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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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This shifts from "cost of produce" to "eating healthily", which are not clearly interchangeable, and the latter is a questionable category altogether. Your previous posts included "much of Western Europe" and specifically called out Germany as a place with half to one third the cost, but the article you just linked shows France on par and Germany/Spain within ~10%. As percentages of income, these are all higher than what Americans are spending. The article also doesn't reference electric use at all.

I think I'm going to settle on the idea that electric use in supermarkets doubles the price of produce being one of those weird things that some Europeans decide to believe about the States for inscrutable reasons.

Rafa’s half-american and atypical in any case. This all started when an american claimed a dozen eggs costs 11 dollars. Europeans are not aware of this, much less speculating on it, so leave us out of it. If I had to throw a guess for the somewhat higher prices, it would be the massive choice americans seem to prefer. Aldi and lidl are famous for cutting costs by having only one or two of each thing, but even regular european supermarkets do not compare to the diversity offered by american supermarkets in peanut butter flavours and the like.

Eggs in particular are kind of weird. Depending on your perspective, they can be either a fancy food (nice eggs benedict at a fancy brunch restaurant) or a cheap food (substituting eggs in place of beef, which has also gone up in price a lot). Then there's like two dozen varities at any supermarket, for cage free, organic, etc, which frankly leave me baffled which one I should choose. There isn't any one "price of eggs."

Indeed. Baumol cost disease seems a rather more likely reason.

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