I'm sad that I missed posting this on the 4th
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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There is a lot of truth to the big in America stereotype. Big country, big cities, big roads, big cars, big buildings, etc.
And a lot of those are related. Big country means that our cities can sprawl. Big (low-density) cities mean that our roads can be wide. Big roads mean that our cars can be big.
Big country also means that there are a lot of people, and sooner or later a good percentage of them want to live close together, so they build big (dense) cities, which means big buildings.
And the sprawl leads to the part about big containers of unhealthy food, too. If you live more than an hour away from the nearest grocery store, you're unlikely to get groceries more than every other week or so, which means you need to buy larger, more shelf-stable containers of food.
I believe (based on nothing but a whim) that us shopping culture is based on buying supplies (shopping for a week or more) while the European shopping culture evolved more from daily supplies from the market. Rural Europe would be the same i guess, but old cities was made for daily commerce
I lived in a couple of countries on Europe and the daily and bi-daily shopping is only really for people who live in big cities and commute by public transport and will pass by a small grocery shop on their way home from work.
As far as I can tell most people do a single weekly shopping generally by driving to a supermarket or even hypermarket either on the weekend or at the end of a working day, hence the popularity of such large surfaces.
Even in places like The Netherlands people have side bags on their bicycles and can just cycle to a supermarket once or twice a week if they don't feel like driving there and bring the shopping on the side bags.
From my own experience with my grandparents (farmers in Portugal), rural food planing timeframes are even longer than a week, as people relied (at least 50+ years ago) on preserved meats and longer duration things like dried pulses, certain fruits, and staples like potatoes for months or even a whole year and then add in season fruits and vegetables and even just go outside and pick up whatever was ripe then from a plot next to their home (so, for example, make soup with some salted pork bellies and chipeas from their food stores and some spinach and carrots picked up from from a farming plot near the house).
Anyways, even in Europe doing a weekly shopping is generally more convenient.
Mind you, it's great when you live inside a big enough city and you can just hop out of the tram a stop or two early on your way home and go by a mini-market to buy, say, some milk and fresh vegetables, but that's not how it generally works for most people, mainly because even in a big city, unless you live right by the store it's more time efficient to do one big grocery shopping a week were you can go to bigger places with more selection.
gotta fit all these big fat people...