#7 - Jenny Lou's
Have you ever been to a Chinese restaurant and ordered a dish that included cheese? Unless you ordered the cheeseburger then I’m sure you haven’t. Cheese is foreign to China, as is sour cream, baking powder, tortilla chips, spaghetti noodles, anything in a Campbell’s can, baby cereal, and the oh so important yet underappreciated – butter. These items cannot be purchased at the local grocery store – enter Jenny Lou’s, #7 on my Top Ten Things I Am Thankful For As A Foreigner Living In Beijing list.
If you think paying 60 RMB ($9.50) for a can of Bush’s Baked Beans is crazy, so do I. If you are telling me that you would never pay 72 RMB ($12) for Cheerios, then I am telling you that I used to say the same thing. Supply and demand is a capitalist ideal, and the folks that own Jenny Lou’s, Beijing’s foreign grocery store chain, have figured out the demand and have offered the supply. I don’t like paying import prices (not all import prices are as ridiculous as the aforementioned examples, they are extreme examples), but I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity to pay import prices.
If you want to try to understand the situation, take your 10 favorite recipes in your arsenal and see which of them would be possible to make with only Chinese grocery store ingredients. I would be willing to bet that less than 5% of all of those recipes would be possible (and for those of you that don’t use recipes but eat everything from boxes and from the freezer aisle, then you would be completely out of luck). It is Jenny Lou’s that makes spaghetti, pancakes, tacos, etc. possible to make, and this Thanksgiving season it is what has made Stove Top stuffing, squash casserole, and even turkey possible – and for this we give thanks.
If you think paying 60 RMB ($9.50) for a can of Bush’s Baked Beans is crazy, so do I. If you are telling me that you would never pay 72 RMB ($12) for Cheerios, then I am telling you that I used to say the same thing. Supply and demand is a capitalist ideal, and the folks that own Jenny Lou’s, Beijing’s foreign grocery store chain, have figured out the demand and have offered the supply. I don’t like paying import prices (not all import prices are as ridiculous as the aforementioned examples, they are extreme examples), but I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity to pay import prices.
If you want to try to understand the situation, take your 10 favorite recipes in your arsenal and see which of them would be possible to make with only Chinese grocery store ingredients. I would be willing to bet that less than 5% of all of those recipes would be possible (and for those of you that don’t use recipes but eat everything from boxes and from the freezer aisle, then you would be completely out of luck). It is Jenny Lou’s that makes spaghetti, pancakes, tacos, etc. possible to make, and this Thanksgiving season it is what has made Stove Top stuffing, squash casserole, and even turkey possible – and for this we give thanks.
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