On: Why Chinatown Produce Is Cheap (2016)

[Alupis]

Few people eat steaks every night, let alone good cuts of steak.

[davidw → Alupis]

And yet... you can get them in stores. That's kind of the whole point. Not everyone in Italy eats clams or octopus or whatever every night either.

[lotharbot → davidw]

This has a lot to do with the fact that a cow is a whole animal. If you raise one to sell the chuck, you also get T-bones and ribeyes and tri-tips and flank steaks and so on. Most of that goes into the same retail pipeline, so availability is correlated.

On the other hand, expensive fish aren't usually a byproduct of producing cheap fish, nor vice versa.

[brianwawok → davidw]

Whole foods has a decent selection of fish. Real salmon is like $20 a pound though.