The worst thing about packaged food in the US apart from fat is high levels of corn syrup in everything (Thank you corn subsidies!). It makes it really cheap and easy to sweeten up all kinds of crap.
Did someone say corn syrup?
Ohhhhh… That thing kept moving after all the slicing and dicing! Ewww
Marmite, the disgusting black paste, started in England in 1902 and caught on in the Kiwi and Aussie colonies by 1907-08. (source: Wikipedia)
my aussie friends tell me that there is a clear distinction between vegemite and marmite.
they tend to get emotional about vegemite. almost as emotional as they get about the ‘who invented pavlova’ debate.
I’ve never understood why it costs more to prepare fresh food than to eat fast food in the US.
virtually every other country has it the other way round.
Tastelike, I think american food is nice. The only thing that disappointed me were Fig Newton’s. I don’t think they’re really bad, but they not the kind of candy that deserves to be packaged and sold to millions - it tasted more like a recipe where your aunt got some measurements wrong or something…
From a very limited experience (metropolitan east coast areas) I also don’t think it’s that hard/expensive to eat healthy in the US. You do have cheap pizza and burgers all over the place, but you also have cheap salads, fruit and yogurt ready to eat all over the place as well. This seems to bring binary outcomes - people are either in shape (it seems easy to eat “healthy” outside) or very fat (once you go for the pizzas and burgers you can have a really tasty ride). Of course US is pretty big and I have no idea what’s happening in the country as a whole.
For brazilians, the oddest US food habit is probably mixing sweets with regular meals, like jelly in a wrap or pineapple in a spicy pizza. I think it’s awesome. .
In the UK I had a colleague who was blown away by the fact that we liked chocolate and peanut butter together (Reese’s peanut butter cups). I could not fathom how this was hard to understand. THEY’RE DELICIOUS, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?!
Visited a few years later and Reese’s were now available in some stores. He had tried them and liked them. Damned right.
A decent salad costs $10 and up - not exactly cheap. And it’s usually not enough food for a man, even for lunch…
I LOL at Europeans who LOL at Americans at our foods and think all Americans are fat. I have colleagues in different European major cities who are male and female and are fat as f*ck.
the percentage of the population of the US that is overweight or obese is higher than virtually any european country.
of course, there are still be a lot of fat people in europe
Yeah, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stopped in at a place for lunch and thought “I’d really like to have a salad: I haven’t been eating enough fresh veggies and I’m in the mood for it.”
Then I think “holy carp! I’m not paying $8 for lettuce and 75 cents for each additional ingredient. I’ll take the ham sandwich, please.”
I was in London listening to a Welsh stand-up comic berate American women for all being fat, and all I could do was look around the room, recall the brits I’d just seen and think “It really doesn’t look much different here, except the food tastes worse.”
In NYC even the one on the left will be considered overweight (among women)
I was thinking more like those pre-made salads who come in a plastic package with the price tag already on it. For instance, there’s the Au Bon Pain chain all over Boston with somewhat ugly looking pre-made cheap salads (I’m assuming about $6 is cheap for americans eating out).
They may not qualify as decent though.
American food is horrible. It’s known throughout the globe that American’s can’t cook…Probably something to do with using cups to measure things all the time.
wtf is up with Cups?..
For much of its history, American cooking traditions derived from English cooking traditions, so is it any wonder that american food is boring. In the 1950s, the traditional american meal was a slab of steak, mashed or boiled potatoes, some overboiled string beans, and maybe some corn. And yeah, it was pretty boring stuff. And of course the veggies depended on the season, which is why potatoes were so standard.
Julia Child was one of the first pioneers to introduce some concepts from French cooking, such as sauces other than gravy.
The US packaged food industry (and the fast-food industry too) is an amazing technological accomplishment when you stop to think about what it is, what it is able to produce, and what it took to create it. There’s a ton of problems, of course, both health and taste-wise. Early iterations of this stuff necessarily had trade-offs in flavor and food quality and health (viz Wonder Bread, Velveeta, etc.), but it also got exported to other parts of the world who thought of it as “American food” because it came from the place that invented processed food. The processed food industry still has ton of problems, particularly with preservatives and salt and things like that, but it is substantially better than it was in the 1950s.
The US actually does have tasty food - New Orleans spices, San Francisco sourdough and crab, Boston clam chowder, Maine lobster, California fruits and salads as well as Wines, Southern barbeque, Fusion cuisines, especially in major cities. Many of these things came or got exported later. And yes, I agree that it doesn’t quite measure up to the best French, Italian, and Chinese traditions, but it is not “horrible,” the way traditional english food is.
Coming from a country that boils everything…