There I was, standing in front of the local import food store’s better-than-average selection of olive oils, feeling a little intimidated. Thanks to my education and work background I am perfectly comfortable in front of wine bottles lined up on shelves, but olive oils are a completely different thing. I am perusing the extra virgin olive oils, but even within that category you can select oils from Italy or Spain, and then you must sort through terms like “cold extracted”, “press filtered”, “fruttato” and “dolce”, words that are apparently used somewhat loosely throughout the semi-regulated olive oil industry. The prices also add to the feeling of risk – with some oils costing over $40 a liter. It is probably not a sign of rational thinking to blow that much money on a little bottle of olive oil, right?
If I allow my gaze to drop to the lower shelves, much cheaper options beckon. There, extra virgin olive oil is sold in larger plastic containers, and the prices here are at a much more palatable $6-7 per liter – about one fifth the price of the top shelf oils. There are even lower priced options as well, if you are prepared to abandon the olive and get your oil from another source.
The weird part of this story is that the only reason I am even looking at that top shelf of premium olive oils is because of what I’m wearing on my feet while I shop – a comfortable pair of black leather business shoes.
Rewind to fifteen years ago, when I moved to Japan from California with a big suitcase of clothes to get me through a year of teaching English overseas. As that year stretched into a longer and longer stay in a foreign country, it meant that I needed to do my clothes shopping locally. Shirts, slacks, jeans, underwear – all of it was easily available, even for my larger than (Japanese) average body. The challenge was finding shoes in my size. I wear a size 13 in the US (size 30 in Japan) and the fact was that shoes in Japan (even made by foreign companies) maxed out at about a size 9 (roughly a 27 in Japan size).
Obviously shoes are an essential item, and I needed a reliable source, pronto. Any time I visited another country, I’d buy a bunch of shoes in my size, and bring them back to Japan to wear in my daily life. I got into a cycle of bringing back a bunch of cheap shoes that would wear out pretty quickly (especially in the hot, wet Japanese summers) and then I’d need to buy more. I didn’t go overseas often and I wanted to maximize my opportunities with as many shoes as possible and that meant buying shoes at reasonable prices. It just made sense to look for a great price because I figured I’d always be a high volume shoe buyer. I expected the shoes I’d buy to break down soon because my whole life I’d been buying cheap shoes and the idea of a shoe lasting longer than a year was completely (a-hem) foreign to me.
But a few years ago I found a pair of business shoes in Japan that happened to be my size. My wife and I were shopping at an outlet center (outlet shopping has become a very successful import from America) and found some size 30 leather business shoes, stashed in a pile of other boxes in a dusty corner of a shop. Clearly they were not selling in Japan and had been sent off to the outlets to try to get rid of them. After trying them on I bought them and started wearing them to work the next day.
After the first week or so of loosening up the shoes were quite comfortable, and so I stopped thinking about them. For more than a year. And the year after that. It was only after several years that I noticed the soles of the shoes were wearing down, but every other part of the shoe was still in great shape. I took them in to a shoe shop and had them resoled for about $15 and they gave me another year of comfortable wear. They finally had to be retired after more than three years of almost daily use.
Obviously this turned the way I thought about shoes on its head. I searched in vain for another pair of leather shoes at the outlets, but Japanese people’s feet hadn’t grown significantly since my last visit and there remained little demand for the size 30’s I wear. However I put in an order with my parents and had them send out three pairs of leather shoes from America, and by rotating these I’ve been able to move beyond shoe-related worries and to think about why I had continued to self-import all those suitcases of cheap shoes over the years. Maybe, in fact, cheaper is not always better.
One of the cool things about living in another country is that it is an opportunity to see some cultural points that are hard to notice when viewed from inside the bubble of life in your own country. Now I could see how saving money and getting a good deal were so hard-wired into my way of thinking in America. Of course that isn’t a bad thing and many times that kind of thinking will serve you well, especially over the long term. But by stumbling upon this forgotten pair of size 30 shoes I had also stumbled on a blind spot in my thinking – sometimes it is fine to spend more money to get good quality.
Naturally this revelation made me think more deeply about other things that I cared about. Was there some other area in my life that I’d been low-balling that could be improved with a slightly larger infusion of money? Of course, the first thing I thought about was food. We buy it almost every day, there are lots choices out there, and it is one of the things that gives us the most happiness every day.
I started small – by buying some quality fruit now and then (previously I considered all fruit in Japan to be overpriced and therefore a waste of money). Fruit in Japan is consistently very high quality, and almost unnaturally beautiful. Where does all the asymmetrical or bruised fruit go? Only rows and rows of bright, fresh, colorful (and expensive) fruit line the shelves. The question was whether the enjoyment I got out of the fruit was worth the extra thousand yen ($10) a week I was spending. After enjoying a bulging orange “decopon”, an enormous human head-sized pomelo, and mangoes, papayas and dragonfruit, the answer was yes – it was totally worth it.
Recently I read a book about a couple who bought a house in Spain and started growing their own olives, which led me to think more deeply about olive oil, which in turn led me to standing in front of the premium olive oil section that I described at the beginning of this story. I selected a small bottle of Italian olive oil labeled as “fruttato”, took it home, and poured a healthy dose of the golden liquid into a spoon and tasted it straight. And I realized I’ve been missing out on what olive oil could truly be. We always buy the big jug of cheap olive oil for cooking (and still do) but using a little premium olive oil to have with bread, to top a salad or use on popcorn instead of butter – it was a whole new way for us to enjoy food.
The lesson here was not to go spend more money on everything. The lesson for me was that I need to rethink some of the views that have been ingrained in me and see where I might make some small improvements. A little more money has made a huge difference for my feet and for our dinner table. I’ll try to keep my eyes open for other areas to improve.
