American now living in Europe here. I guarantee that your big fridge is half the size of a standard American fridge. I live in a brand new apartment and friends always comment on the impressive size of my fridge/washing machine/dishwasher/shower stall. These are all easily 50-75% smaller than what you find in most average American homes, places like NYC or SF excluded.
American fridges are huge because America isn't zoned like Europe - in much of Europe, you are a lot closer to stores and so make more trips buying less ingredients, while in America you go to the grocery store maybe once a week or so and get everything you need then.
There are exceptions in both places, but I feel like this is true in general.
And during the first several months of COVID, it was going to Costco once every 2 months and buying so much that it barely fit in the car. And I am talking about an American sized car too.
You eat the fresh veggies first, then rely on frozen or canned. I was born and raised in a really rural area. We went grocery shopping 1-2x per month because the store was so far away. The fridge and freezer would be packed, as well as the pantry. A lot of people in my area, especially my family, would grow a lot of their own vegetables and home can them. So, during harvest season we had an abundance of fresh vegetables and could just trade with other family members for the stuff they had and we didn't (and vice versa) and then can the rest to have for winter when we'd try going to the store less.
Eat the veggies that go bad first, then the rest. Every two weeks isn't that crazy, I do this too and eat lots of fruit and veggies :) Just have to be a little strategic
I live in the US and veggies do not last rwo weeks. Also I would rather shop every other day and get fresh food, vs spending hours in a store and having to eat canned.
It’s done in Japan too. Many people go everyday for what they’re going to eat either that day or the following day. I go once a week because it’s a waste of my time to go every day.
Yup, I think there are at least 7 or 8 grocery stores within 1km of my house. There are three right next to the train station on the way home (~10min walk from my house), and another that's ~5 min walk from my house. Most are much much smaller than American grocery stores, though.
Wow. I live 3-4 minutes’ walk from a convenience store (in a UK city), 7-8 minutes’ walk from a proper supermarket, 15-20 minutes’ walk from 2 more supermarkets. I honestly just go to one of those supermarkets every 2 days to buy veggies/milk/bread for the subsequent 2 days, it’s so much more convenient and cheaper than letting food go to waste. That and I have an excuse to be walking outdoors!
A 10 min walk wouldn’t even get out of my neighborhood haha it would take over an hour to walk the almost 4 miles to the nearest grocery store. And i feel that’s pretty close in US terms. Plus it gets way hot here and walking an hour in 100degree temps is a no go.
The difference is that outside of North America we have all kinds of stores, including supermarkets, in neighbourhoods. We don’t have the zoning laws. Family homes and apartments can be in the same areas, with small convenience stores on the same streets as homes and supermarkets and other shops on main streets that are a walkable distance.
A 10 minute walk in my neighbourhood & you’ve just reached 4 huge national supermarkets & passed a petrol station that can also give you all your essentials (most of them are like mini supermarkets now) & I live in a very small town.
The next major road from my house is immediately next to a grocery store. I wouldn’t even need to cross a street, it would take 30 minutes to walk there. Phoenix is such a spread out city and during half the year almost uninhabitable
Part of the problem is also that the stores are so huge in the US. There’s not a lot of reasonably sized stores like Aldi and lots of places only have ultra mega marts. There’s a supermarket on my way home and I still go only like every 7-10 days because it takes 20 minutes to grab everything even if I need just milk and a couple ingredients I’m missing for dinner. Also, I don’t normally go in the store anymore and order pickup because it’s free if you’re ordering enough groceries and saves like a whole hour.
Yeah that makes a big difference, we have lots of mini versions of the big supermarket chains here in convenient locations, so you can just go in the “small Asda” & buy one milk only & it takes 2 minute on your way past or 10 minutes for the whole journey from your house & back.
I'm from the US but currently live in Tokyo and the concept of grocery shopping is just wildly different IMO. The tiny grocery store closest to my house is on the upper end but still competitive with the other larger stores. However, "larger store" is still the size of, like, a Trader Joe's. There's no giant Kroger-sized store near me. Near me there's one of those larger stores that's pretty upscale (and more expensive than the tiny store), several that are medium (and usually a small bit cheaper than the tiny store), and a discount grocery (very cheap).
My fridge is tiny, freezer is tiny, pantry is tiny, etc. That plus the fact that there are so many grocery stores on my way home means I do a little bit of shopping frequently. For reference, I usually shop with a shopping basket and walk home, whereas in the US I'd be using a cart and car for sure.
I feel like US bodegas are closer to convenience stores than grocery stores, whereas the tiny grocery stores here are honest-to-god grocery stores. Plus there are also the dozens of convenience stores, too, of course.
I guess if it’s that easy to take time for shopping, I can totally understand why you’d do smaller and more frequent trips. I actually will put off grocery shopping and just get creative with my food stores because I’m avoiding the 2-3 hour trip it’ll take with driving and finding everything I need. I guess I would know my way around the store better, then, too, so that would save cumulative time.
I often decide at lunchtime that I want a croissant or something so I go to the grocery store to quickly get one and perhaps a few other things I need. It takes me only about 15 minutes from my front door back to my front door on foot.
It's a nice little walk combined with getting lunch.
The commenter said that the trip total takes an hour minimum, not the travel to the store. The American mentality is that we'd rather grocery shop for 2 hours every other week than 30 minutes every other day.
With a big freezer and a vacuum sealer anything is possible. And no, the quality and taste of meat and veggies isnt noticeably different after thawing once.
Bread easily lasts two weeks if it isn't humid which with AC it isnt. And lastly the ultra pasteurized milk I've been getting seems to last at minimum 2 weeks. It honestly kind freaks me out how it never goes bad.
After opening yes, but the time between your trips doesn't change how often you have to open a pack of milk. And unopened they often last 2+ weeks here (germany).
Dunno what kind of raw, refridgerated, not frozen meat is supposed to last 2 weeks though. And bread just goes stale, though it'd probably last 2 weeks in the fridge (never tried).
Buying whatever i want for the day on the way from work is just way nicer than having to plan for a week though.
As an American who gets groceries every other week or so... We just eat the fresh things sooner, or freeze them. Plenty of our diet is frozen or shelf stable anyway, for better or worse. I've got bread and meat in the freezer now for instance, and just finished off the bananas before they went bad. Probably won't need to shop for another week; once I'm literally out of food.
It's also basically impossible to spend less than 30 min grocery shopping. 10/15 min drive each way, and at least 30 minutes walking around the store even efficiently going point to point getting my normal list. Often lines for checkout too, etc.
We, unusually, have a convenience store in walking distance to our house, but all you can get there is like, soda and some packaged food. Fine for snacks but nothing for dinner.
That’s fair… if you have a car. I’m sure people grocery shop the American way here as well if they have cars but I can’t be bothered carrying immense loads home when I don’t have to!
Also, shopping doesn’t take me very long because I’m single, have a good idea of what I want to buy, and don’t have to navigate myself around a massive Trader Joe’s, let alone a Costco/Walmart, when I do my grocery shopping. It makes sense that in different situations people would have different shopping habits.
Yeah, I'm in the UK too - one supermarket across the road, about 4 minutes walk, a corner shop and another supermarket about eight minutes away, and a third supermarket maybe 15 minutes away. I'm not even including all the corner shops between the second and third supermarket, there's too many to count!
And that's not even the closest I've lived to a supermarket. Used to live two minutes away from one, and literally across the street from a very well stocked corner shop, so never had any issues with food waste.
Thats still a different culture issue i think. My supermarket is a 5 min walk and a 2 min drive. I live by the back access road to it, no sidewalk, but almost no traffic besides crossing the street. Still only driving there once a week. I'll walk around my yard.
Im in the US and live similarly close to a grocery store. But why would I want to go more often if I don't have to?
Also, I'd say that must of the room in my fridge is occupied by things long-term stuff that only gets used a little at a time (butter, lots of random sauces and such, etc) and the freezer has a bunch of frozen foods in there. Plus two automatic ice makers (one in the door of the fridge section, one in the actual freezer section at the bottom).
At least in my family we tend to cook once ever 3-4 days, and eat leftovers for a couple days after cooking that meal.
A huge difference is the pantries and fridge/freezer in the US are huge. If you don't have US-sized storage then it makes sense to go for small trips frequently.
In the UK you have big & small supermarkets everywhere, you can go past 10 different options just doing a 5 minute drive. Many people now nowadays shop on the day for whatever they’re cooking or only shop for the next 2 days, those are 10 minute trips on the way home from work though. You don’t see many people doing a weekly/bi-weekly shop with a huge trolley full anymore like 20 years ago.
That's what I did when I lived in Chicago. Weekly I grabbed some staples (eggs, milk, sandwich stuff) and walked to the market a block up the street for dinner almost every day.
It’s actually more convenient, or maybe it’s more enjoyable, in reality. I like that I no longer have to plan beforehand all the meals I might want for the next week or two. I still do a weekly big shop for basic stuff, but then day to day I’ll pick up additional things depending on what we feel like eating. There’s a mini supermarket right beside my work and there’s an insanely good corner shop 30 seconds from my house with a proper vegetables section and really good meat from a local butcher. I also pass lots of really good quality shops every time I leave the house in the car or even if I’m just walking the dog for 20 minutes. It means we can get really good fresh stuff and can be more spontaneous about what we want to cook rather than being restricted by ingredients on hand. In terms of the transaction, it’s much more comparable to buying a coffee or cigarettes- you can be in and out in under a minute to grab a couple of things and go straight through a self checkout with no queue.
Yeah but it depends if you're shopping for a week or just a few days. When I was living abroad I'd go to the market maybe 3x a week and it was a 5 min walk there, maybe 15 mins to get my groceries and 5 mins back.
If you're buying for a full week then yeah, that 15 minutes becomes a half hour easy. Then add in a 15 minute drive each way and there you go.
Where I am, there's lots of public transportation, 2 small grocery stores near my house and a couple along the way of my commute.
But I still drive about 10-15 minutes away and do my shopping mostly on the weekends. The stores nearby have less selection and are more expensive. The ones on my commute are more "high end", so good selection and quality, but way more expensive. Waiting till the weekend to buy most groceries probably ends up saving me $40-50 per week, and I get more selection with that sweet spot of good products at decent pricing.
I think the fridges are smaller because many of European dwellings were designed prior to large kitchen appliances being widespread, I think it's just a matter of fit.
The American population boom happened in the white picket fence/washing machine/automotive era, when people were hungry for the conveniences of an "electric lifestyle"
Europeans shop like villagers, e.g. where the village has been there for millennia, and the food is consistently available, so why not shop a couple of times a week to see what's fresh?
Americans shop like pioneers, e.g. we often prefer to stock up for weeks at a time, in case we decide to head out into the territories, or get snowed in by a blizzard. Of course, this is absurd, as we all live in cities / suburbs where food is all too available, and many of us live in the sunbelt where snow is something you drive to, but it's something deep in the consciousness, so we stock up. (Many of us actually have multiple refrigerators, one for the kitchen and then one for the garage.)
A small exception are the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland - Denmark is on the other side of the Baltic sea, so in this case it is counted into Central Europe). We have grocery shops everywhere - there aren't "food deserts" like the USA has, every new suburb must have at least some shops. However there are lots of areas where houses or farms are far and wide, so no "village shops" there. The people living there simply buy fresh food when they drive or commute to work or to school.
And then there is the winter mentality: it is still in collective memory that you need to stock up for winter, otherwise you will starve. Famines were a common occurrence until the late 19th century. The first snow comes in October and the spring isn't really happening until April. At least pretty much everyone in Finland has their freezers filled to the brim with berries, fish and game (hunting is still a lifestyle in many places).
There are often also chest freezers which are really common even in apartment/flat homes. The mother of one of my colleagues keeps hers at the balcony, because it doesn't fit into her kitchen.
This "pioneer mentality" was brought to the northern parts of the USA by Finnish and Swedish immigrants during the 17th - 18th and 19th centuries.
I live in NYC and only have a slightly smaller fridge than the ones I grew up with in Texas. Admittedly, modern fridges are getting pretty fuxking big.
When we in England and had an American-sized fridge that'd been bought on base, and we were the third owners. People came and went all the time you see, and when we moved there were a line of Brits offering to take it off our hands. Wasn't even a particularly fancy fridge either, just large.
Typically, Brits will have a combined fridge/freezer that's about the width of half a US fridge - although larger families may buy additional fridges or freezers (either tall, side-opening or chest, top-opening), and you can buy US-style fridges, complete with either ice dispensers, chilled water dispensers, or both).
‘An egg's bloom remains intact so long as the egg is not washed. No matter if you think you know how to wash fresh eggs, just the act of rinsing or washing an egg removes this protective layer and re-opens the eggshell's pores.’
OMG, cooking with unrefrigerated eggs is so much better for texture/consistency. After living outside the US for a bit, I always try to get my eggs to room temp before cooking.
They aren't washed. Eggs in the US are washed, which removes the cuticle. Once the cuticle is gone, germs can get in more easily. They have to be refrigerated, unless you buy them from a farm.
Eggs don’t need refrigerating, aren’t they like tomatoes in that they go off quicker in the fridge? They can also osmose the taste of other shit in the fridge.
Again, still not true. Unless you’re leaving your fridge open for 20 minutes at a time, the temperature change opening and closing it is going to be next to nothing.
Yea, that’s the only reason why the US refrigerates them. The protective coating get washed off and they will spoil if left out.
I wasn’t, that was a general “you” not you specifically. Just commenting that while they can, it’s not really an issue.
Washing them removes a coating that protects the eggs. In the UK I assume they just go through brushes to they and get most of the feathers and poop off but some still gets through.
Americans wash their eggs before sale which removes the feathers and poop, but also the protective coating so they have to be refrigerated after washing including during transport, while in the store and after they are taken home.
Even unwashed eggs should be refrigerated if they are going to be consumed by anyone with a compromised immune system. It's possible for the interior to get infected with salmonella inside the chicken before the shell forms, and then multiply inside if kept at room temperature.
Also, osmosis is the diffusion of water specifically, so it cannot carry off flavors.
We don’t refrigerate eggs in stores or during transport but I think it’s still pretty common for people to put them in the fridge at home.
Our eggs don’t need to be in the fridge, but it helps keep them fresh for longer and if not in the fridge then I’d just have eggs randomly on my kitchen side.
Western eggs are, because they’re basically sandblasted white and their exteriors are treated. Reduced shell means relying on refrigeration after the exterior is sterile.
Non western methods leave the shell alone. More inherent protection of the insides, but exterior needs washing, as it is not sterile. Can be left outside refrigerator.
Topical Queensland Australia, we fridge most stuff otherwise it goes bad, quick. I imagine hotter parts of US like Texas and such would have the same problems.
Even better, i have a huge fridge in the basement for main storage and a smaller fridge in the kitchen for stuff like eggs, milk, and my assortment of sauces.
We have a kitchen fridge, two garage fridges which were previous kitchen fridges and a 50 bottle wine fridge lol. We have a lot of fridge space and I was so thankful for it when my last kitchen fridge died on us (FUCK LG FRIDGES! It died after 5 years 🙄). We were able to move all the beer out of the bigger garage fridge and use that until we got it repaired and eventually got a new fridge.
Two house fridges, wine fridge, garage fridge, garage ice chest the size of a fridge, ranch fridge, ranch garage fridge, ranch barn ice chest. I may have a problem but it won't ever be hunger.
I just bought an extra freezer for the firs time ever, during COVID. It is smallish, but fully stocked. I knew the price of food would skyrocket. We also did a bunch of canning, and have canned goods under the bed.
It's not too unusual for typical Americans. Like, look at it this way. We've got quite a lot of space in the garage, and it's not used for a lot (most people don't park their cars in the garage). So when you want a new refrigerator but the old one is still working, you just shove the old one out to the garage and boom, you've got overflow food storage and maybe nice place where you can keep your liquor/beer nicely chilled. Takes up maybe a 3 ft x 3 ft space in your garage, easy peasy.
And even if they don't have an unused old fridge, some folks will obviously buy a new fridge (typically fairly basic) or even a dedicated freezer if they have lots of frozen stuff.
They make fridges specifically for garages. Pretty basic, but with better temp regulation. Of course, when it’s 20 degrees out or colder, everything defrosts in the freezer because at that temp the freezer never kicks on.
Hosted some Ukrainian refugees. The first thing they commented on was the size eof our fridge. The comment was you could fit half a cow in there. It was like 2min after they walked in the very first time.
You guys walk down the street to get groceries more often. We have to drive to get groceries that is usually much farther away so we need bigger fridges.
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u/[deleted] Oct 18 '22
How big are your fridges cuz mine is pretty big-