Dinner on Monday: it began as squid with salad... and got out of control. As my meals are wont to do.
I've been thinking about the difference in food here vs, well, anywhere else I've been. I've the most experience of grocery shopping in Finland, Germany and the US, absolutely in this order, but although my practical experience of going to North American grocery stores is not as extensive as my knowledge of Finland and Germany, the internet assumes everybody is an American. Talk about exposure! All the recipes and food blogs I find online and all my experience as a gaping shopper can be condensed into two narratives about the American Grocery Shopping Experience:
why does this come in a can with ten added ingredients and where's the produce section? Have they heard of butcher counters? Do they even know what a rutabaga looks like? How about an apple? and
why, hello, Whole Foods! Food for hoi polloi this isn't.
Now, Germany and Finland easily win if we're looking at the quality of non-organic foods. Eating the average diet here vs in Finland vs in the US, I'd opt for either of the former two, although I'd still skip the eggs from caged chickens or the male offspring of said chickens. Still, the chickens here aren't eating a diet of their own dead friends... or, at least, what's in the feed bowls doesn't taste like chicken.
I don't think I could easily choose between Finland and Germany: Finns eat more fish and berries and mushrooms (all easily available to the nature devotee by simply going into the woods and acquiring them, sigh) plus of course the tastiest meat of them all, the free-to-roam reindeer, and generally have a better selection of rare foodstuffs. Germans on the other hand aren't obsessed with low fat everything and have tastier butter, excellent bakeries, butchershops and greengrocers on every street corner. It's not an exaggeration to say that Finns eat greasy fish and lean meat; Germans eat lean (often frozen and then transported) fish and greasy meat. I prefer my fish greasy and my meats... well, either of the two is good, this really depends on what I'm cooking.
Organic produce and meats are, I notice, somewhat more available in Germany despite Finland being in theory better equipped to deal with such. I think it's a matter of what people are used to and state policies-- Germany seems to value small businesses (just look at how the usual grocery run involves going to three or four different places!) while Finland, eh, does not. The US, being a giant, can do amazing things with variety both in the organic isle and with what manner of processed/convenience goods are available: spray on baking fat? Halp!
Organic foods are, of course, readily available in cities populated by health conscious, vaguely green urban hipsters who like to eat diets based on whole foods, and I've only lived in state capitals-- possibly my perspective is a wee bit twisted?
Anyway, here's where things get interesting: although I'm going to claim the baseline quality of food is generally better here than it is in the US, organic co ops and local farmer's markets and occasional awesomeness aside, people aren't aware of American health food crazes, whether sensible or rooted in a misinterpretation of the available data. See: "why grass fed beef is superior to grain fed" but also the "eggs kill you dead" meme that needs to disappear. (This is the part where I called the latter "full of shit", but on second thought removed that because I think this is a family blog. Except now I'm notifying you about it, oh sh... f... aaaaaaagh!)
The above can take whimsical turns. There's a company that imports beef from different countries to Germany. It was last year that I found some "100% American Beef" steak cuts in the freezer of the local Hit. (High end supermarket chain.) The beef was so streaked with fat that shouldn't have existed in this cut to begin with, and it looked especially out of place next to the same cut from German beef. I've also seen chicken advertised with "Fed only the best of corn! Full of healthy omega-6 fats!" in Finland. I couldn't stop laughing.
The concept of "whole foods", too, is largely an American one: my initial reaction to hearing the term the first time was one of bemusement. What else would I be eating, cardboard? My own fingers? We had fish fingers or tortellini on occasion when growing up, but my mother and grandmother largely cooked foods from produce and meats bought from the supermarket. Some of the veg came frozen and sometimes they took short cuts, but meals didn't come from a container that said "just pop this in the micro!" When we ate fish (often pike, as it was cheaper than the other options and we were poor) my mother bought the whole fish (again, it was cheaper) and gutted it. I remember my younger brother then insisted on having the head as a toy and took a bath with it... ah, do anybody else's childhood memories involve their brother screeching hysterically "NO! MINE! NOOOOO! FISHIE!" while their mother pried a rotting pike head from his fingers? I suspect I may be alone here.
Ideally I'd be shopping in Germany and fishing & picking my own mushrooms and berries in Finland. Somebody else can catch the reindeer. And getting some specialty products from the US, which does these better than anybody else: flavoured ghee from organic, grass fed and pastured cows? Not happening here: just finding kalamata olives or hummus is hard.
I miss Finnish nature and the freedom to roam. Germany, by comparison, is full of people (and farmland) instead of wilderness as far as they eye can see: geographically, it's not that much larger than Finland; population-wise, it has 16 times the number of people we do. Or one fourth of the population of the United States of America.
And
this is why you can't go on vacation here without having to deal with ten hairy Germans per square metre of beach. I leave you with this mental image.
