In the city I lived in, in China, McDonald’s was popular, KFC was seen as a ‘treat’ and Pizza Hut was only for special occasions. I went to Pizza Hut with a friend and we were ushered to the front of the queue and placed by a front window, I think to show how ‘upscale’ eating pizza with a knife and fork is. The Chinese, family run, restaurants were fantastic and I still don’t understand how fast food ever became popular there.
One time in Korea I took the fried skin off my three pieces of chicken, and the paucity of the flesh beneath it put me off KFC for good. In Korea sweet potato on pizza is very popular. Yuck.
I’ve had beef/turkey bacon in several muslim countries, the beef bacon often is full of nitrates and doesn’t do much good for your digestive system, the turkey bacon ranges from satisfactory to very close to the real thing. Across the Middle East McD’s serves the McArabia, two chicken or beef patties in pita bread with lettuce, tomato, onion and tahini sauce, alongside the usual ubiquitous items.
Corn as animal feed? Some Americans do not understand that corn on the cob is a gourmet dish. In my rural childhood home it was served as a separate course, the center of the meal. Corn needs to be in the hot water within 20 minutes of being picked. Never found any in a super market that was fit to eat. Maybe in a farmer’s market. No merchants seem to have heard of super sweet varieties, which extend the 20 minutes some. In corn-growing country we found people eating field corn. It cross-breeds with sweet corn, spoiling it, so they don’t grow it. Worked in a summer resort that served corn on the cob weekly, from a nearby produce farm. The help thought it was a treat; the urbanite paying guests were bored with it. I understand why foreign countries don’t get it.
Corn does start to lose sugar when it’s picked, but 20 minutes was neither necessary nor realistic even a couple of decades ago. Today’s super-sweet and enhanced-sugar varieties will remain sweet and good for quite a few hours, or even a day.
I agree completely regarding supermarket corn. People who buy supermarket corn have no idea what good corn tastes like. You have to pick your own or buy from a farm market. We eat freshly picked corn on the cob a bunch of times each summer. It IS summer.
We had a Spanish visitor for the past few summers, and he says they don’t eat corn like we do, but he loves it. He says Spaniards will eat corn in a salad or as part of a recipe, but they don’t eat it on its own, especially as the centerpiece of a summer meal.
Continuing a tangent, when our German relatives came over in the 1980s they were surprised to find no horses in the neighborhood. On the other hand, we were able to take them to see Southfork Ranch, so it wasn’t a complete failure.
No, she reported finding authentic, American-style, dead-pig bacon.
I’ve eaten beef bacon - bought some by mistake when we planned BLTs for dinner - and it was…meh. Not bad, really, but not bacon.
When my sister spent a semester of high school as an exchange student in the UK, her classmates were surprised to find out that she lived in a house with indoor plumbing and running water. This was in the early '90s.
This is completely anecdotal, but I recently enjoyed a trip to Germany and France. What surprised me is that in both countries is the ever present “pommes frites” on the menus. While staying in Germany, we were in a small town that is not a destination for American tourists. In France, we were in Paris, but our hotel was far away from traditional tourist destinations. Anyway, what I found interesting in both countries is that parents, as near as I could tell were German or French, ordered french fries for their children. I never saw an adult order french fries for themselves.
And, no, I did not order french fries in either country. My daughter did. They resembled what you get at Wendy’s.
And tourist places elsewhere, I imagine. One of my favorite things about staying in Pattaya is the opportunity to eat all of the high-quality western food that’s not available to me in China (where the western food is mostly pretty bad in most places). I don’t mean the big chains, either, but the German owned German place, or the Belgian-owned Belgian place, etc.
I am curious what the ingredients for this were because spaghetti with a red vegetarian/beef sauce is about as close as I can think to a bog standard meal almost anyone could cook here in Ireland (and this was as true 15 years ago as it is now). That is, I cannot fathom your anecdote unless the spaghetti you made was absolutely amazing, in which case, I want some!
I’m not sure how high quality you would have found it 20 years ago, even in the places run by the relevant foreign national. A big problem, I think, may have been getting the right ingredients. That situation has improved. There was always a handful of places operating with good quality. Bourbon Street Bar and Restaurant has been around about 30 years, and it’s always been reasonably priced. There was a Mexican-food place named Tia Maria that opened in I think it was 1990, and it was always good. (Closed five or ten years ago.) But it took an effort to get to such places, particularly in the pre-Skytrain and -subway days.
I had a burger at The Bird in Berlin earlier this year, and it was quite good. They go out of their way - importing beef from Iowa, for example - to produce a true American-style burger. Other burgers I had around Europe were kind of rubbery, low-grade sandwich things. Numerous places on the menu and around the restaurant were instructions against ordering beef well-done and notices that a well-marbled, fatty cut of beef is a good thing. Is order medium to rare, “bloody” steak/burgers not a common thing in Europe?