Here’s a little comparison that will shock and maybe enlighten you. It’s nothing more than my mundane, everyday daily grocery shopping — in London, versus a place like Philadelphia or DC.

How much would the following dinner for two people cost you you at, say, Whole Foods or Wegmans or Harris Teeter or the equivalent?

— A main course , let’s say steak, or chicken, meat, or fish, not just pasta

— A nice side dish, let’s say potato au gratin or seasoned chips, not just bottom of the barrel basics

— A proper salad or veggies, not just lettuce, but a Caesar or Nicoise or something similar

— A proper dessert, let’s say panna cotta or crème brulee, not just, I don’t know, cookies

— A decent bottle of wine. Not something bargain basement, not something to show off, just a good table wine.

None of this frozen. All of it fresh. None of this the lowest quality you can find. Just decent quality. Go crazy, even if you’re poor, and imagine, even if it hurts. Having bought the above, and winced at the pain, I’d say all that would easily run $50 at Whole Foods or Wegmans or some similar relatively upscale grocery store (I’ll come back to why the upscale part matters in a second). Would you say that’s fair? That’s a conservative estimate, isn’t it? It seems impossible to leave American grocery stores without spending that much as a minimum, no matter how you try. Hence, “Whole Paycheck.”

Do you know how much the above costs me in London?

Fifteen dollars. Yes, really. Including the wine. Which isn’t a fine Bordeaux — but it’s not swill, either. It’s good, in fact. So is the steak, the dessert, and so on — I’ll come back to that. First, that’s the nice version, the “meal deal” at Marks and Spencer, which is the higher end of the supermarkets, like a Whole Foods, if you like. Here, check one out yourself. At Tesco — the kind of grim, Food-Lionesque low end grocer? Twelve dollars.

Now, at this point, I’d bet (many of) you simply don’t believe me. As in, you’re literally having a hard time processing this. You’re desperately trying to find objections, qualifications, reasons it can’t be true. You’re experiencing massive cognitive dissonance, in other words. We’re already at the point where we can’t relate to each other’s experiences, because they’re so different. Just groceries — and already, we’re at a place that feels unbelievable, fantastical, surreal. As an American, you probably literally disbelieve that I can get so much for $15. But as a European, you’re probably baffled I have to spend $50 just to eat a decent dinner. But that isn’t because it’s false — it’s because it’s true.

Over a year, assuming that’s all I eat, do you know what the difference works out to? $11k! That’s the price of a small car. In America, I have to pay 3–5 times as much for the same things. And I haven’t even gotten to healthcare — which cost me, what, $10K, last year?

You can quickly see the point: American life is just ruinously, shatteringly expensive compared to anywhere else. If you’ve felt like you’re going crazy trying to make ends meet — it’s not you. Sure, you can eat sandwiches and pasta three nights a week, not have healthcare, call all that good for you, and skimp. Yet that defeats the purpose of a comparison, doesn’t it?

But we’re only just beginning. The truth is that even the sticker price vastly understates the differences in quality. The Marks and Spencer version of all this stuff is so much better — meat, wine, dessert — than what I get at a competing high-end store, like Whole Foods, the difference is almost unbelievable, like night and day. But it’s when you compare the high-end in America to the low end in Europe that the differences are really surreal.

The twelve dollars I spend at Tesco in London, the equivalent of a low-end American grocery store, like Food Lion — even that quality is (much) better than at the best American ones, Whole Foods, Wegmans, and so on. Do you see the point? The best I can buy in America is worse than the worst I can buy elsewhere. And that difference only gets bigger in Europe proper.

So what I get for my twelve to fifteen dollars in London is always better quality — at worst, much better, at best, unbelievably better — than what I’d get for 3–5 times the price in America. (I’ll put it in personal terms, then come back to less personal ones. I don’t get fat. I don’t feel sick. I don’t feel vaguely ill. I don’t feel hungry, but bloated, and somehow still malnourished, like I do when I eat American food, and you maybedo too, only maybe you’ve normalized it. And yes, I can replicate that more or less across Europe, maybe just a little bit more expensively — call it $20. But I can also do it for much, much cheaper, at a low-end grocery store — as little as maybe $10.)

Now. Go ahead and bitch about my bourgeois middle class diet. Oh my God, Umair doesn’t grow his own aubergines in the commune! What a capitalist pig! Sorry, Trotsky, I’m just another guy. So do you want more comparisons? Here are some. Bananas, onions, tomatoes? Anywhere from two to ten times as much in America. A bag of Doritos costs me a fourth as much in London (if you’re into junk food). Chips, with less gross trans fats and so on? A dollar — versus three in the States. A not gross cut of fish or meat? Maybe $5, versus $10 and up. A roast chicken? Maybe $5, versus $15–20.

(Shall I keep going? My partner and kid sister tell me basic feminine hygiene products — pads, tampons, and so on — often cost somewhere between a third to even a tenth as much. My favourite dessert is a nice éclair, and at Wegmans or Whole Foods, I pay $5, and I get a fairly gross, gigantic hunk of custard, but anywhere in Europe, I pay maybe $1, and I get a chocolate covered delight filled with fresh cream. A decent bottle of wine? Maybe $10. But that “decent” would easily cost $20–30 in the States. Painkillers? $5, versus 50 cents (really). I could go on forever, but it’d be pointless — either you believe me by now, or you don’t.)

Now, I’m not trying to convince you that “European food is better!” in some snobby, cultural sense. Far from it. I love a good burger and ribs and cheesecake and whatnot. Part of the above is “subjective”, but only in a weak way. Food elsewhere tastes better, it’s healthier, it’s better for you. Those things are all empirical realities. Europeans are healthier in empirical terms partly because fresh food isn’t a luxury, and processed food isn’t so much a staple (yet). Nobody, really, in their right mind, would think that frozen green beans or pasta or steak is nicer to eat than the freshly prepared equivalent And if an economist says so, you should ask them to ask their kids to live that way for a year.

(Now, of course it’s true that you can buy high-quality food in America more cheaply than at supermarkets. While you can shuttle back and forth to farmers’ markets, it’ll cost you time, energy, and gas. You can’t go anywhere in America, really, and just conveniently pick up high quality food at a low price in remotely the same way — not even in Manhattan. To put that in perspective, it’s also true to say that you can spend way, way more in America than you can ever spend in Europe. If you choose the most expensive steak, wine, and so on at Whole Foods or Wegmans, you’d probably be north of $200 for dinner. But I’d bet it still wouldn’t be as good as basic daily shopping in Europe.)

Now, let’s discuss what all the above means.

It’s not just you. You’re not going crazy.

The cost of living in America is so much higher than in its peers, that it’s literally surreal, unbelievable — on both sides. Americans quite literally probably won’t believe what Europeans get for a few dollars — even after reading an essay like this — and Europeans probably won’t believe how big the sums are Americans have to pay, or the dreck they get in exchange.

American life is surreally expensive — and Americans get abysmally low quality for their money — to a degree that’s fantastical, absurd, and extreme. The difference for just groceries adds up to the price of a small car, remember? It’s comically large. But why? Don’t you think there’s something weirdly, bizarrely wrong with the fact that the difference over a year for half-decent food in America versus Europe ends up being something the price of a car? I do.

And that’s just food — not even healthcare, education, or transport. What happens when you add those up? Then we get into the realm of the absurd, in a heartbeat. I pay $20K more for food and healthcare. I pay $30K more for food, healthcare, and transport. I pay $50K more for food, healthcare, transport, safety nets, and childcare. What the? Welcome to an unlivable life.

It’s not just food, after all, is it? The price of everything that we need as a basic requirement of life has gone through the roof in America. Healthcare? Up by 2000%. Education? A thousand percent. That’s what I call eudaimonic hyperinflation — a kind of slow, creeping, yet catastrophic inflation for the daily stuff of life. TVs might be cheaper — but you can’t eat a TV, can you? Yet because American incomes haven’t risen for decades, Americans are being squeezed to the point that 80% now live paycheck to paycheck. Anxiety-inducing, panic-attack provoking precarity is the new American normal because the basics of life cost so much than anywhere else by now, nobody on either side can fully believe it. Just do the math: If Americans have to pay $50K more than Europeans just to reach the same standard of living…LOL. Who can afford it? Not most of the country, that’s for sure.

(Why? In a word, the answer is capitalism versus everything else. It’s not that Marks and Spencer and Tesco aren’t capitalist. Sure they are. But they’re supplied by a European food sector that isn’t nearly as ruthlessly capitalist as in the States. It’s governed by collectives, cooperatives, and even semi-socialist organizations of various kinds, whether farms, dairies, licensing bodies, and so forth. Europe also subsidizes, well, real food — meat, cheese, fruit, and so on — whereas America subsidizes weird 1950s chemicals. The result is lower prices, and vastly higher quality. Yes, it’s true that all this will change in London in a heartbeat after Brexit. Poor Brits — they don’t know what they’re in for.)

Americans think, proudly, that they pay less in taxes — but the impossibly higher price of food alone chews those illusory savings up long before we even get to healthcare, education, finance, or transportation. Americans don’t know how bad they have it. And the reverse, I think, is true, too. Europeans don’t know how good they have it, either.

Both sides are examples of how the choices we make about economies and societies add up to better lives — or worse ones. Making everything capitalism made everything decent, nourishing, and healthy for us, whether healthcare, education, finance, right down to decent food itself, a luxury in America. But a more balanced approach, social democracy if you like, made European life vastly richer, because those very same things didn’t skyrocket in price — they rocketed if anything, in quality, instead. America should learn that lesson — and Europe should remember it.

Umair

August 2018