Oh, I wasn’t referring to physical space. I meant that there is a lot of America that in a cultural sense falls somewhere between the major tourist areas the OP’s friend visited and what I would refer to as “redneck towns.”
That’s because – in the immortal words of James Carville – Pennsylvania is Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the middle.
The couple of times I’ve been to the US, the food thing that freaked me out were the white egg shells. So bizarre.
And the HFCS that seemed to be in everything. Why do you need sugar in milk?
I found overall that eating on the coasts was a lot like eating in Australia, but down the middle was a wasteland of Folgers ‘coffee’ and melted orange cheese. (yes! I’m exaggerating…except for that week in rural Arkansas)
I found Canada to be a lot like Australia in terms of food, and the prevalence of fresh/lightly prepared food. But I haven’t been to small town Canada, only the larger cities.
White egg shells are an American thing? I thought it just had to do with the breed of the hen that laid them.
Yes, it’s the breed of chicken. We don’t bleach or dye eggs to make them white.
I’m a native New Yorker. I find it very hard to believe someone could visit NYC and not find decent food. Manhattan has fruit markets every few blocks. The surrounding areas have very good supermarkets with a wide variety of fresh items. I like to walk through Manhattan regularly and I have no problem finding healthy food for my kids.
Yeah I agree with this. Unless she didn’t step out of the very center of Times Square or Penn Station the whole time she was there, I’m at a bit of a loss as to why she claims all she could find in NYC were fast food restaurants. 
Hell even right in the middle Times Square are several places to get healthy sandwiches & salads, and some well-known sushi restaurants.
Same with LA, it’s very hard to believe she couldn’t find something other than burgers there.
What’s this about sugar in milk? Regular unflavored milk doesn’t have sugar in it. Sweetened condensed milk does, but that’s not strictly an American thing and it’s mainly used for desserts and on coffee
It has naturally occurring fructose in it, but nothing added. I went “huh?” at this too.
I bought a litre of milk in LA and the taste was weird; I checked the ingredients and it had HFCS in it. Maybe it was a random brand, it definitely wasn’t condensed milk though.
Yeah I think she’s kind of full of it. There’s a Food Emporium on 49th and Eight Avenue with a nice salad bar with lots of choices a very short away from Times Square. Manhattan now even has three Trader Joe’s with great bread, fruit and a huge variety of cheese. Granted there’s a lot of touristy places in Times Square and Penn Station but places for great food like Chinatown, Little India and even 5th Avenue are not exactly hard to get to.
A little research on her part would have yielded fabulous places to eat that include vegetarian Indian buffets, Chinese dim sum and Chinese markets with lots of vegetarian centered food and food markets with dozens of healthy choices like Chelsea Market and even the South Street Seaport.
You can criticize NYC for many reasons. Lack of access to terrific tasting, often very healthy food is not one of those reasons.
And wraps and other sandwiches, Mediterranean lunches (hummus, salad, maybe falafel), and a very nice selection of pre-made salads that are generously proportioned and very cheap. (I think they’re $4 here. Maybe $5.)
And I’ve never been to Australia, but I’m willing to bet that outside of major cities like Sydney and Melbourne, there are probably a lot of places that are whatever the Aussie equivalent of “redneck” is.
I’ve been to a lot of other countries and I haven’t really seen any where I’ve been like “OMG! The infrastructure of this place is so much better than the USA that I feel like I’m in the not too distant future!” They all have the same problems with traffic and potholes and shitty fast food and whatnot.
And yes, Lancaster, PA is pretty hickish, as is much of PA outside of Pittsburgh and Philly.
This has been asked and answered to death, but I feel compelled to throw in my two cents.
Me: American expat, lives in Sydney, been here 10 years, dual citizen
My husband: Australian (Melbourne) born and bred. Well travelled throughout Asia/Pacific/Japan due to work. No novice to seeing new things and experiencing different cultures. Loves food, eats everything, not picky.
For various reasons (I hate my family, mostly) I never took him to the US until last September. We did a similar trip, with excursions into what people here are calling the ‘real America’ and this not being the Pit I will take no issue with that.
We did: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Jackson, MS.
His impressions:
Orange cheese does not taste bad but it looks weird. It weirded him out every time he saw it, although he didn’t complain he remarked on it. To be fair I dragged him into every single place that has a menu item I love but do not have in Sydney, so we ate Whattaburger, In n Out, Wendy’s, Carls Jr and Krystal. So he saw a heap of orange cheese!
There are a LOT of fast food chains. A LOT. (I concur, in comparison to Australia). We were able to find good, healthy local food but that is likely to do with the fact that the three cities we visited I lived in for large stretches of time in the past. I could see an Australian being overwhelmed with what was right in front of their eyes rather than seeing past it to local places. In MS it was the same to him as Vegas and SF, but again I have family there and I grew up there, so we had some wonderful non-chain restaurant food (BBQ, fried catfish, Walker’s Drive In, all sorts of lovely white tablecloth places.) We also ate at Krystal which did not impress him. It made me feel instantly 16 years old again, so it was worth the several hours of indigestion it caused me. 
In San Francisco in particular, he was shocked at the number of homeless people. We got off the cable car some stops ahead and walked downhill to the wharves (we walked from Fisherman’s Wharf to the wharf you go to Alcatraz, so past Pier 39 and kept going.) It was early in the day and there were people on the sidewalks everywhere. We do have homeless people in Sydney - in particular at Circular Quay there are people who seem to permanently live by the train station wall across from the ferry docks. Having been away for 10 years, I had to agree that the sheer number of them was huge to me - and I lived in SF in the early 90s. There are 850 odd thousand people in the city proper, and 8.5m in the Bay Area and this is about the same size as Sydney city vs the greater Sydney area, so I can say that our experience was that there were far more homeless people than we are used to seeing. My husband was struck by this in SF, and remarked on it often.
He didn’t remark on any other points. I would have noticed, because I am a bit sensitive/have a chip on my shoulder about people who shrug off American culture as though it’s bad (or worse, as though it doesn’t exist).
So there’s a data point to throw in there. It’s travel though, and there’s a lot of Americana on TV so everybody’s mileage can and does vary.
My guess is that you actually bought vanilla flavored milk- I did that once.
Seriously doubt it was regular milk. You can find gallons of milk in any store that do not have any sugar added. It must have been some flavored milk.
I was reading that it is becoming common for milk in small cartons intended for children to be loaded up with extra sugar.
What are people talking about when they say “orange” cheese? The stereotypical processed American cheese is Kraft Singles and they’re yellow, or at least they look yellow to me.
Here are some apparently “typical” Australian cheddar-like cheeses. They are all white. It’s customary to add annatto (a natural color) to many cheeses in the USA–as was done to some English cheese, as well.
In short, many perfectly decent American cheeses are not as pale as their Austalian counterparts. We’re not talking about processed cheese, but the good stuff–if not “boutique” cheeses. Ooh, how weird to see something different in another country!
I’ve been reading that various people (including I think Jamie Oliver) are against offering flavored milk with school lunches because it is full of sugar while others say that kids won’t drink unflavored milk - but again, that’s flavored milk. It’s milk with chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, banana ,etc flavoring added and that flavoring is loaded with sugar. It’s not plain milk with a few teaspoons of sugar added.
Chocolate, strawberry, vanilla milk have sugar added. Regular small cartons of milk for kids do not.
Orange cheese confuses me- do they mean velveeta plastic cheese? I guess real American cheese ranges from orange to yellow to white. Even cheddar is orange, but I doubt that’s what they mean.