They are from Ireland and France. I can’t taste any sugar in our food though, nor the spices you mentioned. Maybe it’s garlic or onion powder, that seems to be in a lot of processed foods.
I just came back from Germany and I was surprised how often they add corn to things, and it’s not just when they’re making something “American Style.” They stick it in salads, on pizza, in tomato sauces. Yuck. I mostly like corn the good old fashioned American on the cob way. If German chefs think they’re being hip & American by adding corn to stuff, I really wish they’d quit it.
When I was in the US in February, the points that I particularly noted were:
- the **huge ** serving sizes;
- the incredible amount of sugar in everything;
- the difficulty of finding anything that didn’t appear to have been processed to within an inch of its life.
I want to clear up a number of misconceptions in this thread about food tastes of East Asians. Well, specifically, Koreans since I’ve been living here in Seoul for awhile.
Not true of Koreans. The 2nd highest selling product in Korean 7-11’s nationwide is Banana flavoured milk (quite tasty). First place is Soju (korean liquor/moonshine) and 3rd is Triangle Kimbap (triangle shaped rice roll stuffed with meat or vegetables and wrapped in seaweed).
Koreans also eat an insane amount of processed cheese (american cheese) much to the dismay of most ex-pats who have to go out of the way or pay high prices for real cheese. For instance, at the closest “foreign food” supermarket to me, a small brick of colby-jack cheese is $17.
Anecdotal but… many Koreans comment that foreigners (westerners) smell like milk.
Koreans don’t eat a huge amount of bread, but when they do they seemed to have taken the American “wonder-bread” style to the extreme. If you can possibly imagine Korean white bread is even SWEETER than wonder bread… its nasty. However, adults rarely eat it, its for kids and teenagers. You can occasionally find whole-wheat, rye or other types of bread but you have to go out of your way to find it and its often pricey.
You can find western peanut butter in Korea pretty much anywhere (Skippy etc) and it tastes fine. But I’ve never met a Korean adult who eats it, but there must be a market somewhere. There is also Korean-style peanut butter which you can find on quickie ready made sandwiches in the convenience stores. Its gross. It barely tastes like peanut butter, its an off-white brownish colour and tastes more like sugar paste than peanut butter.
When you go to a bar/restaurant here called a Hoe-Peu (Korean transliteration of the german Hof) koreans always order side-dishes to go with their drinks called Anjou. These range from Korean dishes of stewed octopus and noodles to western stuff like french-fries. At nearly everyone of these places you can order a fruit-salad. This will come in one of two-ways… the chopped fruit will be covered in yogurt. Or covered in mayo.
Mayo is also mixed with ketchup and put on salad as a dressing.
Of course, Koreans also eat Spam like its going out of style, so… but they refer to it as “Ham” or “Sausage”.
It’s not so much the peanut-butter, but the combination of peanut-butter and jelly, that makes me go " eeew". Peanuts [and their butter] ought to be salty, imho, and not some sweet spread on a sandwich.
Oh, and Jell-O.
I mean: What is that? Colored, sweet, bone-marrow and water.
*This from a country that eats raw herring… [and mayonaise on French fries] 
Hey! We’re supposed to be talking about American things that people from other countries think are gross. You’re not supposed to be grossing us out with such a disgusting idea as this! Mayonaise on french fries?..Yuck times ten!
As a Brit living in the US my feeling had been that Americans have a very conservative set of food in that there is nothing that I find “gross”, yet Americans get grossed out by food I am used to, e.g. kidneys. There is certainly plenty that I find strange or dislike, such as some of the examples already given: American cheese, grits, pbj, apple always coming with cinnamon, sweet bread. But these are harldy gross in the manner of the OP’s reaction to some foreign foods.
I agree with amarone I can’t believe that anyone from the UK would be in a position to criticise American food tastes. We have some pretty “exotic” food here too. Some of the more unusual food eaten here would be seen as gross by many other countries.
A few examples:
Black Pudding (curdled and boiled pigs blood, pork fat and spices)
Lamb’s Hearts
Liver and Kidneys
Tripe (a cow’s stomach lining)
Faggots and Peas (Pig’s Caul, liver heart and lights, pork belly etc.)
I’m going to stop now, I’m not feeling too well…
Oh yes, don’t forget Mars Bars fried in cooking oil. 
I agree with all that, unfortunately, but it’s not just America anymore. I just came back from Germany (already said that, I know) and their portions have grown since I was there 10 or 15 years ago. I order soup/salad, a plate of pasta (Germany has the best Italian food in the world, sorry Italy) and one or two German beers and it’s way more than one person can eat. I always end up taking home leftovers, or just ordering one meal and sharing it.
If you don’t like grits then you’ve never had them properly prepared. It’s just corn for gods sake.
Americans eat just about anything you can think of. We’re here from all over the world and brought the rest of y’alls disgusting crap with us.
But does anybody here like chitlins? The hand slung variety of course.
And anyone who eats bologna, hot dogs, vienna sausages, etc
What about boudain, crawdads, oysters, frogs?
Chicken, (nasty ass creatures) head cheese, pigs feet, (hell the whole pig for that matter)
ANY fast food IMHO
cabbage (taste good but smells like shit) calf brains, mountain oysters, etc
I’ve had snakes and eels, turtles and alligator…
damn near anything you can think of AND all in the US. :eek:
One of the grossest things I can think of is a damned chicken egg. Think about it for a minute. Where it comes from, what it looks like and what is really is. But I do love 'em
A Bangladeshi at work recently told me that he went out to eat with an Indian Hindu, and asked him if it weren’t true that he shouldn’t be eating meat from cow-animals (which he was). He answered that it was fine because American bovines aren’t Hindu
If you consider that India is much more than Hindu, it makes sense that beef wouldn’t be culturally disgusting, but rather only prohibited by religion.
Another Muslim at work is from Jordan. He says that they sell “white beef” in lots of places in Jordan and Isreal. “White beef” is pork.
How about tongue? It’s not a common thing, from what I’ve seen; but it does appear in American delis and supermarkets. My sister made it once when I was a kid, and I didn’t like it. I don’t know if it was the meat, or the way she prepared it. It doesn’t have the ick-factor for me. Well, not much. But it does seem to be a little disgusting.
Couldn’t agree more. We go downtown to shop in the Mexican grocery store. Started out as a butcher shop, and they have truly excellent meat. But… it’s always kind of disconcerting to see all of the cow tongues in the meat display while waiting for my number to be called.
Maybe they can dress them up by displaying them in big red plastic Mick Jagger lips?
For some reason, this grossed me out more than any of the other foods you listed in your post.
Root beer is apparently not suited to the Japanese palate either. You can get it in import shops or in (and sometimes around) American military installations, but otherwise it’s almost impossible to find. It’s a shame, because I like root beer, but every Japanese person I know who’s tried it said it tasted like medicine.
Cinnamon-flavored candy and chewing gum also don’t go over too well with the Japanese.
I used to date a man from Algeria and his observations on American food were interesting. I tried to take him to an American barbecue place for some yummy brisket, but the smell of pork was so strong that he became physically ill. To him, the idea of eating pork was just as nauseating as the idea of eating rat.
He said Americans do not make proper pizza. To him, pizza meant a cracker crust with tomatoes, hamburger, and green olives, with very light cheese. He also didn’t understand grocery store bread. “Why would you buy old packaged bread, when there is a bakery available with fresh baguettes?”, he would ask. Oh, and American meat didn’t taste right to him. He didn’t keep strict halal, but he said even the halal meat tasted “funny”. Boxed couscous horrified him as did processed cheese.
I have heard that there is something of a bean problem between the US and Japan - there, beans are sweet, and here, beans are savory. They think baked or refried beans are pretty nasty, and we’re weirded out by red bean confections. (Although I’ve had red bean ice cream that I liked, but it’s hard to think of it as a bean.) There, I suppose, the problem is that you’re eating something that you expect to taste one way, and it tastes completely different.
I love American food, and have very rarely eaten anything in the States that I didn’t think was far tastier, and cheaper, than its European counterpart (apart from a burger I had in O’Hare that was for some reason less pleasant than the worst Wimpy burger I ever had in England), and the American-specific cuisine is just sublime.
But… the portion sizes. My God. Disgusting. I think I mentioned this before, but when I was living in CT, my Irish roommate and I went to a bar ordered dinner. We ordered nachos as an appetizer. The waiter advised us to share it, and then to see if we wanted the main. We thought he was crazy but we took his advice. We couldn’t even finish the appetizer between us. We returned to the bar a few weeks later, and one of our coworkers ordered the same appetizer, and ate all of it, and then a full main! Needless to say, this guy was absolutely normous. When he got posted to Ireland for three months he lost nearly 50lbs without even trying.
I just remembered this one – I had a Kenyan (Masai) classmate in college who was grossed out by uncooked vegetables. Apparently the Masai aren’t big vegetable eaters in the first place, and they certainly don’t eat them raw. She eyed our salad bar with the same suspicion many Americans do sashimi.