PPP is and always will be a garbage metric. Don't compare my Pepperidge Farm 15-Grain bread, sold for $3 a loaf at the supermarket with steamed buns sold for ￥1 each on the street.
I want a "good cheese, good wine, good bread" price comparison metric. By that measure, my money in the US only goes like 1/2-1/3 as far as the same amount in France, since it takes about 2-3x the money to consistently match the quality of their bog-standard stuff in those categories. Usually a good bit of travel time, too, in the case of bread. :-(
[EDIT] actually 3x might be low on the bread. 3.5-4x, probably, around here, to get a baguette that's on par with your average Parisian one, for instance. You don't even hit "kinda OK" until $4 or so, and you're still not guaranteed to be getting something that tastes like a baguette at all, let alone a decent one, at that price. Croissants too. I've had exactly one in my city that was close to the real thing and it was crazy expensive. They burnt it, though. So close, yet so far.
For me this is one of the biggest draws of New York: the food. New York has just an amazing breadth of food available at all price points. You can find very decent $1 slices of pizza (people lost their shit when DiFara started charging $5/slice). The Bay Area as well has a ton of excellent food options as well but prices tend to be higher across the board. And if you're using food costs as a metric, that's just one of a few different areas in which the Bay Area has become dramatically more expensive than other expensive metro areas (NY, HK, Singapore) and it's infuriating.
I've seen some complaints that there's no real bread culture in the Bay Area compared to Europe (and especially France), and to that I said (and will continue to say) bullshit. There are still a ton of bakeries in most areas, and you can find the more mass produced stuff for about $4/1lb loaf (a baguette would be around half the price). And the diversity blows any typical European city out of the water. You can find good sour dough, sweet French bread, Italian bread, rye, etc. in nearly any supermarket. Sure, there were many more bakeries in San Francisco about a century ago (r.i.p. Parisian), but you can walk into a Trader Joe's and get a loaf of sourdough bread that is right up there with anything from my childhood. You can find good (great if you have the patience) croissants too (and, honestly, finding a truly great croissant in Paris is a bit of a challenge these days anyhow). The only thing we really lack out here bread-wise is a good bagel.
I think this is more related to the respective climates and local tastes than anything else.
For example I can't for the life of me find any good potatoes, apples or bread in Italy - or anything even remotely sour that isn't wine - apparently it's not something the locals particularly enjoy.
Really? Not apples or bread? We have valleys known only for their unique apples, like the Mela Renetta from Friuli. Don't let me started talking about the apples from Trentino. So, maybe you are talking about apples in the south of Italy. About bread: I see where you are coming from, best breads I eaten are coming from bakeries on the mountains. They just taste so good. But please, remember that bread in Italy is just a support for the main tastes, like the olive oil.
I've only ever been to the north and what I found is that leavened bread is not a thing there.
As for apples: they're mostly okay but nothing special comparing to the varieties found around the Baltic sea.
Case in point: you can't expect to just walk into any store and find apples suitable for apple pie. Also apple juice exists in one variety and is fairly hard to find.
Exactly it's a weird measurement. Quality matters. And now that we have a global economy where everyone has iPhone. Everyone wants a Tesla. It makes since to say everyone has the same basket.
[EDIT] actually 3x might be low on the bread. 3.5-4x, probably, around here, to get a baguette that's on par with your average Parisian one, for instance. You don't even hit "kinda OK" until $4 or so, and you're still not guaranteed to be getting something that tastes like a baguette at all, let alone a decent one, at that price. Croissants too. I've had exactly one in my city that was close to the real thing and it was crazy expensive. They burnt it, though. So close, yet so far.