Brand ignorance

It’s not until you go to a new country that you realise how much you rely on brand recognition when you go shopping (particularly for food I am finding). Whether this is just a male thing I don’t know, but I find myself looking semi-blankly at a shelf of products and trying to find an equivalent of the product I would buy in Australia (which often simply doesn’t exist) and then being hugely indecisive when I have to decide on a substitute. So instead of a shopping trip taking 10 minutes as you just pick the same things off the shelf that you always pick off the shelf, it takes half an hour as you look at each product and decide if it is going to be an adequate substitute to fill the given required culinary niche, and then you move to the next item on the list and repeat.