The Belgium Food Diaries II
Supermarkets, food costs, and airport food
I love supermarkets. I love going to supermarkets in new cities and countries, and seeing one of the most significant landscapes of everyday life in new places. What sorts of products do they sell? Is it just food? What brands do they have that I don’t recognise, and what do they have that I do? What is the labelling like, and the layouts, and the promotions? What is it like to live in this particular suburb, town, city, or country and what can the supermarket tell me about it? Utterly fascinating, I tell you. Perhaps one day I’ll write more about my fascination with supermarkets but for now, my fond memories of Belgian supermarkets.
We really only went to one large supermarket, a Carrefour. There were a lot of smaller supermarkets around Brussels, mini Carrefours (much like Tesco Express in the UK and Woolworth’s Metro in Australia) as well as corner shops that sold fresh fruit and veg and other grocery items. But the only ‘proper’ supermarket we went to was a large Carrefour. It sold the usual food groceries but it also had a large area devoted to non-food items — toys, books, home goods. It was like if you had a Woolworth’s and a Big W combined in one shop, or a Vons and a Target together. Though it didn’t have much in the way of clothes.
Something I quite liked that I found in the produce section was packets of ingredients for different meals. Each pack would contain everything you needed for say, a curry or a burrito or teriyaki. There were cooking instructions and information about the meal. Kind of like a box mix but instead of for cake or brownies, it was for dinner. I wonder if these encourage people to cook more? I imagine that would be the goal but I’m curious to know the actual effect.
Speaking of produce, we learnt at the checkout that there is something different in Belgium supermarkets (at least at this one) than supermarkets in the US, Australia, and the UK: at the Carrefour we went to, you had to weigh your own produce and get its own barcode and pricing sticker before getting to the checkout. We didn’t know this so we had to weigh everything after getting to the checkout (there were at least scales near the checkout lines, presumably for people like us who don’t know how to supermarket). I can see how this is helpful if you’re on a strict budget and are calculating the cost of everything as you go, because you would know earlier in the shopping process exactly how much each piece of fruit and veg is going to cost.
Belgium food spending
As regular readers will be aware, I’ve been tracking every cent we spend on food since 2019, and the analysis of our food spending forms the basis of our annual family holiday newsletter (see the 2023 edition here). It is not only our American food spending that gets tracked; our trips to Australia all have separate sheets in the spreadsheet. So of course, the Belgium trip got its own sheet too.
A brief tangent: When I went backpacking and lived overseas in my 20s, I didn’t have a smartphone. I had Lonely Planet travel guides, a Nokia brick phone (it made phone calls, sent text messages, and had an alarm function!), an actual camera, paper maps, and I used local currency. For our week in Belgium, we paid for everything with our phones or watches because holy moly the world has changed since I last travelled. We paid in pounds during our layover in Heathrow and Euros in Belgium, and it all conveniently converted to US dollars.
All of our meals were eaten out (we did no cooking). We spent $US690.67 on meals eaten out (€558.60 Euro and £51.45). I did have a separate groceries section, but that was mostly just chocolate, a bit of fruit and yoghurt for our last breakfast in Belgium, and snacks at the airport. We spent $US128.23 on ‘groceries’ (€127.67 Euro and £7.83) which was actually mostly on chocolate. It’s very good.
Our total food spend for the trip was $US738.28. Our average cost per meal per person was $US28.17, and our average snack (waffles, tea, beer, ice cream) per person cost was $4.89. This wasn’t all the food that we ate in Belgium: there were some hotel breakfasts that were included in the room fee, and we were also shouted meals by kind and generous people we ate with while we were there. It would be remiss of me not to mention my husband’s friend who not only let us stay with her for a couple of nights but also took us to some fantastic restaurants and introduced us to the greatest croissant I have ever had the pleasure of eating.
Airport food
On both our flights to and from Belgium we had a three to four layover in Heathrow. This was the first time I’ve been in the UK since 2014 (though technically we weren’t in the UK; we never passed through passport control and were only ever in that liminal airport space), and I took it as an opportunity to browse in British bookshops and eat British snacks.
A moment of irony: my favourite book of 2023, Ultra-Processed People, was released earlier this year as a paperback, with an extra chapter that provided updates on what happened after the publication of the book. I already own the hardback version and didn’t want to buy the book again but really wanted to read the new chapter. I saw it in the WH Smith Bookshop in Heathrow, and ended up buying it at the Waterstone’s in Brussels. I couldn’t help myself. I reread the book and loved it as much as I did when I read it for the first time. I’m still recommending it, in case you’re wondering — read that book. And the irony is this: one of the foods I miss the most from the UK is Quavers, a highly processed food-like substance, exactly the kind of food that Chris Van Tulleken warns about in Ultra-Processed People. My choice of snack at Heathrow on our way back to the US was a packet of Quavers and a packet of Maltesers. It had been a decade since I’d eaten Quavers and they were as delightful as I remembered. There is a lot of power in nostalgia and emotion when it comes to food and food marketing.
