i.e., these same revelations and frustrations are shared by a huge swath of people born in the States (probably Canada too), and it is indeed a pain in the neck being continually paranoid about what nutritional rubbish is included in ingredient lists.

Here in Australia we have a column for grams per 100g by weight. It makes it much easier to compare foods.

Instead you have than x% of your recommended daily amount, if you are an average size American, eating an average size serving according to the FDA. How are you supposed to do anything with that.

Antibiotic resistance is a concern but the FDA has made progress in that area.

https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/safety-health/antimicr...

The EU bans routine antibiotic use for promoting animal growth but antibiotics are still widely used for other purposes.

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/first-report-eu-wide-sales...

For example this contains only milk, cream, bacteria: https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/plain-whole-mil...

This is basically sugary milk with thickeners added to make it vaguely like yogurt: https://www.yoplait.com/products/original-single-serve-straw...

https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/greek-whole-mil...

Or you can buy essentially the same thing for less at Walmart.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mountain-High-Low-Fat-Yogurt-Vani...

While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of finding healthy food don't align with reality.

But not sure I would consider fermented milk to be an "adulterant" in a different fermented milk product...

Some… Most…

You’ve made some broad assumptions here. I’ve lived in various neighbordhoods in one of the largest cities in this country and near and far suburbs of the same. Only when I’ve lived in ritzy or trendy areas have I had no issue eating healthy (according to my definition of healthy), and always at significantly greater financial cost.

My guess is either your concerns are less restrictive than mine annd others’ on this thread. Or you’ve been privileged enough to not have a clear perspective on just how large, dispersed and discontinuous, the American “food desert” truly is.

There are a small fraction of people who do live in food deserts and we ought to help them out. Probably the best thing we could do to make many food deserts "bloom" would be to fund the police and strictly enforce shoplifting laws, especially against organized retail theft gangs. Good grocery stores have been driven out of some neighborhoods partly by high shrinkage rates (not the only problem but a major contributing factor).

> US farm antibiotic use is 2.6 times higher than the median use in European countries and 60% higher than the average use throughout Europe.

[0] https://www.saveourantibiotics.org/media/1830/farm-antibioti...

Large parts of the US are designated as food deserts, where one's best option for groceries might be the convenience store attached to a gas station. Good luck finding plain yogurt with no sugar added there. Your specific experience is exactly that.

[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/food-deserts-not-blame-growi...

I am not sure why you mention eating habits, since this is not what is being discussed

Actually, you pointed out that food deserts exist, and asserted that that meant that plain yogurt is not generally available, the thing you pointed out does not support the conclusion drawn from it.

[0]https://vividmaps.com/us-block-level-population-density/

But you don't have to take my word for it. Instead of making things up you can literally just go look.

Now, fresh produce, except—if you are very lucky—extremely expensive (for the quantity), relatively small packs of cut carrots and other things people might reasonably purchase as snacks, anything usable as a cooking fat excepted salted butter, and lots of other things, sure, you are going to be SOL, but plain yogurt (both the usually watery American kind and strained "Greek” yogurt) seems pretty common.

My issue was less with the plain yogurt specifically and more with the logic of the parent, namely that "X product has been available in every grocery store I have shopped in" implies that "X product can be found in every grocery store"

In which case you can just grow the food.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/537685fafa614d80ac83a60...

Seems like the qualifications are whatever they want them to be.

Even if it were true, it still only affects 13 million people. There are 330 million in the US, so it's a non-issue with regard to our obesity problem.

In any case, I am talking about the availability of items in response to the parent's obviously absurd implication "every food market I have been to sells X, therefore every food market sells X".

I am using food deserts as a counterexample since definitionally these are regions where certain items are hard to find. I know (hope?) that the person I am responding to likely doesn't believe every grocery store in the United States carries plain yogurt, but I also know that people here often forget that not every place enjoys the same level of choice that is enjoyed in places like the SF Bay Area

I truly don't understand why you are bringing up obesity, this feels very remote to what is being discussed.

I find that you do the research once, and then you know what to buy next time.

So, we can say it's reasonable for people to do some research and pick the yoghurt they consider best, but we know most people don't do that. And that supermarkets prefer to give the best spots to sugary yoghurts.

What's wrong with doing the research once for the average person and then regulating the supermarkets so they give those the eye level space? People can still make different choices if they want.

Like maybe the reason there are 200 varieties of single serve cups is that people like them.

It's exhausting being a consumer these days.

So the nutrition facts and ingredients list doesn’t convey any new information? The designers managed to cram all that info into an appealing front facing label? And the marketers refrained from soft deceptions and convenient omissions, prioritizing truth and clarity over sales numbers? Sure.

Your local coastal city store might have a half dozen plain greek yogurts but I bet there are plenty of areas where they are not stocked because they know it won't sell.

But hey, don't take my word for it. Most large supermarkets now offer online ordering. Pick a few small Midwestern cities at random and look what dairy products the major local supermarkets have in stock. It's hilarious how people keep posting uninformed comments here without taking 5 minutes to do some trivial fact checking.

Glad you're hear to tell people they are dumb and they should work around systemic problems instead of trying to fix the system.

When you default to an insanely high amount of sugar in very big portion you train people to expect that sweetness in their treats. Hell, people end up expecting more sweetness in their regular meals. I honestly think that’s a bigger problem than the lack of entirely sugar free options.

Submissions history on HN does not check out.

Sure, if you limit your purchases to Dollar General and Casey's. If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.

I am familiar with what the grandparent is referring to, having spent a decade running purchasing teams in US grocery stores. Even in urban areas with many different food retail stores, a typical supermarket in the US is a fairly difficult place to shop for someone with specific food sensitivities. Hopefully folks here who live in the SF Bay Area appreciate that it's a total outlier in both the diversity of stores available and the assortment of products sold in a typical Bay Area supermarket

[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...

UPDATE: ChatGPT tells me that at Publix it's called "GreenWise Organic" and at Kroger it's called "Simple Truth Organic"

So yeah, there are a lot of towns that fit that criteria (less than 1000 residents). But as a portion of U.S. population it is not substantial in any way.

Or you just ate the food you were growing on your own lot, or what your neighbors were growing, or from the farmer selling stuff off the highway.

Instead of making things up you can just go look. Many supermarkets have online ordering now so you can see exactly what they stock at each local store.

In any case, I love most of what you have written here.

Online ordering enables larger long tails. In which market do you suppose online ordering is more common, Daytona Beach or Mountain View?

If you were managing assortment at a Publix in Daytona Beach, how would you structure your long tail? Would you look to a Safeway in Mountain View as a model to follow?

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Whole-Foods-vs-Safeway-W...

Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.

I will also point out that "cost conscious" is one of several shopper profiles that Safeway targets, but broadly speaking Safeway targets a more affluent shopper (although cost conscious isn't the same as non-affluent). The degree to which a particular location services these targets varies by area. But no, these stores target fundamentally different shoppers and think very differently about assortment, at least with regard to the long tail

- La Plaza Market

- 99 Ranch

- Grocery Outlet

- Rose Market

- Nob Hill

- Lucky

- Smart & Final

- Walmart

- Target

- India Cash & Carry

- Bharat Bazar

I'm probably leaving out a ton.

Yes, in rural areas you often need to drive further than 1 mile to get to a grocery store. That doesn't mean that normal food doesn't exist for these people.

As someone else in this thread used sweet yogurt as an example, it is trivially easy to find unsweetened yogurt in nearly any grocery store in the US. The difference is that there's also a very large selection of sweet flavored yogurt.

"Ultra-processed food staples dominate mainstream U.S. supermarkets. Americans more than Europeans forced to choose between health and cost" - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.16.24302894v...

"Price and availability trends by level of neighbourhood deprivation however, remain unclear; while studies in the US have tended to find differences between neighbourhoods and prices for availability of healthier food items, studies conducted in other countries have generally reported no association" - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3679513/

"The distribution of the FPro scores in the three stores shows a high degree of similarity: each store exhibits a monotonically increasing curve (Fig. 2a), indicating that minimally pro-cessed products (low FPro) represent a relatively small fraction of the inventory of grocery stores, the majority of the offerings being in the ultra-processed category (high FPro). Although less-processed items make up a smaller share of the overall inventory, they likely account for a proportionally larger portion of actual purchases, highlighting a discrepancy between sales data and available food options. Never-theless, systematic differences between stores emerge: Whole Foods offers a greater selection of minimally processed items and fewer ultra-processed options, whereas Target has a particularly high pro-portion of ultra-processed products (high FPro)." - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-024-01095-7.epdf?shar...

"“Our research shows that consumers prioritize taste and price when shopping for food, with nutrition coming in a distant third,” Balagtas said. “So the fact that consumers associate healthy eating with high costs and low taste is a challenge for food manufacturers and public health advocates.”" - https://ag.purdue.edu/news/2025/08/how-americans-make-health...

We have more ultraprocessed foods, fewer healthy options, the healthy options are more expensive, and their distribution is uneven (less healthy food depending on the store). Consumers' associations confirm this.

Meanwhile abroad there is less ultraprocessed food, the healthy food is more often subsidized (so it's cheaper), and healthy food distribution choices are more evenly distributed.

As an european immigrant to US who still spends lots of time in EU, this is not true. It's relatively easy to find grocery stores in higher density areas with fresh produce/meats.

Also as "an European" whatever that means, I only spent a couple of months in the US as a tourist, and had no issues finding heathy foods from leafy greens, to good meats.

If he couldn't find it while actual living three tells me he's not commenting in good faith.

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2025/06/26/cupertino-whole-foo...

Sure it might be possible to find that in USA as well, but its so much harder as not every store has it.

I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.

Those stores are intended pretty much entirely for stuff people want while on the go, and the few "groceries" they stock are basically aimed at the kind of things a drunk/stoned person is craving at 3AM when nothing else is open (say, a frozen pizza), or the few things you might run out of by surprise in the morning/when about to eat and be willing to greatly overpay for being able to grab somewhere close by before your meal/schedule is ruined. (ex: milk, condiments, maybe eggs).

But that is the problem isn't it? That you have to drive so far and look on a map to find a grocery store while in Europe you can just walk for 5 minutes and find one where you can buy fresh produce. So in Europe the equivalent of American convenience stores stocks fresh produce and so on, that is still the same thing even if you say I used the word wrong.

So sure if you define "grocery store" as a store that sells fresh produce you are right, but then there are very few grocery stores in USA which is still the problem we talked about. It is so much easier and faster to get these wares in Europe than in USA.

Approximately 92% of US households have at least one car, 59% of US households have more than one car.

The fundamental point that I am making is: Americans do not typically go to convenience stores to buy groceries, it's not even a consideration. The places most do go to buy their groceries do have fresh produce + meat and so on. They tend to just make less frequent trips and buy more at once.

Since they are getting there by car, it's also easier to buy a lot more at once.

When they get home - they also have a much larger refrigerator + freezer (possibly more than one) than is typically seen in Europe to store it in.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Block-Sharp-Cheddar-C...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Low-Moisture-Part-Ski...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Frigo-Parmesan-Cheese-Wedge-5-oz-...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tillamook-Medium-Cheddar-Cheese-B...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Swiss-Cheese-Block-8-...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dutchmark-Smoked-Gouda-Cheese-7-o...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Castello-Gourmet-Creamy-Danish-Ha...

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Kerrygold-Grass-Fed-Dubliner-Iris...

and on and on and on and on and on...

It might not be right next to the pre-shredded cheese (usually those house brand blocks of cheddar and what not are), sometimes they're in a fancier part of the deli area. But I can't think of a time I've gone to a Walmart looking for a block of cheese and not found any cheese.

Its not going to be the fanciest varieties, but once again the question was for "basics" that don't exist. Having cheddar, swiss, parmesean, gouda, etc. is having the basics.

I didn't look further than that; the parmesan looked most plausible - though '10 months' stood out, I don't think I've seen less than 24 in UK supermarkets, possibly it's a PDO related thing regulating the process. (Whereas the US doesn't respect PDO and linked one possibly made in US anyway.)

Cheddar is expected to be this color in the US market, its common to add annatto to it. There are other white cheddars as well, but its usually expected to be about this color. Its not weird to be in cheese as its commonly found in Red Leicester, Double Gloucester, Cheshire, and Shropshire Blue, French Mimolette, and even other European varieties of cheddar. Good showing off your lack of knowledge.

Mozzarella often comes in multiple different varieties. There's the "fresh" mozzarella which is sold in the whey, while there's also commonly "low-moisture" mozzarella that's commonly used for shredding purposes. This is true in the US as in Europe. Either way, "fresh" mozzarella can also be easily found at Walmart.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/BelGioioso-Fresh-Mozzarella-Chees...

"Swiss cheese" is a common name for Emmental in the US. So once again, ignorance. Thanks for showcasing it so clearly. I guess Emmental isn't a real cheese either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_(North_America)

None of these examples I linked to violate any PDOs from what I understand. So your only actual argument that somewhat stands up is that this parmesean is made in the US instead of Italy (which, "parmesean" is not a PDO anyways) and the gouda isn't Noord-Hollandse Gouda (which, once again, calling a cheese just "gouda" isn't a PDO). I guess the specific location something is made is truly the most important thing.

So ignorance and pretentiousness. Got it. Thanks for proving it.

But hey, you also said these products didn't even exist just a few comments ago so its not too surprising.

Once again, I'm not saying these are top quality, fancy cheeses. They're cheap! Incredibly cheap! But what about them aren't real? Words have meaning. If they're not real, they're fake. If they're fake...how?

Note, I agree, they're not fancy cheeses, they're quite basic, plain, and common varieties. But how are they not real cheeses?

Please provide some, or retract your claim.

The real issue is people don't cook for themselves and seek out premade shelf stable offerings of what their grandparents were making from scratch decades ago. It is like knowledge has been lost.

1. Upscale western grocery stores and markets, ideally located within the biggest and most affluent city possible. Pikes place market would be a great example of what I'm talking about for you seattle folks.

2. Asian grocery stores, like "H-mart"

3. Farmers markets, but these are hit and miss, especially in smaller communities

Most other grocery stores, including Costco, Trader Joes, etc are full of extremely unhealthy trash slop. It's still extremely hard to find reliable low sugar options nearly anywhere, including at health and "organic" oriented grocery stores.

America just sucks for foodies who don't have unlimited time to get through the slop.

I think by definition, being a “foodie” means you have, and enjoy finding, the time to sort the wheat from the chaff. Nobody has unlimited time for anything.

“I want to be be a ‘foodie’ but really I just want to be judgy” is a weak argument.

When I travel to Japan, for example, I interpret a bad google maps review score for a location as a GOOD thing, because the average white tourists palette is incompatible with the local cuisine.

I can walk to basically any random place, anywhere in Japan, or France, or Singapore and get very high quality food that I don't have to worry about being full of bullshit. That's not true in America.

There exist Wal-Mart Supercenters which are basically a full-blown grocery store combined with a traditional Wal-Mart store.

There also exist Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets which are regular grocery stores.

It's not uncommon for some people to refer to all of them as simply "Wal-Mart", especially if only one of them exists locally.

And I’m not sure why folks are downvoting this; objectively, Target has limited and terrible selection compared to standalone grocers.

But yes, I do agree their range of choices for fresh food products is usually more limited compared to good, actual grocers. But that applies to their packaged goods as well, they often don't have as many choices of lots of things. I might find almost a dozen brands of pasta at an actual grocer but only have three or four brands at Target. To me it seems the ratio is about the same, its just the scale is different.

And to be honest, its the same story for practically all the stuff at Target. They don't have the widest supply of craft supplies compared to craft stores like Michael's and Hobby Lobby. They don't have the widest selection of bicycles compared to the bike store. They don't have nearly as many toys as what Toys R Us did. The book section is smaller than a Barnes & Noble. What else is new.

Unfortunate that they can be a bit difficult to grow. Very weather dependent.

I think it's a combination of having them year-round (they are picked before they ripen for shipping) and the emphasis on color/look being very high. A good tomato tastes much better than most store bought to the point I didn't know I liked tomatoes until I had a garden grown one. Now I eat store bought as well but it's not the same.

I don't find most other fruits/veggies to suffer nearly as much from that though.

It isn't that homegrown tomatoes just taste better, they actually have taste.

If its not something that is OK to sit on a shelf for a few months, you won't find it at a Dollar General.

When it comes to actual fresh foods (which can be found if you go to actual grocery stores), those are highly regulated. You'll find fancier varieties at fancier grocery stores, but in the end a yellow onion at Kroger is about the same as a yellow onion in Safeway or Publix or Albertsons or HEB or Whole Foods.

Speaking also as an European, not they would not. There's a pretty big difference in the quality of the meant across the board between shops and brands(suppliers) of meat depending how the animals were raised, fed and cared for.

Here in Austria there's been plenty of scandals covering the poor conditions of animals in meat factories (living in feces, infections with puss, etc) yet the meat cuts receive the AMA seal of approval. I also did some work for the farm tech sector and the conditions of animals in some (most) EU countries I saw were indeed as appalling as those in the stories. It almost made me go vegan.

Sure, it's all(probably) technically safe to eat due to all the antibiotics they pump in those animals, just like in the US, but quality varies a lot.

And like sibling said, there's also a big difference between the quality of fruits and vegetables you find in supermarkets depending on where they come from and the conditions under which they were farmed.

That's why I dislike these over generalist "In Europe it's like this and that" blanket statements. No it isn't, it's just one point on the graph, but in reality it varies A LOT, it's a friggin continent ffs.

US does not have a problem with food safety, it has a problem with widely available UPF with many other factors (price, time, distance to fresh produce etc).

[1] https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec...

The concern isn't eating meat from an animal treated with antibiotics infecting you with resistant bacteria.

The concern is treating animals with antibiotics puts evolutionary pressure towards breeding resistant bacteria that spill into the ecosystem and eventually get back to us. But not through meat consumption, it effects everyone regardless of diet.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria isn't the only harmful downstream effect of factory farms of course. Regular-old harmful bacteria are in the runoff, as well as super-high levels of nutrients that harm waterways, plants and animals. Algal blooms, oxygen dead zones, contaminated water table, etc.

All because we really like cheap pork, beef and chicken.

I'm not saying eating a bit of cow poop on your lettuce never gets anyone sick, but that's not the mechanism of concern.

One: poop is mostly bacteria, by mass. It isn't infected with ... it is. Some can be "pathogens" but that's what the last stage of digestion is, fermentation with mostly a wide array of bacteria.

The concern is these gut bacteria developing antibiotic resistance and bacterial infections in the animal developing resistance. Then infections are spread between animals and across species and the waste is reintroduced into the environment. Resistant bacteria in the environment share. Horizontal gene transfer between species of bacteria can lead to these resistance genes being popular and everywhere. It's not cow poop infecting you, its the genetics getting spread into the environment and eventually ending up in a human pathogen.

>animal waste is sometimes used as fertilizer

More or less all industrial farmed animal waste ends up as fertilizer. Also a major component of the kinds of soil we grow crops in is bacteria, much of which has been through the digestive system of an animal. Again I don't know what people think soil is. If you want "clean"(?) never been poop growth medium for your plants you have to go completely artificial. And manure isn't sterilized before it goes into fields, it's alive.

If you want to eat healthy, you certainly can, but takes quite a bit of effort and some additional cost. Processed and ultraprocessed food has just made us lazy - like eating at fast food restaurants became easier than going home and preparing something from scratch.

COVID and the huge surge in prices that have yet to come down essentially forced my hand to find a better, healthier way to eat. It sucks, but at the end of the day, I know myself and my family are eating healthier regardless of the effort it takes.

You're right though there are a lot of unsavory people who claim to be from local farms but very clearly are not. People who are selling sweet corn in May/June claiming their local. Sweet corn isn't normally harvested until late Summer, early Fall.

>If you want to eat healthy, you certainly can, but takes quite a bit of effort and some additional cost.

It does, but you really don't need to go to farmers markets and buy grass fed beef from a dedicated butcher to "eat healthy". You can get 95-100% of the benefits of your routine by going to a regular supermarket and buying non-ultraprocessed foods.

This is interesting. What gives you extra trust when buying from this person? How confident are you in what conditions their foods are grown. In a nutshell, I agree that food may feel and seem fresher because it is harvested closer to their prime time, but it says nothing about safety.

Its a symptom of same thing that is messing up the US in all other areas. Poor governance caused by layers of people all along the stack taking their cut and not caring about the overall picture.

In the Seattle area there are overpriced grocery stores like PCC and Met Market that sell healthy food at a premium.

There is also Whole Foods.

Even normal grocery stores like Safeway and Kroger have a ton of healthy foods — you just have to read the label.

The one thing you have to know if that American grocery stores are giant — they carry way more SKUs than the average European grocery store. It’s on the shopper to find what they want. It’s usually there.

Not compared to France :) you can buy a dishwasher a tv and stuff for your car all in the same supermarket...

Don't ask me why, just stating a fact

Bread is a bit of a shit show. Stick to something like sourdough for 0 adde sugars.

Hormones are banned for meat and poultry. I’m not sure how antibiotics are treated. Fwiw - with vegetarian food you also run the risk of pesticide contamination.

Either way, my point is that there’s a lot of options but do your research before you hit the store and in general try to limit highly processed food

Completely impossible to get normal bread unless you go to some hipster store that charges an insane amount for it.

It’s just really really hard to get decent food in America, which is crazy because the land is so rich in resources and nature.

The bread aisle is pretty much for sliced sandwich bread (+ buns + similar things) that has preservatives to last for at least a week, and was usually not baked on site.

------

I think the secondary point to note is that you're also just running into cultural differences: Americans don't really eat that much bread. And it's not a staple of meals besides 2 slices if you want a sandwich for lunch.

Hard data is shaky but most sources I can find put American per-capita bread consumption at a small fraction of the consumption of somewhere like France.

Having far fewer standalone bakeries and far less "good bread" is not so much that people are eating a bunch of worse bread instead - no one's serving sandwich bread with dinner, they're often just not eating that much bread at all.

It is just people in this country have forgotten how to cook. Grandmother made her own mayonnaise. Mom bought kraft. To you making mayonnaise is a black art since mom never did it, so you also buy kraft. Extend that to most other food products.

I've just given up on milk while I'm here, because it tastes disgusting (reminds me of " UHT long-life milk sold uncooled in tetrabrick within New Zealand). Apparently normal pasteurised is available from local dairy brands, but I haven't seen any yet.

Quality foods in general seem hard to find here - although some of that is because of unfamiliarity - and it isn't cheaper either. I'm looking forward to getting home to better food.