Admit it, you do look what the person in front of you buys at the supermarket. I do. How else to pass the waiting time at the check-out? I judge them too. Grade A: Wow, want to invite me for dinner? Grade B: Some short-cuts are fine, I buy them too. Grade C: I hope you eat it yourself and don’t feed it to your kids. Fail: Fifty packets of instant noodles?!? That’s why you look so anemic.
I just watched a German documentary. They send a family of five to the supermarket to buy the ingredients for a three course dinner, tomato salad for starter, spaghetti bolognese for main, vanilla ice cream for desert. Fairly simple, because the family had to watch a short video about how the ingredients were made before they decide if they really want to buy it.
The result was that the tomato salad got axed, because most out of season tomatoes come from Almeria in Spain where low paid workers from Africa spray pesticides inside a huge area of poly tunnels that can be seen from space, pack them unripe, so that they transport better, and look just right when they arrive in German supermarkets (and have no taste whatsoever). Almeria does not have enough water to sustain vegetable farming on such a big scale, so they desalinate ocean water and the run-off forms lagoons full of pesticide water… bon appetite!
Instead they made a carrot salad, because most carrots for the German market come from Germany itself. Although harvest time is not all year round, they can be stored easily, making them a low cost and healthy vegetable all year round.
All meat in spaghetti bolognese was refused too. Most pigs for the German market come from Lower Saxony, where they are raised in high-intensive pig pens. The nitrate in the manure is poisoning ground water in the area. The pigs only see daylight one the way to the abattoir. The family decided not to eat meat as often as before, but refused to become vegans.
Most Parmesan is German supermarket shelves is not made in Italy but in German cheese factories. Despite the fluffy marketing of TV ads, no Italian stands in a cave and waits for the cheese to mature, instead an overbred Hostein cow gives 10000 to 20000 liters of milk every year and a mechanized German factory turns that milk into Parmesan and wraps it into plastic. Despite of this – maybe because four year old daughter and daddy loved cheese – parmesan was put into the cart. At least no animal had to die for it. The film told the story of Holstein bull “Yogurt” whose sperm is send around the world because his female offspring have huge udders and sturdy legs.
Most vanilla ice cream has no vanilla in it. You knew that, don’t you? Instead it has artificial vanilla essence, which – if I understood correctly – is made from mold and pine. The family bought it anyway. We are used to it, aren’t we?
Call me a snob, but when I bake myself I buy the real thing, an expensive vanilla bean. What’s the point of baking at home and it tastes just as artificial and bland as store bought cake?
I have a personal pet peeve too, so called “ham”. I don’t know if it is offered near you, but here in Hong Kong it is a low cost alternative to the expensive “Prosciutto” and “Speck” imported from Europe. It’s very pink and has a few purple dots in it. The fine print ingredients list reads like lab report. Ham for me is a pig’s hind leg, salted and smoked or air-dried for the number of months it takes to turn it into an intensive flavored piece of meat. It does not contain milk protein, soya, nor artificial aromas.
I have seen little man’s school friends bite into white bread with lab ham in between. All I can say is “fail” to the parents.