For the past 8 weeks, I have been amazed while food shopping in SW Europe, including France, Spain, and Portugal. Fruits and vegetables are 30-50-70 percent less expensive, and usually, they are organic and much better quality (flavorful and aromatic). Poultry has been 30-50 percent less costly, and seafood is extremely fresh, with much local variety, far better quality, and 50-75 percent less expensive.
How is this possible considering Europe’s cost of living is higher or equal than the US?
I should add that processed food seems fairly expensive in Europe. If you buy something in a package or prepared, it may cost as much or more than I may pay at home.
There are a couple of factors an individual cannot control, such as:
- There is more competition with retail food sales. Many small producers, and even the large European producers, are committed to keeping prices low and competitive.
- European governments subsidize fresh, wholesome food production. In the US, the government subsidizes mostly big farm production, for sugar, wheat, flour, corn, dairy and soybeans, with limited if any support for seafood, organic animal products, or fresh produce.
Yet there are several factors that we can impact, as in Europe:
- People eat what is produced locally. The markets and the supermarkets offer locally grown and produced products. The fruit and vegetables, the seafood, and even the dairy products are all produced locally and often by small farmers. They don’t have the expense of shipping food across the country when people eat locally.
- People eat what is seasonal. When peaches are in season, everyone seems to know that they should buy peaches. The same is true for most of the food here. People are aware of the seasons and buy their food when it reaches its peak.
- Local farmers sell their products to local markets. They don’t have massive food farms producing food on a national scale. The money flows locally. This eliminates many of the middle-level buyers who are buying and selling food.
- European food doesn’t have set sizes and color requirements. Generally speaking, Europeans care far more about the freshness and quality, than how it looks. It doesn’t have to have a standard appearance, specific size, or single color. An apple is acceptable if it has spots, a tomato is fine if it has bumps, and it is fine if things come in different sizes. In the US, food producers throw away vast quantities of food that don’t meet a pre-set standard appearance.
- Buyers in Europe expect fresh, excellent quality, and they won’t settle for less. They won’t buy inferior products, in contrast in the US in particular, where most of our food sold in the grocery store seems to be perfected shaped and colored, but of marginal flavor, we have become used to buying inferior fresh food products. Most of the time, our peaches are hard and without flavor, melons have almost no fragrance and little taste and tomatoes have the perfect shape and color, but almost no flavor. In Europe, people expect their food to be fresh and flavorful or they won’t buy it. In the US, we seem to care too much about finding the perfect color and shape, causing tons of food to be thrown away, and not picky enough about the flavor of food, and our quality suffers as a result.
- If you are able to shop at the local market in Europe (which exists in every small town) instead of a large grocery store, the food is often less expensive.
When you add all the factors together and shop in stores and markets, you’ll find that you get far more food in Europe at a lower price than what we spend at home.
What steps could we take to reduce our food expense and quality:
- Buy fresh food that is grown locally.
- Buy food that is seasonal.
- Buy direct from local growers. For seafood, look for sources of locally caught seafood options (lakes, rivers, and sea as is feasible with where you live).
- Accept food of varying sizes, colors, and shapes.
- When you can, support your local organic markets.
- Insist upon high-quality food, or skip it.
I wish you the best of health!
Steven Masley, MD, FAHA, FACN, FAAFP, CNS
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Nice article. It’s a shame that so many fresh foods are wasted. We could feed the poor and the underprivileged with produce that I’d eat myself and gain health benefits.
Thanks for the information.
Michael
I am European and I was shocked at rather disgusted at what Americans call food when I went there for an extended stay. I bought some veg and then went out and about sightseeing for a couple of weeks and then came back to base and the veg I bought had not rotted at all. I can only assume irradiated food. I always read labels carefully and I had not seen anything saying I had effectively bought zero nutrition produce. Do you even have any effective food labelling legislation? I bought papayas in Southern US which were the palest flesh I have ever seen and no juiceiness or taste and I also saw food in the US which were the most disgusting colours – viz the bakery section and stuff laden with inches worth of sugared icing and colourings. On the good side, I saw some amazing and dramatic natural landscapes but omg very little decent food and NO you do not need those portion sizes. We also have reasonably stringent legislated standards – no hormone fed foodstuffs for us!
Dear Dr. Masley,
Though jealous sometimes, your trip was great and thanks for sharing all the information. What is next on your bucket list?
Stay healthy and thanks for all the great information you provide.
Hi Sharlene,
I am headed back next spring/summer to search for more regional Mediterranean recipes, planning on writing a Mediterranean cookbook down the road.
Steven Masley, MD
Excellent comments, very valuable and helpful.
The world is lucky to have you!
Thank you, from Switzerland 🙏 Be//a
I had the same r experience in Switzerland several years ago. Yukon Gold potatoes were so good they didn’t need butter. They had flavor!!! I was truly amazed at the produce, so good.
I spend my winters in Florida. A neighbor from Maine that grows wild blueberries in 2016 they were paid $0.32 per lb, last year they were offered $0.18 so he did not bothered to pick them. Those same Maine blueberries in Florida I had to pay over $12.00 for 3 lbs. Need I say any more.
The large retail grocery stores do not want to buy from local farmers. They have large sale flyers that are distributed every week. If broccoli is on sale they need enough to last a week for all the stores they own, only large factory farms can produce it. A few weeks ago I wanted broccoli but it was almost in seed, all yellow. I have been buying broccoli for years and I can tell you the quality is going down every year because we have farmers that plant only broccoli year after year. Also to supply the market many produce are gathered before they are ripe. I asked a vendor one day at a flea market why his strawberries are all white. He told me they start picking the strawberries at 5:00 am, in other words they pick them in the dark. Years ago we did not know what the store would have on hand till we got there but it was fresh and looked 300% better than what we buy today, and it probably had 1000% more nutients. Have you bought potatoes in the last 10 years. In plastic bags they are all sun burnt from the lights in the store. In paper bags where we cannot really see what we are buying, it is garbage. Sometimes there are 2 or 3 rotten potatoes in one 10 lb bag. They are full of black spots that gives them a terrible taste. When I was a kid we used to harvest around 100 bushel of potatoes, we had beautiful potatoes but dad refuse to spray his before harvest like some farmers were doing. That was before roundup but whatever they were using you could taste it in every potatoes so people were eating that spray every day. Those 100 bushels was all for our family, two adults and 9 kids eat a lot of potatoes. I am sure that the main problem today it that the good potatoes go to the large companies and the rest which we used to give to the pigs, they go to the grocery stores for us.
Local fresh food is usually quite a bit more expensive than that in grocery stores, unfortunately.
The situation in Germany is different – whereas people in those countries around us (the mediterranean countries) insist on quality, here in Germany food seems to be only for calorie uptake. People prefer spending their money on cars, holiday trips, clothing etc. so there is not much left for food which is then bought at the discounter stores. There are a lot of organic food options, but these are expensive. It is also not true that people don’t care about bumps on tomatoes or spots on apples – they do! So, we in Germany are different from the countries you mentioned (I talked to an organic gardener and she told me that the controller who visits her from time to time for the controls says that if they offered the vegetables and fruit in Italian supermarkets they offer here, people would riot ;-)).
My daughter lives in London and I noticed that the fruit and vegetables there are far more flavorful and tasty than ours. In addition, I believe they don’t use as much pesticides as we do. So glad you are writing about this. Thank you!
Just what I’ve been thinking
I enjoyed reading your article. I just returned from my 5th trip to Italy. I have witnessed in Italy what you describe seeing during your trip to SW Europe. The European Union bans artificial flavors and GMO’s, and Monsanto has a bigger fight there. The people appreciate their food – they have a respect for their food. They know where their food comes from. Grocery stores are small and not filled with shelves of processed foods. Gathering family and friends for a meal is a part of their culture. There is much we can learn from them.
Thank you for this article Dr Masley. I am going to print it and share! We are so used to eating tasteless food in this country that many people don’t know what real food tastes like. Major changes are needed in the way we shop and prepare food starting with our system of growing crops for food. We are up against some very powerful institutions but I do see change beginning to happen
Thank you for sharing!!
In South Africa, anything organic is extremely expensive and one has to go way out of your way to find places that sell it. Also quantity is very limited.
Excellent article. Send a copy to every media outlet. I intend to.
Thank you so much , I fully agree with your experience in Europe. I had the privilege to visit years ago from Brussels to Austria and was impressed with European eating habits with meat . We were craving heavy foods during our visit . Our friends were so well balanced with small portions on there plates . We recognized many farms market with farm fed family living . Every one carried that mentality …. thank you for all your tips …
Interesting
But food doesn’t grow year round here in most states.
Very good analysis and suggestions!
I agree completely! We live in rural France half the year, and the produce (during the summer particularly) is so delicious – it reminds me of what used to be available in the midwest when I was a kid. Coming back to the States every autumn is a bit of a food shock! We gorge on all things fresh from May-October & eat (mostly) frozen veggies & berries during the winter.
Growing up in Germany as a child remembering when the farmers truck would stop by 1-2 a week selling fresh eggs, chickens and produce. How I miss the European way of lifestyle eating fresh healthy, the diversity and varieties of fresh produce, breads, cheeses and lunch meats. Even the butter tastes different and certain dairy products that I miss eating are Quark, Creme freche and Schmand hard and expensive are hard to find, not to mention fresh Boisenberries, varieties of cherries, red and black currant , Pineapple watermelon, Kohlrabi and , Wirsching. Eating healthy is much cheaper in Europe and you buy mostly fresh for your daily needs.
When we visited Indiana as a child, the food had such taste. No supermarkets there then..They were in California and sold more tasteless foods..Best milk ever was from a cafe in Oklahoma, talk about flavor..In Calif we had milk delivered to our door and poured off the cream..My sister and I hated the little bits of cream left in our milk…We dressed the chicken we bought at home often, or the man we bought from would dress it and remove that awful green thing that could spoil if not carefully removed..The veggies in Indiana were fresh picked from the garden or fresh frozen in their own freezer. The eggs came from the chickens they raised and the chicken we ate came from those hens too..The rooster crowed each day and loved that…Now our foods are poison…Some cities provide healthy growers and organic choice, alas not in this town…You can see the results at the market by looking in the carts and at the people that their food is very bad. Eventually Indiana I knew got a supermarket and it all went away..Oh those watermelons picked fresh from the field Now that was a melon.