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More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You h
by ertgbnm 2y ago
More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists.
You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!!
All relatively affordable and accessible to the average person.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists Mate, the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, the Walmart 5-gallon bucket of Snickers and the giant Costco bulk bag of peanut butter M&Ms blows my present day European mind, let alone someone from 1900.
- qlm 2y agoThe quantity of chocolate for sale in bulk certainly is surprising. Unfortunately I find American chocolate to be borderline inedible.
- le-mark 2y agoBest not to think of it as “chocolate” similar to how cheese whiz is only loosely related to cheese.
- pockybum522 2y agoAs an American, I agree with you. Most things we call chocolate are painfully and literally disgustingly sweet. We have plenty of good chocolate too. However, anything darker than about 40% gets called "dark chocolate" in America, which is just stupid, so even that isn't a sure sign that it's not loaded with sugar. Most grocery stores will have a few dozen chocolate bars in their candy aisle that actually say a percentage on them. Not only does this tell you what's not sugared to death, but companies that do this tend to make higher quality chocolate anyways. Anything 70% and higher tends to be tasty.
- MisterTea 2y agoYou're thinking of the cheap stuff like Hershey and other candy bar crap. It's all sugar.
- kybernetikos 2y agoI don't think it's just the sugar, Hershey uses butyric acid in its process and some other manufacturers copy them because that's the taste US consumers associate with chocolate. To people used to chocolate made without butyric acid, it tastes like vomit.
- pfdietz 2y agoMore accurately, Hershey is thought to use milk that is partially lipolyzed, and this process generates butyric acid -- which, according to the wikipedia page, is also found in Parmesan cheese. Does that taste like vomit? I find European chocolate tastes sickeningly sweet, so to each his own.
- kybernetikos 2y ago> is also found in Parmesan cheese. Does that taste like vomit? I don't think it does taste like vomit, but it does smell like it.
- pixl97 2y agoI promise we have good chocolate here, just stay away from anything labeled Hershey's or Cadbury because it's the malk equivalent of milk.
- criddell 2y agoThat's like saying you don't like American beer because you tried Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite and didn't like any of them. There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US.
- delta_p_delta_x 2y ago> There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US. Ghirardelli are decent, but I've been relatively hard-pressed to find decent American chocolatiers otherwise. In general, European chocolatiers are in a different league.
- ghaff 2y agoYou won't generally find the best in the supermarket--probably either in the US or Europe. There are actually some pretty good more artisanal chocolate bars you can get in many supermarkets to my tastes. But they're still by definition mass market and (often) not as good as what some specialty maker with a small store has.
- orwin 2y agoAnd cheese too! but you will hardly find good cheesemaker at a piggy wiggly (or even in SF more reputable supermarkets). The best i had was one from Hungtinton's Farmer market (WV), easily a top4-top3 goat cheese.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoAs someone from Wisconsin, I can say with certainly that you can in fact get great cheese at Piggly Wiggly. I have no idea if they exist in other states though, and if they do the cheese is no doubt worse.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoYou only really see kids eating m&ms. There's good American chocolate too, american chefs can read and follow a recipe just fine.
- RGamma 2y agoThere's tasteful advancement of civilization. And then there's mountains of trash food.
- oblio 2y agoThose are the ones that scared you?!? Walgreens/CSV literal buckets of medicine like Advil and whatnot were some of the scariest things I've seen, and worst of all, people DEFENDING them.
- pfdietz 2y agoHow old are you?
- oblio 2y agoOld enough to realize that mass selling buckets of medicine isn't sane (no matter what they are, hint, Advil expires too), especially since I have doctors in my family. Also it kind of confirmed what statistics say about America being over medicated. It's just a small whiff of the disease that ends up with mass fentanyl addictions.
- pfdietz 2y agoAnd not old enough to have the constant, chronic pain of old age, when your bones are grinding against each other at your worn out joints, particularly if you've had a life of physical labor. I think without the privilege of being relatively pain-free you'd change your tune.
- oblio 2y agoI'm sure that the solution to that is not 1 ton of likely self prescribed Advil, it's proper treatment.
- pfdietz 2y agoDoctor recommended ibuprofen can be at considerably higher dose rates than what's listed on the bottle at your pharmacy. This whole "too many painkillers are prescribed" thing really annoys me. It leads to cancer patients suffering because of the risk they could become addicted. So f-ing what?
- brigadier132 2y agoIt really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people were starving in the US during the great depression. Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent rhetoric.
- CooCooCaCha 2y agoBut at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that blueberries exist year round?
- boxed 2y agoWhat is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?
- password_ 2y ago[flagged]
- bee_rider 2y agoShipping blueberries around the world can’t be great for the environment.
- Retric 2y agoWhy not? Bulk shipping is really efficient, local farmers markets can easily be worse for the environment than going to a supermarket. A Semi moving 35 tons at 7 MPG is 25 times more fuel efficient vs a ford F-150 moving 1/2 ton at 20 MPG and trains or boats are even better. In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a port city.
- bee_rider 2y agoReplacing shipped blueberries with locally farmed ones definitely could be a wash or a loss, environmentally, for sure I agree there. But we have relatively efficient industrial scale farming in the US as well, if we admitted that blueberries are seasonal we could grow them in big efficient farms and then just ship them less far.
- petesergeant 2y ago> would blow the minds I think there are two aspects to this. I think anyone who's ever been to a food market in the history of time would conceptually understand it's possible to have a bigger market, and perhaps even a faster horse or mechanical bird to bring the items there. Commerce bringing you items from the other side of the world is millennia old. So I think it would be more of a case of "how did u mad lads actually pull this off", rather than a true mind-blown situation. True mind-blown'ness I think comes from other examples he brings up, like GPS, and making items apparently hover a hundred miles above the earth and transmit information from above there, instantly, silently and invisibly. That's supernatural stuff, and the realm of the holy or the uncanny. You can't go back very far in time without talking about that stuff getting you accused of heresy / talking to the devil.
- perlgeek 2y agoThe real progress with the supermarket is the availability and ubiquity. Maybe 80% of US Americans now have access to a larger variety of fresh fruits than even most nobles had 200 years ago, and it's not even a big deal to us. Project that kind of progress another 200 years in the future... it's hard to imagine how that would even look like.
- pixl97 2y ago>another 200 years in the future Tea, earl grey, hot.
- ertgbnm 2y agoI think people would have a deeper appreciation for what a super market is because they could understand it since it's exactly the kind of thing they would imagine a utopia would have. Throughout most of history people have spent most of their time worrying about food. Air conditioning, satellites, and CAT scans are just too far beyond imagination that I don't think it would be fully appreciated.
- eleveriven 2y agoFood security remains a critical issue in certain parts of the world still I think
- nico 2y agoThis is still mind blowing and a huge luxury for most of the world “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” - William Gibson
- eleveriven 2y agoIt's so pity that it is hard to create a future that is truly inclusive and sustainable for all
- anonporridge 2y agoIt is hard, but we've proven to be really fucking good at doing hard things. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-between-different-poverty-thresholds-historical https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
- marcosdumay 2y ago> Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? Well, aluminum was supposed to be luxurious and everything... But I think before that they'd pick a piece of plastic packaging and be without words to explain their marvel.
- b3ing 2y agoThey didn't have plastic back then, it would of been paper or cloth
- keybored 2y agoIt seems utilitarian to the person who doesn’t understand the concept of microplastics.
- genewitch 2y agobakelite was patented in 1909 - i understand franklin was before 1907, but the idea of "plastic" as something separate from wood, metal, and glass has been around over a century.
- Intralexical 2y agoBakelite also wasn't very good though. Stiff, heavy, brittle. Modern sheet plastic packaging gives the impression of a soap bubble that we've somehow frozen in time and made solid.
- perilunar 2y agoHow would you explain plastic to someone who hadn't even seen it? I would say it is like candle wax (which it is), but it melts at a higher temperature and is much stronger when solid.
- dotnet00 2y agoIt brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected leader a few years later. https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day Or similarly there's the story of the Lykov family, who lived life cut off from humanity for 40 years but still somewhat understood what the new, moving "stars" in the night sky must be: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus... Edit - Plus, this quote: “What amazed him most of all,” Peskov recorded, “was a transparent cellophane package. ‘Lord, what have they thought up—it is glass, but it crumples!’”
- bee_rider 2y agoAlthough, Yeltsin was already a liberalizing reformer. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was playing it up a bit.
- dotnet00 2y agoYeah, I do take it with a grain of salt since it's a very convenient propaganda story, and it'd be a stretch to say that he formed his political platform just 2 years before actually being elected.
- odiroot 2y ago> More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. Modern American supermarket would blow the minds of anyone from the Warsaw Pact countries ;), up until probably mid 1990's.
- tomjen3 2y agoThere is a video where it literally blows the mind of an immigrant from Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8
- creer 2y agoStill current for some countries: 2 weeks ago, a shopper clearly confused half to death barely manages to make themselves understood to me in 3 words of english: They are asking what is the price of the bag of oranges. Because there were 3 different prices on that price tag. The price, the one if you have the card, the one if you have the app or some other deep magic. (They were not stupid - presumably they could understand on their own the additional price per unit - but most likely not which price this was based on and why...) What a world we live in /s!
- more_corn 2y agoAnd yet a lot of people go hungry in this age of marvels. We have enough homes to house all the homeless, we have agencies, money, social workers. And yet we somehow can’t seem to figure it out.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoWe can. It's just uncomfortable to admit. For example, making housing an investment steals from the poor to give to the rich.
- Nasrudith 2y agoYou can frankly tell when something is bullshit when it involves defining new increasingly fantastic and phantasmal forms of theft. It inevitably devolves into some sort of bastardization of voodoo. Just looking at the number of houses and the number of homeless is itself deeply misleading for what should be fairly obvious reasons. If someone operated a model simplistic enough that concluded there should be no deaths of dehydration in Africa given the flow rate of the Nile river is more than sufficient to hydrate them, you would call said hypothetical person intensely dim for believing that conclusion or model of reality. Yet when it comes to housing suddenly that incredibly over-simplistic to the point of being idiotic model it becomes a political rallying cry.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoWould you take the concept more seriously if I'd used 'taking' instead of 'stealing'?
- LouisSayers 2y agoWe, as society could easily "figure it out", but there are so many misaligned incentives for those that are in charge or in power. Why build more housing when it would only work against the value of your own properties? Why give out free food that's "spoiling" when you risk getting sued for potential food poisoning? Rules are made up in the name of "safety", and they pass because yes there's an element of truth, but what goes unsaid is that much of the time it's maintaining the status quo and blocking competition.
- swatcoder 2y agoI agree that a modern grocer or butcher might wow them, but it's way less given that contemporary supermarkets would. Those supermarkets are a product of a far more modern and culturally specific consumerism, which is not so innate as you might think. Many of us have been raised into and it's been gradually exported around the world, but it's the food equivalent of free to play MMO -- overstimulating, manipulative, confusing, and in many ways far divorced from the far more universal basics of buying food to cook and eat.
- DamnInteresting 2y agoAnd a whole aisle full of splinter-free toiler paper![1] [1] https://www.historydefined.net/splinter-free-toilet-paper-didnt-exist-before-the-1930s/ https://www.historydefined.net/splinter-free-toilet-paper-di...
- mikestew 2y agoIs that whole site just LLM-generated crap? About the only thing that link has to do with "splinter-free toilet paper" is that those words exist in the post, and yet telling me nothing about the topic. I cross-checked another post (because everyone has a bad writing day), and yup, more of the same.
- ghaff 2y agoThe mind would be perhaps be not quite as blown but the modern large urban area supermarket would be pretty mindblowing to someone from the 1960s. You could probably get a lot of the stuff the random gourmet-ish cook might want but it would probably involve some combination of Saturday farmer's markets--which might have other things like beef--(which my mother did with some regularity), maybe a separate fish market (ditto), a specialty gourmet store, ethnic market, etc. And, as you say, things like out of season fruits and vegetables or the variety of things like spices and teas would be largely unavailable outside of maybe specialty stores in the largest cities.
- eleveriven 2y agoI sometimes think that modern American super market would blow the minds of a lot of people nowadays too
- pfdietz 2y agoThere's a reason some people celebrate when Wegmans opens near them.
- sethammons 2y agoWe moved from nowhere Montana to North Carolina and when our teenage kids stepped into Wegmans, you would have thought they had never seen a grocery store. The vegetables section alone had their eyes bulging. One kid actually teared up. Best produce we had had in years. A couple years onward and the novelty is absolutely gone and the oldest thinks wegmans is too expensive with too little variety
- metadat 2y agoAnd why would bread be full of sand and grit?
- NateEag 2y agoBecause using millstones to grind grains into flour leaves traces of sand and stone grit in the flour. It's really hard on the teeth long-term, IIUC.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoKeeps the ol' colon moving right along tho'
- buildsjets 2y agoThresh a bushel of wheat by hand by tossing it in the open air outdoors, and let us know the results of your experiment.
- sethammons 2y agoWhy would that encourage sand or grit?
- ks2048 2y agoThis would blow many people's minds, but *more than* the magical rectangle in our pockets that plays endless moving pictures and sounds and all the world's information? Oh and talk (with live images) of people instantly across the globe? Not even close.
- MisterBastahrd 2y agoReminds me of the story of the VERY early German settlers in Louisiana. They didn't have work animals such as horses or food / sustenance animals such as cows for the first decade of their time settling here (and to be clear, cows were used ONLY for milk... killing cows was a crime in early colonial Louisiana). Clearing the land for farming? The Company des Indes gave them each a pickaxe, a hoe, and a spade. The progenitor of the Folse family in particular cleared the land, then became ill with malarial fever all summer, and then a hurricane flooded his property. 2 years after his arrival, he managed to harvest an entire 7 barrels worth of rice, which he had to hand-transport from the Hahnville area of modern day St. Charles Parish to New Orleans for sale. One of the reasons the people there had such good relationships with the local native Americans (and why Creole Louisiana is such a melting pot to this day) is that they didn't have time to focus on procuring meat, so instead they would trade their crops with the natives, while the natives went hunting for meat and taught the children how to hunt, too.
- wordsinaline 2y agoCan you explain the sand and grit part?
- bongoman42 2y agoPoor quality grinding of grains and adulteration can leave sand and grit in the flour. Still happens sometimes in places like India at least.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThere are tradeoffs of course, its not all a direct upgrade. The deli section has certainly gotten a lot worse than 100 years ago. No capicola anywhere that I've seen. Cheese offerings leave a lot to be desired now that they've been reduced to the same half dozen usual suspects. All the food in that deli might be entirely monopolized by boars head or dietz and watson. Pickles, same thing with the vlassic/mt olive race to the bottom. I'm not even sure we can really honestly say the bread situation has improved other than the fact a machine now slices it.
- wayeq 2y agoKind of rough for those of us that prefer sand and grit unsliced break though..
- nsguy 2y agoSliced bread is a step in the wrong direction though ;)
- Merad 2y agoWalmart. Walmart is totally the winner in this category. It has all of the grocery store things you mentioned plus mountains of clothing, household goods, mind blowing technology, medicines... Show them all of these wonders - then tell them that this is where poor people shop.
- schoen 2y agoLast year I read some fan fiction in which a young woman comes isekai-style from a medievalish fantasy world to present-day Nevada. To make a long story short, one thing she concludes during this experience is that God wishes to bless everyone with ... a CostCo!
- ChickeNES 2y agoDo you remember the title? Would love to read it myself
- schoen 2y agoYes, it's called "in His strength, I will dare and dare and dare until I die"¹ in the Glowfic Constellation. There are a whole bunch of people there writing about characters and settings from the RPG Pathfinder (which I haven't played), most often in an isekai scenario (people from our world enter the RPG world, or vice versa). Although I was fascinated by some elements of this story, it was actually abandoned incomplete last September and it's unlikely to ever be finished, so you may be disappointed by that if you get into it. (Some people who play Pathfinder also complained that they didn't feel the characters were faithful to the originals, which I can't really evaluate.) ¹ A quote from Shaw's version of Joan of Arc, which is pretty thematic, although the "He" in question for the title character of this story is a particular god from a polytheistic pantheon.
- bmitc 2y agoI think supermarkets hide a bit of a scary thought though. It sends this signal as food always being available, but it sits atop a very tightly "balanced" supply chain that is quite fragile. A few major supply chain disruptions and food scarcity becomes real very fast (a few days at most).
- prawn 2y agoAlso exposed when thinking about hardware stores. If you need to build/repair part of your house and the supply chain for wood or steel is gone, are you going to wait for tall, straight trees to grow? And then if you don't have milling hardware? Know how to create and extrude steel roofing or angle iron or similar?
- bmitc 2y agoYea, our supply chain fragility and dependence really scares me sometimes. I try not to think about it, to be honest.
- LeChuck 2y agoOur supply chain is not fragile at all! It took an enormous, global pandemic to cause a disruption and even then, goods kept flowing. Don't forget, Everyone braced for an economic downturn and all of a sudden demand for transported goods shot up. That's what caused the congestion, hugely growing demand. Containers never stopped moving, demand for transport was simply greater than supply. Prices rose, sure, but that's what's supposed to happen right? After the pandemic was over prices plummeted even faster than they climbed and are now under pre-pandemic levels. Right now containers ships have (largely) stopped transiting the Suez Canal, passing the Horn of Africa instead. Adding weeks to their transit time. This is a mayor disruption and, while freight rates are once again rising, no one notices. Goods keep flowing, stores are stocked. I work in logistics, so I'm somewhat biased, but to me it's amazing how robust supply chains really are
- dclowd9901 2y agoAnything that stems from _protocol_, to me, is astounding. Yes, the internet is predictable in a sort of “yeah I think people will eventually all want to be able to communicate with each other easily.” But if I said to Benjamin Franklin — the ambassador to France during the American revolution — that the internet only works because every country in the world agreed to do internet the same way, he would’ve said “fuck you, no way”
- throw__away7391 2y agoI remember when I was a kid reading an old fairy tale, perhaps from Grimm's, about a girl given the "impossible" task of getting "strawberries in winter" or face some horrible consequences, but she was helped by a fairy. This was considered literal magic not that long ago.
- m463 2y agoI think stores have become much more welcoming. The doors automatically open for you, the interior is nicely arranged, everything is brightly lit, and food is chilled, refrigerated and frozen. Also, cold coca cola.
- xdennis 2y ago> The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! I agree with you on the other points but this. People too often try to make the present look better by hyper focusing on bad things in the past. Bread was sometimes adulterated with sand or sawdust, but it was not the norm. I don't think that a past peasant (who would bake his own bread and eat it fresh out of the oven) would be impressed by supermarket bread. People who think sliced bread is good have never tasted real bread.
- weiliddat 2y agoJust this past month was my first ever visit to Canada, and the supermarkets here also blew my mind (I spent the last decade in Germany and before that in a mix of Malaysia/Singapore). I heard this was also representative of US supermarkets. I was mostly surprised at the ridiculous size of the mall footprint (no wonder they need to put these in the middle of nowhere and require cars); of the variety of things (like the parent comment mentioned); the variety of the same thing (30 different types of frozen pizzas), of the packaging (especially Costco holy shit, some package sizes are what some supermarkets where I live have on display). It is very convenient and impressive, but I have mixed feelings about the trade-offs, like needing a car to get around and carry larger quantities of groceries (though I’m unsure whether big box stores or car dominant culture came first or maybe hand-in-hand), the majority of food choices on offer seem less than ideal for your long term health (lots of packaged and processed meals, junk food), and lack of origin or locality of goods (though farmer / wet markets do exist for that).