Expensive food for rich people

[loiosh]

Chrisamirault and Richard: point taken that not 100% of food mags (including Gourmet) is elitist.  But, I am actually a freelance writer/photographer, and in looking at the pages of Gourmet (Feb 2005), Australian Gourmet Traveller, Vogue Entertaining  + Travel, there seems to be an unhealthy fascination with things expensive.

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The Australian magazines Austin mentions cost 7 or 8 bucks a piece at the newsstand....not really pocket change for most folks. And they're *heavy*, printed on super-thick glossy stock....popping one in your carry-on will give you a backache. I always viewed these magazines as being aimed towards wealthier folks and/or as an 'aspirational brand'. (Didn't I read somewhere that most magazines tend to have advertisers one economic 'notch' above what the subscribers could actually afford?)

The Australian food magazine scene runs the gamut from the food section in the Women's Weekly to Super Food Ideas ($2.50 I think? Tends to run cover blurbs like "100 New Ways with Mince") to the Jamie-and-Nigella-fest that is Delicious.

While it doesn't make for exciting magazine travelogues (though there was an awesome one on Aussie bakeries in Saveur last year), people in Australia eat well at all socioeconomic strata, if they choose to do so. Real bakeries and fresh bread can be found at pretty much every shopping complex, and you'll also find greengrocers, fishmongers, delis and butchers. This is *in the mall*, in fact, in *all the malls in my city*, not at some kind of gourmet Disneyland. Sure, the breads may not be artisanal, the produce might not always be organic, but it's still a heck of a lot of variety of fresh ingredients and products, and usually pretty affordable.

You can't really encapsulate this kind of phenomenon in a flashy magazine layout, and if you wrote a story about it for one of the local glossies, the response would be 'Duh'. Furthermore, while you can go to Tetsuya's, it's a lot harder for foreigners to snag an invitation to someone's house for lamb roast with pumpkin.

[MarketStEl]

As someone has already (finally!) posted some stats on how much Americans spend on food as opposed to Thais, all I will say is that it confirms my suspicion. Generally speaking, Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than inhabitants of almost any other country.

"So that's why it's not all that good," I hear some of you say.

That may well be. After all, as the old cliché goes, "Time is money." Doing something well usually requires large expenditures of either one or the other, and sometimes both.

One of the hallmarks of much of the "common" fare Americans eat is that it is fast and it is cheap. I don't know how much it costs to buy a decent lunch from one of those Thai street stalls, but I suspect that, when expressed as a fraction of the typical Thai national's paycheck, it's more than it costs to buy a $5.99 Happy Meal at McDonald's. And judging from the faces I usually see whenever I walk into a McDonald's, the percentage of Americans who cannot afford a $5.99 Happy Meal at McDonald's is very small indeed.

We seem pressed for time all the time, or not interested in spending the time to cook well when we have it, so if our common fare is something of a letdown to those coming here from abroad, that may have something to do with it. (I still hold out "Slow Cooker Helper" as the epitome of what I'm talking about--convenience meal kits for people who don't even have enough time to chop up some veggies and meat, toss it all into a Crock-Pot with some liquid and seasonings, and go about their business for the rest of the day.)

And yet...as Mayhaw Man and others have already said, look at the amount of bandwidth we spill here gushing over barbecue (perhaps the slowest of slow food), or hot dogs, or home cooking, or great diner fare. It seems to me that good food can be found anywhere you look in this country, and at all price levels--it's just that sometimes you have to expend extra effort to find it. Good restaurant fare at modest prices is easier to find in the big cities than the small towns, but given that nearly 70 percent of Americans now live in urban areas--and yes, the suburbs count as "urban" for purposes of this argument--most Americans won't have that much trouble finding some if that's what they are looking for.

As for the top=flight chefs being interested in more prosaic fare, I recall quizzing Ferran Adrià on this very subject when he dropped by for a conversation with eGulleteers last year. He responded by talking about his "Fast Good" restaurants in Spain, which would be in a category that includes diners in the United States. So it's obviously not as cut and dried as it was first presented here.

[nacho]

That's a good point about cooking being an example of an art.  My complaint is that the majority written about this "art" in newspapers and magazines seems to focus on high-end restaurants and chefs.  Personally, I'd be more interetsed in reading about what Swedish people eat for breakfast, or the history of chilies or whatever, but we all have different desires, and I reckon I'm a minority!

Austin

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This is one of the things that makes eGullet so compelling as individuals can discuss whatever they wish about food and people with similar interests will likely respond.

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Yup. According to my Swedish co-worker:

we eat cereal with milk or buttermilk, yoghurt, bread with butter and chesse or ham or something... and coffee

[H. du Bois]

I am curious--where are you "staying?"

You may not be able to get sushi (good or bad).

There are rural areas and some small towns in the US do not have a wide selection of good restaurants but often this is a result of the fact that people do not dine out a lot.

Hard to believe there are many places that have no or little good healthy food available in markets etc. People may not be dining out a lot where you are but that does not mean they are not eating well at home.

By the way--some of the "chain" restaurants are not quite as bad as we make em out to be.

I'm wondering too. Maybe, there is some interesting local cuisine in those "greasy spoons" that get bypassed on the way to the 40 mile away place?

I don't know, I'm just saying that I have had some incredibly good food in some very unprententious, and yes, even unpromising locations. Talking to the locals about where to eat, and keeping an open mind, can generally net you some great experiences.

Of course, coming out of New York, where there is good food at every other door, I could see where one would get spoiled. Just spending a long weekend there spoils me. Just the nature of the beast.

I am, at present, in a little place in western New York, halfway between Rochester and Buffalo. It sounds an awful lot like petite tete de chou's town! (Are you sure we're not neighbors?)

I don't mean to stir the pot with my posts. I do recognize that as a New Yorker, I've grown accustomed to having the world at my fingertips - a circumstance which the rural regions of the country cannot possibly hope to replicate. And I have been able to find some wonderful things to make up for it - this is peach and apple orchard country, and the sweet corn in season is to die for. The fresh, free-range turkey we bought from a local farmer for Thanksgiving was superb - no brining necessary. But finding some of the food I've grown to take for granted has been difficult - not impossible, but difficult, and there's often a fair amount of driving necessary to hunt it down.

Agree completely that the best food to be had here is probably cooked at home, or acquired by means with which, as an urbanite, I'm unfamiliar - I've been assured that if I were to shoot my own deer, there's a man here who makes the most fabulous venison sausage ...

As MarketStEl notes, and I agree with him absolutely, it isn't that there isn't good food to be found outside the urban areas, but it can take effort to find it.

Ellen

[annecros]

Ah, I see. A neighbor of mine from upstate New York beats me about the head and shoulders concerning the "real" toms and corn she grew up with, and how nothing here tastes the same. Of course, I throw the produce from the neck of the woods I grew up in right back in her face, sometimes hauling it back and preparing it for her just to SHOW HER! Silliness.

Well, hunt and gather while thy may. I would feel homesick for the city as well in your position. In fact, I feel homesick for it now. Haven't been there in about 18 months.

Glad you have found some good things to eat and appreciate.

Want to talk about "slow" food? Ask the UPS guy with your order!

[WHS]

Mayhaw: I never suggested making "high end dining available to the masses", but I would like to see good, healthy, creative food available at a price that normal people can afford.  Although I'm far away, I get the impression that this is not the case in America.

And if things are as you say, why doss dining in the US seem so exclusive and prohibited when compared to Thailand or somewhere else?  Maybe you haven't been abroad, but there is a very different feel, at least in this part of the world.  Why can't US chefs do something more inclusive?  Although it sounds virtuous, I think that would be a much more difficult and requires much more skill and talent to make good food at low prices than the opposite.  Will this ever happen?

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Austin, I think you are overstating the case that dining in the US is more "exclusive" than in Thailand. What about restaurants like Mahanaga or any of the upscale places around Ekamai that cater to sophisticated, rich Thais? They use ingredients like foie gras or kobe beef and combine them with things like lemongrass and galangal. I would agree with you that food in Thailand tends to be more egalitarian in preparation though. The first night we arrived in Bangkok after a 26 hour flight we took the easy route and had dinner at the Erawan, and I must say it was delicious. We has Isaan dishes, duck curry, mee krob, sticky rice with mango, etc. We could have had the same dishes anywhere else in Bangkok at a tenth of the price. However, the place was filled with well-to-do Thais, not just farangs. So I think the desire for exclusivity exists everywhere. And if you don't think Thai people can be pretentious, materialistic snobs, just take a visit to the Prada boutique in Gaysorn Plaza.

[Austin]

Gosh, can't believe all the responses this has generated. Some interesting thoughts here. Honestly, I think if you'll scroll back to the beginning, some of my original statements have been twisted and misunderstood (this wasn't meant to be Thai vs. US!), but there's way too much to respond to at this point.

WHS: take a look at my blog (RealThai, below) for a pic from MahaNaga. I went there for an article I was writing and photographed the som tam pork chop. There are more pics of other dishes at upmarket Thai restaurants there. (And by the way, duck curry and mee krob aren't Isaan dishes, if I'm understanding you correctly. They are very much Central Thai dishes.)

Austin

[WHS]

(And by the way, duck curry and mee krob aren't Isaan dishes, if I'm understanding you correctly.  They are very much Central Thai dishes.)

Austin

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No, I meant we had Isaan dishes AND duck curry and a bunch of other stuff...there were seven of us so we went crazy and ordered everything. Of course there were a hundred food stalls and restaurants between the hotel and the Pratunam bridge which were maybe even better, but it was so easy to sink into the plush.

Edited December 22, 2005 by WHS (log)

[Pan]

Austin, I think you need to spend more time in California. Go to a place like Chow in San Francisco. Good, healthy, creative food available at a price that normal people can afford? Yep, I think they've got that covered. High end and ritsy, it ain't. Good and a bargain, it sure is.

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Pan, with all due respect (truly!!!), I believe what Austin is talking about is eating outside of the urban centers. I've eaten like a queen in New York and San Francisco, at ethnic restaurants that cost very little as well as at the high end of the spectrum. Where I'm currently staying, I have to drive 40-50 miles to either of two cities if I want to eat at a place that isn't a chain or a greasy spoon - with the exception of the local prime rib house.[...]

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Isn't Austin in Bangkok? (Are you, Austin?)

I think the main point is that the Chao Phraya Valley (the valley in which Bangkok is situated) is a prime agricultural region with no winter frosts to interrupt the growing season. Therefore, it seems to me most apt to compare the quality of food there with the quality of food in prime agricultural regions in the US that have mild enough weather never to be frosted over. That would include much of California, though not the northernmost part, and -- not coincidentally -- Louisiana. It would not include Western New York, North Dakota, or Iowa.

I strongly suspect that you can find good food at affordable prices throughout most of the year-round growing areas in California.

[Arianna]

The food culture of America is far too much of a dichotomy for any such characterization of eliteness. Although it is a cliche, we are indeed a "melting pot" of cultures, income levels, and food preferences.

One thing that contributes to the low cost of dining out in a place with a more pronounced cuisine is the economics of competition. If there are two hundred dumpling stands in Bangkok, the price wil drop due to the availability and compensation. This happens in America, as well. In Seattle, where I live, probably the most commonly obtained foods in little shops are teriyaki and pho. As a consequence, these are almost never over $5 a serving.

America has less of this competition as there are so many different varieties of things to be had, a shop selling pho rarely competes with one selling burgers or pasta or vegan pan-asian, so their prices exist independently of one another, with different market shares. The dumpling stands will compete almost uniformly with the roti stands, the noodle stands, and whatever else, because they are all street food, and often with street food, people are going for what's cheapest and closest.

I think there is a cultural aspect to this observation of food being elitist, but a lot of it is the economics of density (Thailand is the 59th densest country in the world- the United States ranks at 143) and competition.

[KitchenQueen]

We need to get comments by Pim in this thread. She can discuss the draw of high-end restaurants in Bangkok and why wealthy Thais choose to go there, rather than going to a stall. We also need comments from people who live in parts of the US like Louisiana. I don't think you need to be rich or pay a lot of money to get delicious food there. (Actually, you can get tasty food very cheaply in New York, too, if you know where to go [like Chinatown and Flushing].)

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I don't live in Louisiana now, but I grew up there. There were magnificent restaurants, and I'd eaten in most of them, but honestly, many of my best meals were in private homes, or cooked by me from their recipes.

Recipes passed down for generations, from locally available ingredients, and most , but not all, were actually superior to high end New Orleans restaurants. I said most, and I meant it.

My apologies to restaurant owners there, if I've offended.

Some were breathtaking.

But I personally feel a lot of that excellence was more in the presentation and ambiance.

Flavor and enjoyment just don't absolutely demand a waiter and a menu.

It requires a great recipe and great ingredients.

The candlelight ,silver,crystal and linen just make it wonderful...

But sometimes I wonder if presentation, surroundings, and wanting to be considered a "cutting-edge experimental" chef aren't sometimes getting just a leeetle-bit silly?

[helenjp]

I've certainly become a better home cook because of it.

That was petite tete de chou discussing the effects of moving away from the diversity and quality of food offered by a big city.

It's a key point - that the need to cook well generates good cooking.

The all-white = bad food thing...so many theories abound on why this should be so. I quite like the one about lower incomes for British working classes depressing a natural interest in food...possibly railroads bear some of the blame too?! Towns with good transport grew big enough to be out of easy reach of market gardens long before refrigerated trucks became the normal method of transport.

The differences I see between my moldy suburb in Japan and similar moldy suburbs in New Zealand are: definitely, less willingness to spend money on food (both for personal use and for gift-giving) and consequently fewer businesses focussed on good foodstuffs or products. Another biggie: lack of interest in seasonal produce - Kiwis love their nature, but I rarely hear talk about the difference between spring lamb and autumn hoggett, or when to eat watercress or mussels. Last one: housework and cookery = outdated drudgery. Women's magazines seem to promote either "give yourself a treat" thinking or "go on, skive off!" food.

I understand what Austin is talking about, and it disturbs me too - even if I *could* cook in masterly fashion, home and family cooking is what interests me most, maybe because there are so many constraints to challenge the home cook.

On the other hand - eGullet shows me a world of people determined to deliver a loving kick at the backside of the food they grew up with. Discussions and experimentation on food within reach of even my table - that's the heart of eGullet for me.

[sazji]

An interesting thread, this one. When I first read the initial post, I found myself saying "yeah, true," to many things, especially the money thing.

In the US, mostly, you have to lay out some good money to get good quality vegetables and fruits. Every time I go home, I'm shocked at what they are asking for a pound of whatever. I am not at all rich, I'm not working for an American salary in Istanbul, but I can afford to eat really good vegetables, fruits and herbs pretty much any time I like. Much of this is perhaps because things come from so far away; but even in Washington state where I lived, apples were just as expensive as anywhere else. This system has also nearly eliminated eating by season; you can buy a peach almost any month of the year in a grocery store in the US but I'm interested in when I can find an edible peach *anywhere* in the US. I gave up years ago.

However I also found that at least in Seattle, there were alternatives. You could get fruits and vegetables just as good as those in QFC for much less if you went to chinatown and bought them at Viet Wah.

Someone mentioned being able to find fresh herbs - I notice a similar thing here. In grocery stores, about the only fresh herb you can get for a decent price is parsley, and perhaps cilantro in some areas. This is because there is a high turnover, they are sold in simple bunches and there is not much loss, I'd wager. The rest are in fancy little packages (how much are we paying for those little plastic jewel boxes?) and are still marketed as something a bit upscale. There is very little as invasive and rampant as mint; you stick it in the ground and it immediately goes out of control, but it's absurdly expensive to buy it in a QFC or Safeway, but go to an Asian grocery and you will find big bunches for sale at logical prices, perhaps a few different varieties at that, because people use it.

One phenomenon in the US (and many places I suspect but here it's a very small minority who can really buy into it) is that once an idea becomes popular, it's immediately capitalized upon and packaged. Remember natural foods coops? I remember when they first started, back in the late 60s/early 70s, and they emphasized healthy, fresh foods. The last time I went to Pacific Consumers Coop in Seattle a couple years back, I was shocked at just how incredibly expensive everything fresh was, and how the great majority of what was for sale was pre-made, pre-packaged. Perhaps lower on preservatives than other places, but fresh? It was aisles and aisles of stuff, and nothing to eat.

Of course, when there is not much of a market for something, bringing or preparing it in small quantities to a limited market is going to be more expensive. It's been especially interesting to watch the markets in Greece, where I lived back in the 70s and 80s, and those in Turkey. As Greeks have become more affluent and traveled more, they have become more interested in new flavors. I remember in the 80s, nobody had any idea what a lime was. Now you can find them in many grocery stores, and there is even a Greek word for them now. (Besides "laim") Fresh ginger costs 3 or 4 Euros a kilo; compare this to Turkey where this kind of stuff is still the realm of a very small and affluent group - ginger if you can find it costs about 25 dollars a kilo. Lime? 10 a kilo. Bacon (an example of a low-demand product): 80 dollars a kilo, if it's findable.

We have chinese restaurants, sushi places, mexican restaurants, but as there is no local chinese, japanese or mexican population, they cater to an elite group who has spent lots of time abroad, and so are all in very affluent districts or places frequented by foreigners. Eating sushi especially is a marvelous way to show you have money, because despite the availability of very, very fresh fish here, it's much more expensive than in the US, even though the average wage here is far, far below that of the US. Your average person has no more idea what sushi is, than your average Iowa housewife in 1950 knew what "cilantro" was.

It's a bit hard to determine what is the chicken and what is the egg, but with prices as they are and American ideas about food what they are, generally, it's not at all surprising to me that so many Americans are perfectly happy to eat pre-prepared foods, buy frozen or canned instead of fresh vegetables. Here you can find a few canned things but they certainly aren't very popular; most housewives would still wonder why someone would buy, say, okra in a can when you can get it fresh? Frozen vegetables...I can't even remember if I've seen them.

Things are changing though. I live in an older part of the city, with many fruit and vegetable stands within walking distance of my house, neighborhood grocers every block or so, and three huge street markets a week in my general area. Over on the Asian side, in slicker areas like Bostanci and Ataköy, where people mostly live in high-rises, there are no street markets, no corner groceries, no fruit markets. I was surprised to find that people there, mostly middle class, seemed fairly complacent about it. Living in your car and buying everything from a grocery store is, for many people, a new thing, and a sign of status, like having the latest cell phone. I went to one of those giant grocery stores for the first time just a month ago; it wasn't much different than a QFC back home, a big deli case with familiar foods, börek brought that morning from God-knows-where, dried out and oily, and no "börekçi" (börek maker) anywhere within walking distance. They pay a lot more for this stuff now; it's more expensive in the grocery stores than it is if you go to a börekçi, fruit and vegetables are more expensive there than if you go to a fruit stand or especially a neighborhood market. But there, those other things are no longer alternatives. Eventually I suppose it will become that way for the rest of the city, and the rest of the country, and the few remaining greengrocers will become more expensive.

Still, some seem to be resisting. I heard today that Turkey is the first country where MacDonalds actually took a loss - there were once 25 of them in Ankara and now there are only 4 or 5. People tend to get tired of things that are attractive simply because they are new and have status appeal. They eventually realized, I suspect, that the many and varied traditional "fast foods" here are both cheaper and much better than what Mickey D's serves up. Hopefully they will realize the same thing about packaged foods and other far-from-the-source products. If they get into the EU, the battle will be lost I suppose, as they are forced into that kind of economic system. But that seems increasinly doubtful, so perhaps there is still hope for good food in Turkey at least!

[Chris Amirault]

What a fantastic post, sazji! Thanks. I was surprised to read that there was no word for lime in Greek until recently. What is the neologism?

[Grub]

What Chris said -- great post. I shudder to think of bacon at $80 a pound!

[sazji]

I was surprised to read that there was no word for lime in Greek until recently. What is the neologism?

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"Moscholemono." Literally, "fragrant lemon." But most people simply call them "laim," and that's how it usually appears in the grocery stores. I remember trying to describe a lime back in the 80s, and people said "oh, you mean an unripe lemon." Finally one said "oh, isn't laim a fragrance they use in shaving cream?" Limes have never had any place in Greek cooking as compared to lemons, lime trees are more tropical and much less hardy. The same holds true for Turkey; a few weeks ago I had a bartender swearing up and down that a lime was nothing but a green lemon; he said "you might use something different in the US, but I'm a professional, I know!" I was surprised to find that in Iran, it's the other way around, true limes are much more popular.

[sazji]

I shudder to think of bacon at $80 a pound!

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Well, being an overwhelmingly Muslim country, pork in any form is something a bit exotic, partaken of again by a very upscale and non-religious crowd. (Which is not to say that all very upscale people are non-religious here.) It was more common when there was a large Greek population; one of the Istanbul Greeks' famous dishes is pork cooked with prunes. About the only time I ever really missed it was the few times I went to Chinese restaurants and noticed its conspicuous absence from the menu. Chinese food and no pork??!

There is lots of "ham" here, but it's made of beef or turkey. Part of the price also owes to the heavy taxation on imported foodstuffs. Parmesan cheese isn't cheap to begin with, but here it's around 40 a kilo. I go across to Greece regularly, so I just stock up on things like that there. Half the time my friends there slip that stuff into my bag as I'm leaving... Hehe, people think *I'm* upscale when I give them pesto with real parmesano reggiano...but I do set them straight.

Edited January 5, 2006 by sazji (log)

[loiosh]

Limes have never had any place in Greek cooking as compared to lemons, lime trees are more tropical and much less hardy.  The same holds true for Turkey; a few weeks ago I had a bartender swearing up and down that a lime was nothing but a green lemon; he said "you might use something different in the US, but I'm a professional, I know!"   I was surprised to find that in Iran, it's the other way around, true limes are much more popular.

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In Brazil, people seem to use both limes and lemons and refer to both as lemons. (FWIW, this is secondhand information, so take with a grain of salt...if you add lime, you're 2/3 of the way to enjoying a tequila shot.)

[sazji]

It's the same in Persian - the word for both lemon and lime is "limoo" or "limoo-ye torsh," (sour lemon-or-lime, as opposed to the sweet lemons they also have in Iran, which are definitely lemons).

I feel another subject thread coming on.

[helenjp]

feel another subject thread coming on

Please do! I'm so fascinated by citrus that I once had a dream in which I discovered a huge, huge poster with photographs, descriptions, and botanical names for every variety of citrus in the world.

...if only!

As for aisles and aisles of stuff and nothing to eat, I agree - if you want to buy actual food, you find yourself very much on the outer rim of the supermarket...or even better, out the door entirely.

[prasantrin]

We need to get comments by Pim in this thread. She can discuss the draw of high-end restaurants in Bangkok and why wealthy Thais choose to go there, rather than going to a stall.

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I'm not Pim, either, but I can say that wealthy Thais do eat at street stalls. My father's family was very wealthy (and very prestigious at one time) and many of the men in the family would, and still do, eat at stalls. The women wouldn't usually, but they would send the maids out to buy them foods from the stalls, then eat them at home.

However, I noticed that those in his family who frequent the high-end restaurants (rather than stalls) are also those who lived abroad for the longest periods of time. My father was sent abroad when he was 15 or 16, and didn't return until he was 33, and then only stayed another two years before leaving again (permanently--he visited maybe only 6 times in the 30 years after that). His stomach just couldn't handle most Thai street foods after that. Many wealthy Thais nowadays spend a great deal of time abroad so perhaps their stomachs no longer have that special protection one gets from eating those kinds of foods regularly.

And of course the reasons OnigiriFB gave are all valid. Plus the nicer restaurants are great places for the wealthy to rub shoulders and catch up on all the gossip. (I met the daughter of a disgraced former Prime Minister at one place!)

[sazji]

His stomach just couldn't handle most Thai street foods after that.  ...perhaps their stomachs no longer have that special protection one gets from eating those kinds of foods regularly.

Yes, after being here a year or so and having gone through what we affectionately call "the gurgles," I traveled with some friends to the Black Sea. We ate musakka one afternoon, it tasted a bit "off" to me in a difficult-to-pinpoint way. That night my friends were both sicker than I *ever* want to be in my life; I got off cheap with a bit of "gurgles" several days later. My little brother had the same problem though after coming back to the states from several years in the Philippines. Seems it can work both ways at times.