The economics of food

Westside market on Broadway

We are slowly realising that we live in a very expensive city, at the very least if we plan on maintaining our habitual lifestyle. We knew that the rent was going to be nasty, however we did not expect the expensiveness to extend to other aspects of daily life such as transportation and food. Regarding transportation I would say "faire enough", NY is a very big city with a very dense network of public transports that needs to serve millions of people (although I still can't for the life of me understand why they don't have any line going horizontally through or above central park).

Food, however, is more surprising. Compared to switzerland:

• Meat is almost 3 times cheaper
• Vegetables and fruits are almost 3 times more expensive.

Indeed, $1 for a tomato is crazy. And so is paying $5 for a kilo of apples. And this is found across a number of organic food markets such as Zabar's, Whole Foods, Westside, Citarella, etc. I will not delve into the ludicrousness of distinguishing food with the organic and non-organic terms (the closest parallel we have in Switzerland, in theory, is BIO, but I somehow have the impression that the standards for non-organic food are different here than for non-BIO products back home... but I blame this on culture shock – see previous post). However, if one wants to eat healthy food that would be entirely affordable at home, here it becomes a luxury that you need to be able to afford. (There are a number of cheap(er) options, which we might look at, but that are not very convincing at least from the outside.)

Discussing the topic with our favourite local inhabitants (Virginia&Fred!), we noted that you need to be in a dire economical situation to not be able to afford doing your grocery shopping at Migros and Coop (in which case you would have to *shivers* resort to Denner). Here the tune is different: if you can afford it, you can eat your greens and live healthy, paying hefty sums for local produce and branding yourself as a Localvore (the fact that local could mean half a european country away does not seem to be an issue here). And yet, if you are a happy carnivore, you will be able to buy meat at incredibly low prices, in the very same stores where you were ogling at the tomato prices. 

All of which makes you wonder about the question of social inequality: the economically-challenged, health-conscious european family (if it exists) will forego meat and other expensive products; the american counterpart will have no choice and will end up with a not-so-healthy protein-rich regimen based on meat and non-vegetable products. Of course you can eat cheap crap in european cities just as well, but at least there you might have a better choice.