Size matters
Everything you can buy in Bordeaux is smaller than almost anything you could buy in Oklahoma.
This is most frustrating where it concerns bottled beverages. It's kind of maddening where it concerns milk, as Alex has adopted it as his comfort food, and virtually every time I go looking for milk, we're out again. The last time I went to the grocery store I bought a pack of 6 cartons of milk (altogether maybe it's a gallon -- I'm not sure why they don't just put it all in one carton/bottle if they're going to package them 6 at a time). The only reason I'd been delaying purchasing milk like this is that it's stored at room temperature in the grocery store. I guess some of the milk in France is pasteurized at an ultra high temperature, which makes it okay to keep out instead of refrigerating, but that's sort of contrary to my (I'm sure) thoroughly American idea of how dairy products should be treated.
Anyway, it's not just buying beverages. It's also cars, streets, you name it. Our glasses and towels in the apartment are all sort of comically tiny. Yesterday I went to buy a laundry bag (I didn't bring one with me and got tired of having nothing to use as a laundry hamper) and found it to be about half the size that I expected it to be. Then I remembered how our washing machine has about half the capacity of the one at my old apartment in Norman, and it made a little more sense. And, I suppose, if I'm going to hang my clothes out to dry, there's only so much available space that can be dedicating to drying clothes.
I'm also beginning to feel too tall to live in this country.
This is most frustrating where it concerns bottled beverages. It's kind of maddening where it concerns milk, as Alex has adopted it as his comfort food, and virtually every time I go looking for milk, we're out again. The last time I went to the grocery store I bought a pack of 6 cartons of milk (altogether maybe it's a gallon -- I'm not sure why they don't just put it all in one carton/bottle if they're going to package them 6 at a time). The only reason I'd been delaying purchasing milk like this is that it's stored at room temperature in the grocery store. I guess some of the milk in France is pasteurized at an ultra high temperature, which makes it okay to keep out instead of refrigerating, but that's sort of contrary to my (I'm sure) thoroughly American idea of how dairy products should be treated.
Anyway, it's not just buying beverages. It's also cars, streets, you name it. Our glasses and towels in the apartment are all sort of comically tiny. Yesterday I went to buy a laundry bag (I didn't bring one with me and got tired of having nothing to use as a laundry hamper) and found it to be about half the size that I expected it to be. Then I remembered how our washing machine has about half the capacity of the one at my old apartment in Norman, and it made a little more sense. And, I suppose, if I'm going to hang my clothes out to dry, there's only so much available space that can be dedicating to drying clothes.
I'm also beginning to feel too tall to live in this country.
I had a similar experience with small things in Germany. Not the towels, but definitely all of the food. The bags of sugar were so delightfully (annoyingly) teeny!
ReplyDeleteI decided it was a frontier thing. The US was only recently settled, and much of it was very rural for a long time (a lot of it still is.) If you were living out on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, it might only be once a month that you'd get into town for supplies, if that. It might only be once a year, depending on how far out you were! So if you were going to buy something, flour, sugar, whatever pantry staple it was, you'd need a lot of it so that it would last for a long time. During the Great Depression it was common for people to use the fabric from the flour sacks as dress material, so it was useful in that way for the flour to come in large quantities. So even if that isn't quite as much of a necessity now as it was in the earlier part of this century, I think it's something that has really become part of our cultural existence, particularly in this part of the country. Contrast that with Europe, which as been a lot more urban for a lot longer. In an urban setting, you wouldn't need to travel far for sugar or flour or whatever, so it was less of a big deal to run out.
Finally, there is the consideration of space. If there's one thing America has lots of it's space. So we can easily store 50 pounds of rice. Because of the population density in Europe, space is at a premium--how many European apartments have you seen with pantries or root cellars? Or even big refrigerators?
I suppose you could add into the argument that a mill can only grind so much flour per unit time--for everyone to have some, everyone would need to take less. This isn't a big deal if the people wanting to buy flour only appear once every six months or so.
I guess the argument boils down to higher population density = smaller sizes.
That's not to say that it's not annoying. Although schlepping 20 lbs of flour and sugar up 10 flights of stairs isn't exactly my idea of a good time either. I suppose one adjusts to it.
What one never adjusts to is the funny milk. I want my milk with bacteria, goddamn it.
Right on, Rachel. The ultra-pasteurized milk just doesn't taste as good.
ReplyDeleteThen again, I often think that drinking milk is a kind of ridiculous thing to do anyway. Like, if you aren't willing to sit underneath a cow and suckle, it's not something you should be drinking.