Readers on food inequality in eastern Europe
As someone from Romania, I see this as a distribution problem and a consequence of consumer apathy. If you live in a few major urban centers, you can buy high-quality food, often the same products as in Western Europe, and the prices are within reach of the average city-dweller. The problem is that in smaller towns, the sole supermarket or two might source only lower-quality products, so you cannot buy better things no matter how much you want to or how much money you are willing to spend.<p>Wanting a quieter working environment, I recently moved from a big city to a village. The biggest shock for me is how bad the food that is sold here is. Village shops typically buy all their products from a wholesale store like Macro, sometimes the inferior versions of Western European brands, or often the generic brand. The tomato sauce is mostly sugar and food colouring, the chocolate has no actual chocolate in it, and these products are sold at the same prices as the high-quality food in the cities, so it is not a simple matter of rural people not being able to afford better. The people just accept what they get, and none of my new neighbours understands why I would complain.<p>So, while it may seem unfair to blame the bad food on the people who are the victims of it, if there were more concern from the rural&#x2F;small-town Romanian public about their food, there might be room for competition and distributors would change to serve them.