Eh, I actually reject the notion of there being an American style pizza. We do so many styles that aside from really exotic toppings only popular in Asia you’ll find just about everything here in the states. From all varieties of crust, to various sauces, to difference crust to sauce ratios, to different toppings etc. Even in regions like Chicago or New York which have a major “style” associated with them, consumption of all other types of pizza is still very high in those areas.
Also as I’m sure you know since you know about cheeses–while American cheese most ordinarily does mean stuff like Kraft singles and Velveeta (the easily meltable processed cheese food), if you go to a supermarket deli or “real cheese” section you’ll actually usually find an actual cheese (not a processed cheese food) called American cheese for sell. It’ll typically be white in color, instead of the orange/yellow of its similarly named processed cheese food version. It’s a mild cheese, but a real one, and goes good on burgers.
Right, under the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21 Ch. 1, Subchapter B, Part 133 (Cheese and Related Cheese Products), it’s laid out what must be labeled “pasteurized process cheese food” and “pasteurized process cheese.” Kraft singles and that like end up under the “cheese food” categorizations while real American cheese is a legitimate cheese, albeit a pasteurized process cheese.
You are absolutely right.
Let me try again:
My experience with American cuisine is limited to a 3 week vacation (in 2009) and whatever I have encountered in global chains.
During this vacation we ate very well and mostly found lovely food in even the most remote areas we visited.
However, we struggled to find bread we liked. Outside of more populated areas the choice of available supermarkets is limited and we found the bread supplied by Walmart and some other supermarkets almost inedible (I guess you’re supposed to put it in a toaster or something)
Being dutch, I really like a cheese sandwich. After having trouble finding bread I liked, I also couldn’t find cheese I liked. A lot of cheese looked very orange and previous experiences led me to believe I would like the taste either. The sandwiches from Subway et al are spongy to my taste. So we ended up eating muffins for breakfast and fruit and cookies for lunch.
Another challenge was coffee; the pot of drip coffee in most restaurants we found is undrinkable to my taste. Happily we found out soon that no matter how deserted and small a town looked there was always a little independent hippie coffeeshop (that’s where we got the muffins).
Eh, to be honest you have to recognize what you’re going in for here. American coffee is a caffeine delivery mechanism. Frankly I don’t like coffee at all (and I’ve had really “good” coffee), I’m a tea person, but anyway, most people get hooked on coffee at work when they’re young because it keeps them up when they’re tired in the morning from improper sleep and then it becomes a ritual. Not least because caffeine is addictive and you start getting headaches if you stop.
While there is a market for true coffee lovers in America, it’s much smaller than the market of people who just want some bitter brew to sate their morning caffeine addiction needs. Coffee is often given away free at offices and workplaces, and when it’s being consumed for caffeine consumption purposes no one really cares too much what it tastes like. Pour some sugar or splenda in it and it just tastes like that, anyway. Americans (aside from a niche) don’t drink coffee to enjoy the taste, any more than they take pink bismuth or Robitussin for the taste.
Similar to alcohol and macrobrews–you’re missing the point if you think people are concerned with the finer points of taste.
From my two decades+ in the Army I traveled much of the world, and I actually reject the notion that Americans eating bad food is a unique thing, and I think you’re just fundamentally confused. Most people all over the world eat bad food, for reasons of money and lack of time. I’ve had some home cooked meals in various countries around the world that most people in this thread probably could not get down (fortunately I have an iron stomach and a willingness to eat anything.)
The difference between America and much of the rest of the world is while much of the rest of the world focuses on quality when it comes to restaurants where you pay to eat food (be it street restaurants or sit-down), America has both fast-convenient restaurants and slow-quality focused restaurants. Most countries I visited didn’t have fast-convenient at all, it just wasn’t a concept. If you wanted cheap food fast it was something you premade at home in the morning and ate later in the day, it usually wasn’t that great. The equivalent of ham and cheese sandwiches to put it in American concepts. There are a few countries that had a lot of quality-convenient foods (most notably Japan–but France and Italy are good examples) these countries are actually the exception, not the rule. Most countries don’t have a big convenient foods market at all, and the quality of home foods is usually poor unless you have someone who is really into quality and cooking running the household (which just like America, means some people but certainly not all.) A few countries actually do fast-convenient in imitation of America and actually do far worse at it, by the way.
One thing unique about American home cooking is the presence of some much heavily processed food, and this exists for mostly corporate scientific reasons. We’ve literally had food scientists “train” Americans to eat this stuff for profit reasons. But I assure you even without heavily processed foods people the world over are more than capable of eating terrible food on a regular basis.
In the more rural areas stores cannot afford to carry products that only the rare traveler will want. But living near a major metropolitan area, I would note that supermarkets here all carry wide cheese and bread selections including bread that would be more palatable to a European’s palate. But if you were really hanging out way outside of any city it’s unlikely you’d find it. Even here these “hard breads” you have to know where they are, they usually don’t have a ton on display because most Americans simply hate this type of bread. Personally I never eat bread outside of a restaurant setting.
I think one of the biggest problems with USA bread is the sweetness of it, same with yogurts and…well, pretty much everything.
I’ve travelled extensively across europe and the USA for business and pleasure and in general if I wander down the main street of any town or village in France, Germany, Italy, Austria I am guaranteed to find a bakers that turns out stunning bread in a wide variety of styles.
The USA? not really. Even top class hotels over-sweeten their bread to an almost inedible extent. Not good. Finding a well executed crusty baguette is a matter of good fortune or hard work.
But then people in Europe are extremely fussy about their bread, it is absolutely central. You will find people queuing up at 6:00 in the morning in order to get the freshest bread and are apoplectic if it isn’t of good quality.
The best bread I’ve ever had was a home made pretzel at the top of a ski lift in Heilegenblut, Austria. Warm from the oven, as big as my head, crunchy and salty on the outside and cotton-wool soft inside…incredible.
Of course on the other hand, the quality of freshly made mexican food in supermarkets is excellent in the USA and I’d imagine you’d find our puny UK efforts risible, and quite right too.
You’re basically just confirming what I said. Americans value good-tasting food less than other factors.
I’ve had the equivalent of a ham-and-cheese sandwich in Italy. It was a ham-and-cheese sandwich (mozzarella and prosciutto). It was fast, convenient, cheap and made with high quality bread, meat, and cheese. The ingredients were so good, it didn’t need anything else, like mayonnaise or mustard.
Yes, because only the rare traveler will want tasty bread and cheese instead of processed crap.
And hipster baristas are the butt of jokes in American culture because they are interested in quality.
Yeah, I don’t like bread as a regular food so I’m not very fussy about it–I actually don’t think it’s good to eat a lot of bread. As for yogurt, I’ve never seen a store here that doesn’t carry unsweetened (usually labeled “plain”) yogurt, which has no added sugars at all. It’s not the most popular, but it’s widely available. I’ve used it for literally decades and have never had trouble finding it. The uptick in popularity of Greek yogurt which is still usually sold sweetened (but is less sweet that typical Yoplait or Dannon) has even made it so that you now usually see multiple brands of unsweetened yogurt.
I specifically noted France and Italy (and Japan, which has the best convenience food I’ve had) are exceptions to the rule. I’ve traveled extensively in both rich and poor countries, and at least in my travels you legit picked 2 of the 3 countries I think of when I think “good convenience food.” Most countries simply do not have this. They have good, expensive (relatively) sit down restaurant food, or they have food that you can make at home which is of widely varying quality.
Vietnam may be another that has good convenience food, but Vietnam also has a lot of places where you can eat and suffer serious gastrointestinal distress the next day (and I say that as someone with an iron stomach), Vietnamese also will usually raise the price like 500% for a white man.
Like I said, most countries do not have what America has in terms of fast and convenient foods at all, the ones that do this food often sucks just as much as it does in America. This is certainly the case in Canada and most of Western Europe aside from the two countries we’ve already talked about. In some of them fast-convenient food is even worse than it is in America. In the rest of the world fast-convenient doesn’t even exist as a concept in many countries–restaurants are for slow meals where you sit down and eat, and people don’t eat at them all the time.
I’ll also add that convenient doesn’t have the same meaning in France and Italy as it does in the United States. A lot of convenience foods sold for cheap in those countries are sold from places that close (like many stores in those countries close) very early in the day. So to me they aren’t even comparable to American stores which are open all day long. Japan on the other hand has a lot of off hours convenience options while still delivering very high quality. Convenient in France and Italy is still much less convenient than in say, America, Canada, many other Euro countries, or say, Japan or Hong Kong in Asia.
You can get real cheese anywhere in America. It’s a choice to buy processed cheese food, but even my home town with like 5000 people in deep rural Virginia sells real cheese, and has since the 50s when I was born. The bread thing is more of a choice, like I’ve said–I think bread is bad for you and don’t eat a lot of it, but I don’t think that Euro style “hard bread” is objectively better than soft American bread. That’s a difference of taste, not of quality. I agree processed cheese food is much lower quality than real cheese, but there is literally no where in America you are required to buy that and cannot buy real cheese. The European complaining about only seeing orange cheese is probably unaware that some of those were real cheeses like cheddar or Munster. He may not have been able to find the exact cheese variety that he liked in Denmark in the United States, but the difference between a Munster and a Havarti is one of personal preference, not quality.
That’s not the case. No one makes good steakhouse the butt of jokes and they’re focused on quality. People make fun of hipsters for behavioral and attire reasons, not because they like good quality coffee.
Try your local Polish shop - they will probably have it dried (cząber).
I was going to pick your post apart line by line but it was just so wrong on so many levels.
I’ll start with a “sub.” If someone asks if I want to go get a sub I wouldn’t be happy if they just gave me a roll. Also I have had subs made on actual baguettes (and they weren’t even wet) The point is there is no single “sub” roll… some are good, and some aren’t. It is like saying that all burgers in the US are crap because they think the only ones are from McDonald’s. If they think any bread that isn’t dense and crusty is bad then they haven’t tasted many of the breads around the world.
I also don’t understand why you think tourists would only visit cheap convenience places or that you would have to work hard to find good places to eat good quality food. I just got back from Vegas (one of the top international tourist destinations) and I heard all sorts of difference languages being spoken and the food everywhere I went was top notch.
This one I have to address… Have you seen the food truck explosion lately? There is some amazing street food in America these days. I have had great Mexican, Italian, soul, beef, fusion, burgers, and even some of the best cupcakes from food trucks (that is not an all inclusive list).
And I can go to my local grocery store and get some great fresh baked breads and all kinds of other high quality foods that rival anything anywhere. I could leave my couch and be back in 20 minutes with a plate of lobster macaroni, some aged cheddar, a fresh baked baguette, some freshly made smoked sausage, a nice salad, and fresh fruits. That would be going to one grocery store and what I would consider convenient.
You are changing the context of the words in order to pretend that there was ambiguity. I don’t believe for a second that you didn’t understand that post was criticizing the quality of the bread.
No, it’s saying that the majority of burgers sold are as bad as McDonald’s and that unless you already know where the good burgers are you are likely to end up with one as bad as McDonald’s.
While the food truck trend is welcome, it is not one that is accessible to the vast majority of people and it has not changed the general state of what people largely eat.
It is available only if you happen to be near certain neighborhoods of certain large metropolises at certain times of the day or the week.
The food truck industry is also in most places always on the edge of being regulated into oblivion and the vast majority of food truck operators can’t count on it to be a long-term proposition.
When I was living in Japan, I remember one of my friends was surprised to learn that not only do Americans also eat okra, we even call it by the “Japanese” name!
And you are being purposely stubborn in not acknowledging that “sub” is not the proper term for the bun and that the bread used for a “sub” can vary greatly. There is no one single standard for a “sub bun.” They can be soft, or dense, white, wheat, herb, cheese… you name it. As I pointed out the cheap fast food standard of Subway offers 11 different varieties of bread.
It is comparable to calling white Wonder bread as the only “bread” in America. Actually the comparison is more like saying that “sandwich” in America is Wonder bread.
How can one say that a “sub is like a wet baguette” when I can get a sub on a real baguette just like you would get in France?
That is just totally wrong. There are tons of burgers available at all kinds of places that are better than a fast food burger. I work in the travel industry and can tell you with full confidence that people don’t book a trip over seas to only eat fast food. You don’t have to be some insider to know you can go to a pub to get a decent burger that is nothing like McDonald’s. Just going to Applebee’s, Chilli’s or anything similar will give you something completely different that McDonald’s
I bet there are even message boards somewhere that people can post things like: “I’m going to Spain in a month… where should I eat?”
Most tourists don’t come in to visit Leon Iowa.
More BS… the industry is thriving and the regulations are not slowing any of the good operators down at all. I know a couple of food truck operators and they are not the least bit concerned.
This is irrelevant. You know what the poster meant. You are simply being obstreperous in purposely misinterpreting a foreigner’s use of language in a loose manner.
Subway offers 11 different varieties of crappy bread.
Again, you are being obstreperous. Walk down the street and buy a sub sandwich at the first place you find. It’s likely to be a 7-Eleven or a Subway or some other convenience store or grocery with a pre-made sandwiches section. Nine times out of 10 you are going to come out with something that is made with low-quality bread.
And that’s the point you keep pretending not to understand. In the Netherlands, where that poster is from, you walk up to the first place you find and you are more likely than not to come up with a good sandwich, and the opposite is true in the United States. In other places in the world, when you want fast, convenient, inexpensive food, you don’t have to go looking for it. It’s just there, especially in the places you’re likely to go sightseeing.
And that’s how people eat when they’re traveling. The majority of people don’t go to Vegas and eat at a fancy hotel or a restaurant with a celebrity chef’s name on it. They go to tourist destinations and eat whatever’s there. At the Smithsonian when you do that, you end up eating a shitty hot dog stand or a shitty museum cafeteria. At the Louvre, the museum cafeteria is at least decent food.
I live in one of the country’s biggest metro areas. Unless I am at certain places at certain times of day and certain days of the week, I don’t have access to food trucks.
And tourists also don’t eat every meal in a restaurant that they have researched in advance and they don’t want to spend $20 a person on every meal. They mostly eat wherever they happen to be, and if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., sightseeing, the most readily available foods are shitty foods. So when you balance one or two meals in a nice restaurant against the majority of food you just grab on the go, you come up with the perfectly valid conclusion that Americans for the most part eat bad food.
It’s just like the article I cited above from the Washington Post about coffee. Sure, there is great coffee to be found in the United States, but the vast majority of coffee sold and consumed in the country is bad coffee. And the same is true of food. Yeah, we have all kinds of things available to us, but by the numbers, for the most part, it’s bad food that’s the easiest to get and it’s bad food that constitutes the majority of sales.
You can’t argue against general trends with two particular cases. The food truck industry has potential, and there’s demand—because for the most part, cheap, convenient food in America is shitty—but city governments and restaurants around the country are fighting them tooth and nail.
No, while baguette makes sense the “wet” in there is completely baffling when talking about a roll of any sort.
It isn’t wet, though. I get lunch from Subway fairly often since there’s one near my office, and while there’s room to criticize their bread (I think it’s okay, but certainly not great) I’ve never been served damp or soggy bread there.
I’m being rowdy and disorderly?
Nope… I mapped it out. The closest place to me where I can get a sub is at a local chain (1.0 miles just a couple of locations) and their Italian sub includes:
Ham, salami, swiss and provolone cheeses, lettuce, red onions, roma tomatoes and italian dressing.
Oh yeah… on freshly made bread. I would and have taken out of town visitors here.
Claim this all you want and it still doesn’t make it true. I’ll admit that I haven’t been to the Netherlands, but I have traveled many places in the world and I’ve been to good and bad places everywhere. More often then not though I will ask someone where I should go before I do so.
I wish you would have told all the international tourists… the wait would have much shorter.
We’ll just have to agree that we travel in totally different circles then. $20 per person is a low price for something that I wouldn’t consider fast food… and my point is fast food isn’t representative of the country.
We did have a breakfast buffet that was under $10 per person and included eggs Benedict, pancakes with real maple syrup, made to order omelets, various sausages, hash browns, bacon, fruit, breads… you name it. And by the way, we walked across the street from where we were staying to get it, so it was technically the closest place. Also, unlimited Bloody Marys.
Twice we hit food courts at very touristy locations. Got a Nathan’s Chili Cheese dog (pretty good) and a couple of slices of pizza that were more than decent. The beer was $7.50 so that sucked, but the food certainly didn’t.
Well, I can (and am) arguing against this. I don’t know where you live, but where I am we have local governments that are sponsoring food truck festivals, and the cheap convenient food is very far from shitty.
That’s going to depend very much on where you live. Since you mention “walking down the street” , I assume you are talking about an urban area. I would have to go out of my way to find pre-made sandwiches at a 7-11. The closest one is just over two miles from me, and there are at least 30 delis closer than that 7-11. I could go to a Subway (if it hasn’t closed down yet- this is the second time someone has tried to operate a Subway in my neighborhood) , but why would I when an extra block takes me to a deli that gets fresh bread deliveries every day from a local bakery and makes sandwiches to order in addition to selling sliced cold cuts by the pound (I never saw pre-packaged cold cuts until I was an adult, and even now I don’t see them in local supermarket chains.)
But what kind of bread are you talking about? If you’re talking about the bread from institutional bakers that is sold in the bread aisle at the supermarket, it’s usually not good bread (especially Wonder and similar brands). You can also get bread from in-store supermarket bakeries and independent bakeries- and that bread is very different.
Subway bread comes as prefrozen dough, but it’s the worst of the worst. The idea that it’s representative of what you’d find in a major city (where most tourists come to visit) is simply ridiculously wrong.)
I live just outside Richmond, VA and what you’re saying isn’t true of Richmond–not a world city by any means. It’s extremely untrue in major tourist hub cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA, Las Vegas, Seattle. It’s true of say, Roanoke VA or Ames, IA, but people probably aren’t coming to visit those places. Not that tourists never visit the interior of America, but if you come to the States to visit Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon you aren’t coming for the food experience in the first place.
Yes, in the large Dutch cities that attract tourism–which you can’t compare against BFE America–which is what you’re trying to do. And while you just keep ignoring it–I reject your assertion that anywhere else in the world you can find fast, convenient, inexpensive high quality food. France and Italy do have vastly better cheap and somewhat convenient food, but their level of fast and convenience is much slower than an American fast food place, so to me they aren’t even directly comparable. The only places I’ve gone that actually have American level fastness AND convenience, and also beat the quality of those places significantly are Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Japan in particular has like the best fast food in the world. That being said, even in Japan if you’re a tourist you should really limit yourself and not eat a lot of the fast food. Because for a little bit more money and time investment you can have food that is way better. But your examples of France or Italy don’t actually have food that is equal in terms of speed and convenience to American fast food or similar places, they have places that are somewhat quick compare to a typical sit down restaurant, cheap, and high quality, but they aren’t the same as a two minute roll through the McDonald’s drive through, either.
If you compare “like convenience”, and you go places a little slower than the McDonald’s drive through, and a little more expensive, you’ll find a lot of restaurants on par with what I’ve eaten all over the world. Have you ever watched Anthony Bourdain’s old Travel Channel show where he walks around various cities around the world? He’s eaten tons of great stuff in places like Baltimore and Boston here in the states, not just foodie cities like San Francisco and New York. Often times in the cities I’m familiar with (like Baltimore for example) he hasn’t even found on his show the best restaurants of the type he visits, and sometimes there are several that are way better than the one he visits.
If you’re eating that in D.C. you’re really just intentionally trying to eat bad. There’s all kinds of good places convenient to the Smithsonian. Fast food is not the only game in town in big cities like D.C., in fact a lot of times it’s less prominent than it is in lower density places.
In Richmond we have food trucks occasionally but there are tons of restaurants where you can go in, order a sandwich and be out in a few minutes, and the food is great. It’s not bad Subway quality bread and toppings, it’s legitimately good food. Unless you intentionally only want to eat fast food, there is no reason to do so in Richmond, and again, Richmond is no “world city.”
So you represent every tourist in the world? When I was last in Japan I looked up in advance almost every place I went, aside from a few ramen places where I just sat down and ate. There are so many restaurants in Tokyo it’s akin to rolling the roulette wheel to do otherwise. That being said, just like in America if you don’t research at all the quality of your restaurant before hand you can end up in places you’d rather not have eaten in Japan, too.
I think this is true everywhere. The place Americans eat worse food regularly is at home, but that’s not something tourists are exposed to, this is because Americans make poor choices at the supermarket in exchange for convenience. But in the restaurant space I think America may lag France and Italy, which are like the top two restaurant locations in Europe and highly ranked in the world, and Japan, which is often considered the top restaurant country in the world. But your assertion that the only thing you can easily find is McDonald’s and Subway quality meals in American restaurants is frankly stupid and wrong.
And even at the supermarket where a lot of Americans eat poorly, the fact is good quality food has always been there, just not purchased as much as it should have been.
Cheap convenient food is shitty in almost every country in the world, you’ve just cherry picked a few examples where it isn’t the case.