Essen, Essen, Horosho!

Back during my first week here, I commented that I didn't like cheap German food.  Well, I perhaps made that judgment in haste.  The thing is, not all cheap German food is gross; I just didn't particularly like that type of meat.  Indeed, since those first few bites of German food, I have come to realize two things which actually contradict my previous assumptions: (1) the vast majority of German food is of high quality, and (2) food in Germany tends to actually be cheaper than a similar product bought in the US.  A grocery bill that would cost $30 in the US will only cost 10€ here.  There have been days when my grocery bill was as low as 3€, and I think the most I've ever spent on groceries was 16€. 

Yes, cheap, good-quality food exists in Germany.  At least, that's the case with most food here.  The price of peanut butter, however, is an exception...if you can even find the peanut butter, that is.  It's not that easy to find, and when you do find it, it's sold only in small, 350 gram jars.  And for those tiny jars, the price is something like 1.60€ (that's currently about $2.13).  But of course, they give the peanut butter a good, American-sounding name and print the label in English.  With it being so difficult to find peanut butter and the price being so high for such small quantities, I've begun to wonder for what, if anything, real Germans use peanut butter.

Milk, while reasonably priced, tastes strange.  At least, that was my first thought when I first tried it. (And you won't believe how long it took me to actually find milk!  I must have kept overlooking it the first couple weeks here.)  At first I thought maybe it wasn't pasteurized, but then I realized that that couldn't have been the case, since I could clearly read "pasteurisiert" on the carton (that's another thing--milk in Germany only comes in cartons; no big plastic gallon jugs here!).  I suppose maybe it's because I was drinking 1.5% milk.  Milk over here only seems to come in the whole and 1.5% varieties.  I think maybe if I had grown up drinking the milk over here, and were to go to the US and drink some of that stuff, I would be saying American milk tastes bland and flavorless.  But having come from the other side, I think German milk is too rich and creamy.  It almost tasted like coffee creamer when I first tried it, and I was afraid that I'd actually bought half-and-half.  But now that I've been drinking the stuff for a few weeks, it's not so bad anymore.

Another interesting drink the Germans have: Apfel Schorle.  Basically what it is, is sparkling apple juice.  Weird, right?  Of course, that's not the only apple-based drink which is plentiful in Germany.  This region around Frankfurt, as I learned from a friend, is famous for apple wine.  Apple wine, Apfel Schorle, and just plain apples...so basically, as far as food is concerned, Hesse is the Washington of Germany.

While we're on the topic of fruits, oranges are pretty reasonably priced, and are very juicy and just absolutely delicious.  I like them even better than most American oranges I've had.  Strawberries are a different story.  I've tried buying strawberries on two separate occasions while in Germany, and I've never been satisfied with that purchase.  Along with generally being more expensive, at least half of the strawberries in the pack are always soft and mushy.  Today I even bought one pack that had a strawberry that was already rotting.  Quality-wise, grapes are only slightly better.  A lot of the grapes were going soft by the time I got them, and they're rather expensive--over 3€ for one of those plastic cartons of grapes that will last one person for maybe three meals. So for now, as far as fruit intake goes, I'm probably going to stick with oranges for the most part.

Well, that's all the food-related cultural wisdom I can think of at the moment.  So until the next post, chow--I mean, ciao!

**Note for those who didn't understand the title of this post: "Essen" is German for "food" or "to eat" and "horosho" is Russian for "good."  It's a reference to a Verka Serduchka song...don't ask.