A Matter of Choice

A couple of weeks ago we had a visitor from Berlin who described her experiences in the US world of consumers as follows: “Here, it is us who are the Ossis”. “Ossis” is a sort of shortening for “Ostdeutsche” given to East Germans, i.e. people from the former GDR, by West Germans as a not too flattering nickname. What our visitor wanted to express, then, was that whenever people from (West) Germany enter a shopping mall, a supermarket, or even just a coffee shop in the US, they feel exactly like East Germans who had been raised in a Socialist system of material shortage, felt on their first trips to the Bundesrepublik after the wall came down: Overwhelmed and sort of helpless by the sheer vastness of product ranges.

Newcomers to the US get this feeling especially whenever they go food shopping. It is not just that “large” often is only the smallest category for, let’s say, eggs (going up to “extra large” and “jumbo”), or that milk and orange juice are sold by the gallon rather than by the liter (which, apart from the absence of the metric system, explains itself also by the fact that the average American family – and the average American fridge - are definitely bigger than their German counterparts). But even at the ice cream parlor one finds that the smallest portion, one scoop, is the equivalent of approximately three to four scoops of ice cream sold in Germany. Apart from that, the product is usually enriched and contains so much sugar that even a seven-year-old who LOVES ice cream has problems finishing such a gigantic scoop before it melts.

On top of this, there is the problem of choice. To stay in the ice cream parlor for another minute, there are rather fifty than twenty sorts you may chose from. Same thing at the coffee shop: No way you could order just a cup of coffee; at least half a dozen questions have to be answered before the coffee is finally yours. Regular or decaf? Whole milk, skim milk or soy milk for the latte? Tall or Grande? For here or to go? And on it goes until I forget what I actually came for. “Welcome to the United States,” grins my neighbor Debbi. “We like to consume big style, that’s what we’re here for.”

Even more bizarre I recently felt in New York’s famous Bryant Park. It was freezing cold, and we were delighted to find a small kiosk offering “Hot Chocolate”. But guess what? You couldn’t buy just hot chocolate. It came in eight or nine different flavors, but there simply wasn’t anything like plain hot chocolate! While the line of people was growing behind me, the guy behind the counter tried hard to figure out which of his flavors came the closest to plain hot chocolate– maybe malt-and-something (I forgot what the second component was), he finally decided. He obviously had to dig deep down into his memory, trying to remember how this beverage had originally tasted.

Similar experiences come with any food shopping. Among the various brands and manifold shapes of frozen French fries offered in a local supermarket, try to find some that are not heavily salted; I haven’t succeeded yet. Also, the percentage of fat is, on average, distinctly higher as in my home country.

So it seems that the choice suddenly becomes very limited when it comes to finding plain foods, i.e. something that is not enriched, sweetened, or processed in any other way. Even the lunch menu at my son’s elementary school, titled “Balanced Choice”, by the way, reads more like a fast food chain’s menu than a list of healthy meals – even if it tries hard to pretend otherwise, especially on Fridays. Try this week’s offerings: Monday: Cheese burger on a bun, Tuesday: Baked Breaded Chicken Nuggets, Wednesday: Rotini with Italian meat sauce, Thursday: Macho Nacho, Friday: Tony’s Smart Reduced Fat Cheese Pizza. (There is a vegetable side dish every day, to be fair. And children may choose a salad platter instead of their “Balanced Choice” meal. But which child ever would?)

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that WE in Germany are doing so much better. Not at all, we are just – as usual –lagging a little bit behind, and I’m sure we’ll catch up soon.

But what if there were other options? My neighbor Debbi, for example, says she got away from a lot of these dilemmas by becoming a vegetarian and opting for organic food. Not a few Americans, fearing obesity, diabetes, and other plagues of the modern eating times, nowadays cover at least some of their requirements at supermarkets specialized in organic and natural foods. Thus, they have among other things made a small supermarket in Texas, founded 26 years ago, grow into the Whole Foods Company, the world’s biggest retailer in this field with almost 200 locations in the US and Britain, more than five billion dollars yearly sales, and two-digit growth rates.

There is at least one major disadvantage attached to most organic foods, though, and this is the price. Only people from the upper end of the social ladder can afford a wretched cauliflower for six dollars or lemons that cost 1,75 dollars EACH. And even those well-off Americans obviously find price levels high enough to have nicknamed Whole Foods into “Whole Paycheck”.

Also, going to the “good” food chains and supermarkets doesn’t automatically mean that you come out with nothing but healthy stuff in your shopping cart. Apart from organic fruit and veggies, hormone-free milk, and meat without antibiotics, there also are – to give just one example - tons of sweets, disguised as ever-so-healthy cereals. Or who wouldn’t be tempted to buy an extra pack of cookies if the advertisement attached to it reads: “It never felt so good to say NO before – NO refined sugar, NO saturated fat”, etc., etc. And what about all these vitamin pills and other dubious food supplements sold in such luxury style organic megastores?

Which directly leads to the last (but not least) problem: Enter any Whole Foods (or Wild Oats, or any other organic chain’s) supermarket, and you face basically the same problem as in any conventional food store: Overwhelming heaps of different products – and hardly any clue what to choose.

To escape all this food confusion, here’s the perfect literature: Michael Pollan’s article Unhappy Meals, recently published in the New York Times Magazine. Pollan is an award winning environmental journalist and writer who also teaches journalism at Berkeley. The bottom line of his article is that the food industry has succeeded in selling us nutrients instead of foods. As a result of that strategy we simply eat (and buy!) more (because we feel so good about eating all these supposedly healthy nutrients) instead of eating right. What Pollan recommends after a whole lot of research into the subject is: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

This has become my new protective mantra I mumble to myself whenever I enter one of these gigantic food stores now. And I am already feeling so much less like an Ossi and more of a really smart consumer! Ask me again in a few months whether this has indeed benefited my health – or, at least, my purse.