue that’s not a good thing…

While the large cities in US have an amazing diversity of food, the quality of this food is abysmal. US also restricts many normal European foods because of the requirement to pasteurize. While I’m sure the periodic table laden recipes are dangerous if not pasteurized, I personally have yet to have an issue eating EU food within EU norms (yes, things spoil rather quickly by US standards; that’s why fresh food is important).

I agree. They have weird food safety standards!

Especially when it comes to the fermented stuff. Cheese is a good example: most of the good stuff is severely restricted in the US. Idem for cured meat—they mostly don't allow non-pink salt cured meat. Cooking temperatures in restaurant settings are also on the very safe side (finding pink pork is rare for example).

All of this contributes to food that is often underwhelming taste-wise.

It seems like you are disagreeing with GP? They are saying "EU tends to restrict things until proven safe, whereas US tends to allow until proven unsafe"...while you are bringing up the example of cheese and meat, which are more permissive in the EU than in the US, from a food safety standpoint.

I was talking about the additional ingredients/chemicals in the great example when referring to EU being more restrictive, whereas EU is more permissive with traditional foods (also in my comment), which I personally find to be positive.

Just wait until you find out what yeast is made of.

And here I thought “Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom” (Wikipedia seems to agree). What else should I expect to find in that yeast packet?

As an aside, anyone thinking you need all those ingredients in bread should try baking their own loaf. It’s a very rewarding process and is super simple. A good Dutch oven makes it even easier.

Yeast are amazing and useful organisms. Quite a bit of cool content on home brewing/etc. out there.

> And here I thought “Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom”.

Yes, but write out all the chemicals inside them the way you did for the wonder bread.

> As an aside, anyone thinking you need all those ingredients in bread should try baking their own loaf.

As a British expat living in NYC, I am mostly able to find a good freshly baked loaf on the way home from work. On the occasions we can’t, my Polish wife will bake her own loaf, as we would never eat the extremely sweet breads typically found in bodegas/grocery stores. And yes, she only uses 4 ingredients.

I just don’t think it’s superior because of some false pretence about the number of ingredients.

So in other words you don’t eat that yourself and prefer to eat either high end quality food (that’s unlikely to have questionable ingredients and tastes good) or bake at home? Seems we are not so different after all.

So why defend the ingredients intended to make bread last longer and appear fresher than it really is?

Co to ma wspólnego z faktem, że żona pana jest Polką?

> So in other words you don’t eat that yourself and prefer to eat either high end quality food (that’s unlikely to have questionable ingredients and tastes good) or bake at home? Seems we are not so different after all.

Sure -- I never said we were different about what we might choose to eat, but instead why we might choose it.

> Co to ma wspólnego z faktem, że żona pana jest Polką?

That we're both Europeans: it's directly relevant to the OP article and subsequent commentary in this thread.

> That we're both Europeans: it's directly relevant to the OP article and subsequent commentary in this thread.

xD

What's wrong with mushrooms?

Just wait till they realize mushrooms are fungi…

Please enlighten us?

The US has extremely high standards for bacterial contamination risk. This was a change from standards that previously were similar to Europe. For some food products, these changes materially reduced incidence of bacterial food poisoning relative to OECD countries, so it wasn’t entirely misplaced. I am skeptical of the benefit for some foods because the benefit has not been demonstrated. Scandinavia has similar food standards, so exporting food to the US often requires that it be processed in Scandinavia first, which isn’t always worth it for European food producers.

The main barrier to exporting food to the US from Europe is the higher standard of bacterial hygiene that the US requires. The US government is pretty obsessive about bacterial contamination in food.

> Calcium Propionate (To Retard Spoilage)

(Nice euphemism, there. Preservative is a bad word? This deceitful wording should be illegal...)

I don't know food chemsitry, but it looks like they are mostly vitamins, preservatives and softeners/moisturizers. The latter two could be a result of the low density GP suggested: if you go shopping weekly, because Target is far away, the bread needs to feel fresh for a week.

However, added vitamins is either because the ingredients are poor, or to avoid lawsuits from those who expect to survive on only white bread...

> I personally have yet to have an issue eating EU food within EU norms

I noticed this for my favorite dessert: Tiramisu

There are two types of recipes: Mascarpone creme based on whipped egg whites or cream. From my unscientific studies, it looks like European recipes most often use whipped egg whites (eaten raw), while American recipes use whipping cream.

Those are the ingredients for factory produced bread. You need to go live in a higher density neighbourhood that can facilitate a local bakery. The bakery I (sometimes) go to sells 3-day fermented artisanal hand-made sourdough baguettes for the same price as a loaf of wonderbread. It's the cars.

It’s available where I live, but it’s hardly the norm in the overall US. Why should good food be only in some places and not others?

> (because it somehow dissappears the second they step in Europe for vacation)

To be fair, that is because people on vacation are by definition living out of a suitcase. It is easy to live in a tiny hotel room in a very dense building among dense buildings when all you own (for a few days) is a suitcase.

A lot of people in the US like to have space for hobbies and toys and cars and home offices and yards and so on. Which is difficult in a dense city, but irrelevant while on vacation.

> Suburbia is literally characterized by being boring.

Not by everyone.

Suburbia is bad for bar crawls, but after my 20s that wasn't a priority. Suburbia is great for access to mountain biking, road biking, playgrounds for the kids, sports fields, walking to friends houses, having space for a yard and BBQs, having friends over (plenty of parking) and countless other activities. It's really pretty awesome.

You don’t need parking if you live in a city with nice transit

Low density means you are unlikely to live a walkable distance from a friend, so suburbia sucks for that too

Honestly the only thing you said that is true is the big yard, everything else is worse in suburbia than cities

Maybe not American cities, but most suck anyway

Nah, you're right. My friends all live in the same "suburbia" as me. 50 minute drive one way. We still just hang out online, cause no one wants to spend their life on the highway. Wish we lived in a place with real transit / density.

Heck, even in Tokyo, you can hop on a bus to go do outdoors stuff easy.

> My friends all live in the same "suburbia" as me. 50 minute drive one way.

Please post the name of the suburb and city, I really want to look at it on google maps. I can't begin to imagine a housing development that takes 50 minutes to drive from one end to the other (assuming you both live at opposite edges).

> on the highway

Highway? Ok so you live in different towns probably, not the same suburb.

> You don’t need parking if you live in a city with nice transit

As long as you only ever want to see people who also live in the same transit route.

I have some friends that moved to an apartment in San Francisco, it is nearly impossible to visit them since there is no parking anywhere nearby.

> Low density means you are unlikely to live a walkable distance from a friend, so suburbia sucks for that too

This morning my elementary school age kid walked to a friends house in a different neighborhood (10 min walk). As I'm typing this, one of his school friends just walked over from his house (3 min walk) to play. Being able to walk (particularly the kids) to friends is one of the prime reasons people like the suburbs.

> Honestly the only thing you said that is true is the big yard

And the road biking, mountain biking, playgrounds, sport fields and so on.

> everything else is worse in suburbia than cities

Clearly a matter of activity preferences, so it is not an objective truth to say one or the other is worse. Dense cities are great for bars, clubs, museums, that kind of thing. Suburbs are great for outdoor activities, sports, hobbies that needs space (e.g. woodworking, try that in an apartment), walking to friends, forests, etc.

Man I’m sorry nothing you said is impressive in most developed countries cities

No transit doesn’t need to be in the same route, there are bus terminals and metro line connections

> Man I’m sorry nothing you said is impressive in most developed countries cities

I didn't say anything with the intent to be impressive. I'm describing differences between dense urban and suburban pros & cons. Neither is objectively better, they are different.

> No transit doesn’t need to be in the same route, there are bus terminals and metro line connections

Sure. So now you need to spend a lot of time traveling in the wrong direction just to get to a central terminal and then take another bus to the intended direction. It's all tradeoffs.

It’s not the wrong direction…

You are not describing differences between urban & suburban

Maybe you are for America specifically but most of what you described is normal in urban areas of Japan or Germany for instance

> It’s not the wrong direction…

You can't make that statement without looking at a specific case where someone is, where they want to go and how the transit lines run. It often is the wrong direction, which consumes time.

I was staying by Columbia in Manhattan recently and wanted to go to the upper east side (straight east). Subway doesn't go that way. Need to take one south to 42st, then east to grand central then north to my destination. Easy example of having to go away from the destination. That one is not so bad as the NYC subway is pretty quick.

Close to home if I want to visit a shopping area two miles west, I need to take a bus 6 miles south to a central terminal and then another 7 miles north. Adds about two hours to the trip. Easier to bike there.

That's always going to be the nature of mass transit because it can't possibly be point to point for everyone.

> You are not describing differences between urban & suburban

I don't know what to make of this statement, since I'm specifically describing the different pros & cons of urban vs. suburban.

I don't see how that is true.

> mountain biking

The mountains are where the mountains are. Being the suburbs or cities changes nothing.

> road biking

I would never dare road bike on American roads. If anything, cities have more protected bike lanes.

> playgrounds for the kids, sports fields

Playgrounds are about having 22 people to play a game of football. Cities have both sufficient fields and sufficient people. Suburbs struggle with the latter.

> walking to friends houses

?? More like, being forced to be friends with the 5 families on the block, because no where else is walkable.

> having friends over (plenty of parking)

Hah, solving a problem of your own creation ? Cities don't need parking. You can have plenty of friends over using transit, who can safely have a couple of beers, because they don't need to drive back.

___________

When people explain suburbs like this, I have to wonder what shaped their opinions of cities. Surely you must have a specific perspective on cities, which would lead you to believe that cities struggle to accommodate these exact things. To a degree, We are in agreement. No one wants to live in cities in the way the US has built them.

IMO, Chicago, SF, NY, Boston, DC & Philly are the proper cities (as a non-American would recognize) in the country. Of those, SF & Philly refuse to deal with their public safety issues. Chicago has peculiar weather. Boston and DC are great, but are confusingly limited to oddly shaped and tiny city boundaries. This leaves NYC as the only city that is allowed to leverage its full city-ness. The issue with NYC is that most people do the FiDi -> Times Square pilgrimage and come out disappointed, having experienced the touristiest and therefore the worst that NYC has to offer.

> I have to wonder what shaped their opinions of cities

By far most of my city-time has been in the #1 densest city in the US, NYC (specifically in Manhattan). I'm on the record (in HN comment history) on how much I loved time in Manhattan when I lived in the east coast in my 20s. In middle age now my hobbies and lifestyle and family commitments are quite different and I'd hate living in Manhattan now.

The second city I've spent most time in is the #2 densest in the US, San Francisco.

> lead you to believe that cities struggle to accommodate these exact things

Cities do struggle to accommodate these things. Cities do come with pros & cons, it's good to be open about that. Pretending there are no compromises at all to make with living in a city is not a good way to promote city life. Some people love it some don't, all depends on the priorities. Sometimes the same person (like me) will love it at one stage of life and then want nothing to do with it in a different stage, because life priorities change.

> The mountains are where the mountains are. Being the suburbs or cities changes nothing.

Despite the name, mountain biking does not require mountains. It is off-road biking in forests, open fields and sometimes actual mountains. Clearly being in the suburbs vs cities changes everything. It is difficult in a city to ride out your front door into a forest or the mountains in reasonable time (Central Park doesn't count, as much as I've enjoyed tons of time cycling there, it's not mountain biking). In many suburbs this is easy. In the suburbs I'm less than a mile away from forest land where I can ride for hours (or even all day). Such places rarely exist within a city.

> I would never dare road bike on American roads. If anything, cities have more protected bike lanes.

Yeah, no. I did spend a lot of time road biking in Manhattan but I was much younger and foolish. As a road cyclist (more than a mountain biker) I don't really want to risk my life road biking in any city. Out here in the suburbs, I can ride out my door into rarely-used mountain and rural roads where I'll see a car maybe once or twice an hour. It is prime territory for road cycling. If I was living in a city I'd have to put the bike in the car (but what if I don't have a car?) and drive out to the suburbs to look for safe cycling roads.

> Playgrounds are about having 22 people to play a game of football.

Playgrounds means for the kids. These exist in cities but out in the suburbs they are larger and easier to access, cleaner and safer.

> Cities have both sufficient fields and sufficient people. Suburbs struggle with the latter.

Suburbs don't struggle with this. Surely the term soccer-mom is familiar as an archetype of suburban life? Because it is so common. I have several soccer fields just across the street and the kids take full advantage. I don't have time to research how many people in Manhattan live within a block of a soccer field but it's a tiny percentage.

> More like, being forced to be friends with the 5 families on the block, because no where else is walkable.

There are more than 5 families in a suburb. In particular, all the kids from all the nearby suburbs go to the same few schools, so they can all walk to each others houses which is very awesome at that age.

> Cities don't need parking. You can have plenty of friends over using transit

Yes you can, as long as everyone lives in the same transit. If you live in Manhattan and everyone you know does as well, it's perfect. There's even Seinfeld episodes about how people move out to Queens never to be seen again due to this dynamic. It's a tradeoff.

Dense cities can be really awesome, particularly in young adulthood. But it's not honest to pretend that there are no drawbacks. City living comes with a stiff set of tradeoffs, you gain many conveniences but you lose access to many activities as well. Whether it's paradise or hell really depends on what each person enjoys the most.

I think you're on the money with this. I live in Australia in a pretty walkable inner city area and there are countless amazing food options all around and there is also a KFC which serves absolutely appalling food for higher prices than the much better stuff around. Yet there is always a queue of cars in it since it borders a main road.

I can only assume people tolerate paying more to eat gristle if it means not having to park and get out of their cars. Meanwhile people on foot have access to everything.