Amanda

People in America seem to feel okay with open bulk vegetable and fruit sections, even though everybody is touching them, and you don’t heat them up to eat them. (People touch peaches to see how hard and firm they are so that they can pick the ones with the desired ripeness.) Do people demand that grocery stores package every single vegetable in plastic? (Oh, I shudder at the thought of individually wrapped bananas, and peaches and cherries.) No, because they see other people doing it, and it’s the norm. And norms can change, it just depends on how you view it.

In Taiwan, housewives prefer open markets not only for fruit and vegetables but for dried noodles, meats, and prepared foods because the quality is better and you get cheaper for more, and they’re always full of people. It’s not perfect and it can benefit from more standardization (like making the floor less gross, for example) but as it is, it’s not the sanitary nightmare that people in America imagine it would be, and we do just fine. You are welcome to bring your containers, the person weighs them for you, and he or she often adds everything in the head, cross-check the amount with the customer, and the customer pays, while the other customers are free to shop around and leave their filled counters at the counter until they’re ready to pay. If you think America’s supermarkets are busy, Taiwan’s population density is way higher, and service clerks service a lot more people in a day.

Contamination (like that pig-disease scare I forgot the name of) mostly comes from upstream, when the farms mess it up with their practice of crowding too many livestocks(we have so little space in Taiwan, and landfills are overflowing, why can’t we try to free up the landfills?), and(!) in food packaging(finding bugs in the plastic), oh yea, and let’s not forget DEHP, the plasticizer that nobody knew was being added to sports drinks and fruit drinks because of the secrecy surrounding the food industry. And why were they adding them? because it was a magically cheaper alternative to another drink additive that the industry add to their packaged drinks so that fruit juices don’t have natural condensation at the bottom.

If you DON’T KNOW what to test for then you won’t find it, for each new compound you have to develop a new indicator that is reliable and shows up most of the time and can be separated from other chemicals. In our case, it took us 20 years before some sharp-eyed inspector realized there were abnormal wavelengths corresponding to the DEHP in the drinks. Usually they just run a test of known chemicals, so nobody ever found out that some OTHER thing was in there. Just imagine the amount of waste that came from taking all this food off the shelves and incinerating them. Some of the foods were innocent in the sense that it was not the manufacturers who deliberately put DEHP in them, but they had unacceptable levels of DEHP due to packaging.

Oh, yea, and it’s great that because of these food additives, people think fruit juices “naturally” come with neon red coloring and have no condensation of fruit pulps on the bottom and have to be taught to separate something that is really natural from something that has DEHP in it.

I’m all for local bulk food stores. I wish they were more widely available in the US.

Currently I shop at the vegetable store (farmers market in the summer) once a week, and the grocery store once a month or less. I always bring my own bags, I have mesh bags, nylon bags, and cotton bags depending on what I need them for. I used to just toss all my produce on the counter but it was so awkward, especially at the vegetable store, so now I use various bags.