If you teleported me to a foreign city for a day and gave me a choice between a trip to the supermarket or a museum, I would almost always choose the supermarket. This is not just because I like snacks more than I like still life pieces, it is because a grocery store is a museum in its own right: a little slice of local life. I am not the only person to brand “buying crisps” a cultural experience: “Grocery store tourism” is having a moment on social media. Influencers are treating trips to the supermarket with the same reverence they might reserve for the Louvre.
This is not just greed in intellectual packaging. There are dissertations to be written on why you can find prawn cocktail crisps on British supermarket shelves and nowhere else. There are deep historical reasons why Germany is so obsessed with paprika-flavored snacks.
It is not just unusual products such as lasagna-flavor crisps (available in Thailand, apparently) that give you a taste of a place — even supermarket layout can say a lot about a country. Look at eggs, for example. In the UK, they are on a shelf, in the US they are in a fridge. Why? Because of different salmonella management strategies. Americans wash their eggs, which removes a protective cuticle. So then they compensate for that by spraying the eggs with oil to stop bacteria seeping in — after which they are forced to refrigerate them. In the UK, and a lot of Europe, egg-laying hens are vaccinated against salmonella and their dirty eggs go on unrefrigerated supermarket shelves.
I wish there was a similarly logical explanation for why French supermarkets are filled with rows of utterly disgusting, unrefrigerated, ultra-high temperature processed milk, but there does not seem to be. Anyway, you would not get these same insights into international agribusiness practices from staring at the Mona Lisa now, would you?
Of course, the very best thing about supermarket tourism is how authentic it is. No annoying tourists taking selfies. Just you, some local people and a bunch of Gen Z influencers filming content for TikTok.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist.
A nation has several pillars of national defense, among them are military strength, energy and food security, and national unity. Military strength is very much on the forefront of the debate, while several recent editorials have dealt with energy security. National unity and a sense of shared purpose — especially while a powerful, hostile state is becoming increasingly menacing — are problematic, and would continue to be until the nation’s schizophrenia is properly managed. The controversy over the past few days over former navy lieutenant commander Lu Li-shih’s (呂禮詩) usage of the term “our China” during an interview about his attendance
Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), the son of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee Politburo member and former Chongqing Municipal Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai (薄熙來), used his British passport to make a low-key entry into Taiwan on a flight originating in Canada. He is set to marry the granddaughter of former political heavyweight Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政), the founder of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital in Yilan County’s Luodong Township (羅東). Bo Xilai is a former high-ranking CCP official who was once a challenger to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for the chairmanship of the CCP. That makes Bo Guagua a bona fide “third-generation red”
Would China attack Taiwan during the American lame duck period? For months, there have been worries that Beijing would seek to take advantage of an American president slowed by age and a potentially chaotic transition to make a move on Taiwan. In the wake of an American election that ended without drama, that far-fetched scenario will likely prove purely hypothetical. But there is a crisis brewing elsewhere in Asia — one with which US president-elect Donald Trump may have to deal during his first days in office. Tensions between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea have been at
US president-elect Donald Trump earlier this year accused Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) of “stealing” the US chip business. He did so to have a favorable bargaining chip in negotiations with Taiwan. During his first term from 2017 to 2021, Trump demanded that European allies increase their military budgets — especially Germany, where US troops are stationed — and that Japan and South Korea share more of the costs for stationing US troops in their countries. He demanded that rich countries not simply enjoy the “protection” the US has provided since the end of World War II, while being stingy with
RSS