The basic supermarket food groups are the same in northern Europe and in the U.S., for the simple reason that the baseline “American” population that established the baseline traditional American diet originated in northern Europe.
There’s the beef food group. The chicken food group. The lamb, fish and dairy products food groups. The green stuff food group is over there somewhere; fresh fruits are probably somewhere nearby. What’s the tonnage that flows out of a U.S. supermarket every day? We could probably use a couple of U.S. military cargo planes to fly the necessaries in each day.
The main difference between the good foods in European and American groceries is price. Most foods are significantly less expensive in the U.S. than elsewhere. This is why the EU works so hard to box U.S. staple foods out of European distribution chains on a variety of specious grounds.
This is where the anti-GMO hysteria originated, by the way. The Europeans realized decades ago that they couldn’t have cute Swiss cows on cute Swiss mountainsides if Swiss farmers had to compete with Iowa and Wisconsin. The EU’s solution was to scare EU consumers with absurd fables about the varieties of corn the cows were eating.
By the same token, European famers with their little microfarms can’t compete with big U.S. farmers practicing economies of scale made possible by modern technology.
So: the whole EU food system is organized as a conspiracy against the public. In my ideal world there would be a U.S. style supermarket — over 40,000 items on average — in every major European city, with prices marked to average U.S. grocery store levels. European consumers could see how badly they are being cheated, and they could vote with their feet. I would be happy to reprogram a big chunk of State Department funding — let’s start with all the DEI officers — to support this as a cultural outreach program.
the EU is a trade disaster.