you can tell alot from a supermarket
May 16th, 2009I think you can tell a lot from a supermarket while travelling.
In the US, I was taken aback by the kid sized pepsi/soft drinks (for kids lunchboxes) and jumbo sized packets of muffins/sugary sweet stuff I’d never heard of.
In Spain, I was taken aback by the incredibly cheap (and good) wine - I’m talking 2 or 3 euros for a scrumptious bottle of vino.
In France, I was taken aback by the fromage department… cheese, cheese, cheeeese. I also had never seen lobsters in tanks before.
In the UK, I was taken aback by the amount of crisps and the variety of flavours from exotic to just plain weird (prawn cocktail, roasted chicken with aioli or sweet thai chilli?) and the orange neon coloured national energy drink Irn-Bru, much more popular than coke in Scotland!
The photo below is one we took in a health salad/sandwich bar in Brighton promising crisps with your salad or baguette (the French boy could not get over the contradiction of having crisps with something healthy and these moments while living in the UK gave him endless opportunity to make fun of English cuisine!)
Many more supermarket adventures later…. I am back to kiwi supermarkets, full of yummy fresh fruit and veges.
I miss the farmers markets in Europe. Bustling, fresh, with interesting flavours from around the world. The French boy and I really loved the Borough Market while living in London, and being able to taste spanish paella, spanish chorizo, and french cheese all within an hour of being at the markets. And the vibrant food markets we stumbled across in Amsterdam, Valencia and other parts of Europe. It’s a good way to get a feel for the community life and spirit.
It’s fun to try new foreign food and it’s one of my favourite things about travelling - sampling the local cuisine and trying new flavours. Variety really is the spice of life!
Categories: europe travels
Isabella said
May 17, 2009 at 12:19 am
This made me laugh! Brilliant! Thanks for sharing this!
You are right about the jumbo packs of sweets in America. The longer I am away from it all, the more strange it seems to me! It’s not so much the fact that it’s sweets which bothers me, but that it’s jumbo. Unless one is buying it for a household of 8… You’ll notice often in the States on the labels of packaged products “low fat,” “no fat,” “low cholesterol,” and this was my latest surprise: “no trans fat.” Many products had “no trans fat” anymore. What was it?! Why is it gone now?! And how often did I eat it?!
Loulou said
May 17, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Checking out the grocery stores is one of my favorite things about traveling too! It is so interesting to see what people eat, how it is packaged, etc.
Loved reading about your observations, especially in the US, where I kind of feel like a foreigner now.
parlezvouskiwi said
May 17, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Hahahaha Isabella - good point! What does “trans fat” entail exactly?
And Loulou - must be a sign youve been away a while!
I love supermarkets, they really are such interesting places!
cathy said
May 18, 2009 at 5:41 pm
oh my gosh. supermarkets = MY FAVE.
and this is why i prefer to travel alone - i can spend hours in a foreign supermarket (or even any grocery store that isn’t a chain), which drives my friends nuts!
if free crisps make your frenchboy laugh, he’s going to lose it once in the states, when unhealthy things are standard…
cathy said
May 18, 2009 at 5:49 pm
oh, and PS, trans fats are a huge huge huge thing here. essentially, they prolong the shelf life of food for a long time so they never go bad and they are extremely cheap to use. but they also never leave your body - so they are a major source of all sorts of health problems, obesity, cholesterol, etc.. it wasn’t until a few years ago that a huge campaign was mounted against them, and now companies must label their products/inform customers if any are present. but even today, there are still ways of misleading consumers about the amount of trans fats - “trans-fat free” or “zero grams trans-fat” means nothing unless one reads the ingredient list. so the fight is still on.
just know that you should avoid anything that has “partially hydrogenated oils” in the ingrdeient list.
okay, i bet you didn’t want to know all that, but i had to share!
parlezvouskiwi said
May 18, 2009 at 5:53 pm
oh my gosh. I did not even know about this “trans fat”, so thanks heaps for all that info Cathy! Kind of gross huh? Oh and pity about the misleading messages. Its hard to ever know whats really in our food aint it?
Thanks for your wonderful comments. And yes, the Frenchboy will get the shock of his life in the US of A (food wise…) hehehhehe. Stay tuned!
greetings from sunny california said
June 19, 2009 at 1:59 pm
[...] I said in my previous post, I love going to the supermarket to discover stuff about the culture I am living in. So off we went [...]