Looking too far into this issue depresses me so much that it's hard for me to talk about without getting emotional.
Consider an easy recipe for a tasty lunch- bread, cheese, tomato, mustard. In the US, buying these ingredients off the shelf of a major grocery store and assembling a sandwich results in a disgusting combination.
These are four ingredients that should be delicious- and yet you have to hunt to find edible versions of each of these items and often pay wildly high prices. Store-bought tomatoes taste like water. Even the artisan bakery sections yield bitter, preservative-laden bread. Mustard is created in vats to maximize shelf life instead of quality. If you don't know how to find artisan cheese, you're stuck with plastic garbage. But the sandwich will look* incredible, like the platonic ideal of a sandwich.
This trend of cheap, attractive food is trickling up even into restaurants. I just moved to Houston, and with every new restaurant I go to I become more and more frustrated with the bland, uninspiring food even at local "hot spots". I've seen the most beautiful, awe-inspiring sushi, tacos, and burgers- all that taste like nothing.
The only places that remain safe are immigrant-run foreign grocery stores, most of which who will go out of business in the next two decades as their owners die, and their kids go into fields that actually generate money.
*Emotional because of how the basic pleasures of existing are continually sold out in order to protect the bottom line- for instance imagine living in a world with zero wilderness, in which there literally wasn't a direction you couldn't turn without seeing human influence. It's already hard to go to coastal towns and watch the waves because you'll be able to see the giant mega-hotels lit up with balcony lights.
Wow this affected me more than I'd like to admit. As an avid veggie gardener, I highly recommend growing your own veggies and baking your own bread (there are cheap bread loaf machines).
That's what I'm planning on. I almost cried (okay, that's hyperbole) the first time I grew tomatoes in my backyard in college. If I wasn't in an apartment right now I'd have planted already.
Consider an easy recipe for a tasty lunch- bread, cheese, tomato, mustard. In the US, buying these ingredients off the shelf of a major grocery store and assembling a sandwich results in a disgusting combination.
These are four ingredients that should be delicious- and yet you have to hunt to find edible versions of each of these items and often pay wildly high prices. Store-bought tomatoes taste like water. Even the artisan bakery sections yield bitter, preservative-laden bread. Mustard is created in vats to maximize shelf life instead of quality. If you don't know how to find artisan cheese, you're stuck with plastic garbage. But the sandwich will look* incredible, like the platonic ideal of a sandwich.
This trend of cheap, attractive food is trickling up even into restaurants. I just moved to Houston, and with every new restaurant I go to I become more and more frustrated with the bland, uninspiring food even at local "hot spots". I've seen the most beautiful, awe-inspiring sushi, tacos, and burgers- all that taste like nothing.
The only places that remain safe are immigrant-run foreign grocery stores, most of which who will go out of business in the next two decades as their owners die, and their kids go into fields that actually generate money.
*Emotional because of how the basic pleasures of existing are continually sold out in order to protect the bottom line- for instance imagine living in a world with zero wilderness, in which there literally wasn't a direction you couldn't turn without seeing human influence. It's already hard to go to coastal towns and watch the waves because you'll be able to see the giant mega-hotels lit up with balcony lights.