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| It looks all very attractive, but what to choose? |
As someone
who made its profession of talking and thinking about food,
it is often difficult to make decisions regarding to this topic. While buying
groceries at the supermarket, choosing what to have for breakfast at my
favourite pasticceria or when
deciding which restaurant to enter. At some moments I find it really difficult
what I should use as indicator that can help me to make these decisions: is it
the look, the price or should I choose that what I’m used to take?
It might
be my sign (I am a Libra) but I have these doubts almost daily. At the
supermarket I can spend minutes in front of the shelf filled with tomato sauce,
wondering what is the difference between one product and the other. I am even
capable of choosing one, but changing it for another one after another round in
the shop. Why is there such a big price difference between one container and
the other? Off course I don’t like to pay a price which doesn’t even cover the
production costs, but who can give me the guarantee that the more expensive
products mean also an honest price to the ones who did the hardest work on it?
It
doesn’t help that I often watch documentaries or movies (like this one, in Dutch) digging into the real story behind
our daily food. The package can give some hint on the contents (“prepared only with Italian grown tomatoes”
or “less salt”) but that might
only be done to confuse you. Even if the label tells you that the tomatoes are
grown close by home it does not say where they were processed. Further research
might show that your local tomatoes have gone a long way before arriving in
your kitchen.
Some
people say that similar products from different brands ‘come out of the same
factory’. That might in fact be true. However that does not mean that the same
production process is used for the product from brand A as well as that of the
same type of product from brand B. The quality of the product usually is linked
to the price, so if a commissioner pays a low price to the manufacturer he has
to compensate for the flavour with cheaper ingredients. Have you ever compared
the amount of salt per 100 grams between a bag of potato chips of four euros a
kilo and one that costs twice as much?
However,
the choices made in a supermarket are relatively controllable. You can check
the labels on contents and usually the country of origin of the product (check
the barcode to understand how this works) and
if you are really curious check the website of the producer to understand their
values and the company’s approach to for example sustainability, the treatment
of their staff and other things that matter to you. But how to do this when you
are to eat out of your own house?
Visit
this blog next week and I will tell you more about this.
