Er, that was a photoshop joke. It’s not a real product.
I’m curious at the number of Brits in this thread who complained about greasy American fast food. You could probably heat your home for a day off the grease in your food from the average chippy! Most of the chippies I’ve been to in various parts of the UK were far, far greasier than any food I’ve ever eaten in the US…almost inedibly so in some cases. (Yes, I know I should have learned the first time, but no…) That said, I too was shocked when I came back to the US by the large portion sizes in restaurants, the salt and sugar in the food, and the general lack of taste in food.
One other thing I noticed that I haven’t seen here in this thread is that in the US one generally doesn’t go to specialty food sellers. In England or France or Spain I’d go to a butcher’s for meat, a cheese shop for cheese, a fishmonger’s for fish, or a vegetable seller for veg. If I wanted Indian spices I’d go to the Indian shop on Cowley Road which was about the size of my current office. I wouldn’t be going to the “big supermarket” (which was about half to a quarter the size of even the supermarket in my little suburb of ~20,000 here) unless I needed things like cleaning supplies or other miscellaneous items, or some fast cheap takeaway lunch. What it means mainly is that the quality of food you got was better all around. If the cheese shop owner was going to make a living, he better be selling some damn good cheese, and if the “big supermarket” was even going to compete with that, they’d have to improve the quality of their own cheese. In the US what you get (outside of Wegmans, the size and quality of which awes everyone) is going to be all of a sameness, where you can’t even tell one kind of cheese from another.
Yes, we do have specialty sellers here, but sadly they’re dying out. I try to go to the local butcher shops as often as I can, but even they are falling down on quality.
Yeah, actually I do. Maybe bodega means something different to you, but in NYC , it does not mean anything as large as a supermarket and I would be surprised if you went to an actual supermarket in an Italian neighborhood in Philadelphia and couldn’t find a large variety of tomato products including peeled , crushed, pureed,paste and sauce . It would not surprise me if the supermarket in an Irish or Slavic neighborhood had less of a variety.
Its your assertion you could not find them in supermarkets that is absolutely incomprehensible to me.
I suspect the issue was that you were not seeing familiar packaging, or the size you were expecting, or something like that. Bcause it is impossible that you went into a fullsize supermarket that did not contain any can of crushed or diced or whole peeled tomatoes.
And yes, to me a “bodega” is a corner store, which usually doesn’t sell a wide variety of groceries. It’s more a place to get beer and cigarettes, ice pops and candy. They might have a small selection of non-perishables.
You do understand that a chip shop isn’t a major dietary staple, right? That it’s a type of fast food? I eat from a chip shop a couple of times a year, at most. You can’t compare everyday meals to chip shops any more than you can compare everyday meals to Big Macs.
Huh! I had no idea there was actually such a thing. I always thought “American Cheese” was just the generic name for Kraft Singles-style processed-cheese-food-product.
They’re pretty good, but I feel like I’m getting gout just looking at one.
Weird fried foods (candy bars, bananas, whole sticks of butter :rolleyes:) can be found in some US fairs, but I believe many of these are originally products of Scotland. Or Wisconsin.
And nobody eats fried PB & banana sandwiches except Elvis. And maybe Paula Deen.
Sorry to shock you back into a coma, but Mitch Morgan and Bacon Martini exist. Don’t worry, they’re something for hipsters or people who want to say they’ve tried it once. Not widespread, and unlikely to happen any time soon.
I suspect you were in the wrong aisle. Most grocery stores around here will have have a tiny nod to the canned tomato selection in the canned fruit aisle where (IMHO) they belong. but the real variety and breadth of selection is hidden over by the pasta and the canned marinara sauces. The same is true of canned olives and mushrooms.
I’ve heard it said that Asian people are utterly disgusted by our consumption of “rotten milk”. Cheesemoe than anything, but also yoghurt and sour cream.
Skim milk and low-fat anything dairy. My Irish cousins were bowled over with laughter on that one. These are folks who have jobs, but also a few cows each to care for, so it may not be universal.
The portion sizes, definitely.
Another one for the frozen cookie dough.
That people seem to actually prefer foods with HFCS over sugar?
Or what seems to pass for chocolate there (granted, I’ve only had Hershey’s and See’s candy)
Oh my dark gods! I thought that was a joke link, so I searched, and that’s a real product line! :eek:
Thing is, chippies are even greasier than American fast food, by a long way. And, at least when I traveled in Scotland, in some locations they’re the only places open at certain times of night.
Well, Cheesesteak was drawing a distinction between “real” American cheese (mild cheddar with an emulsifier, and pasteurized), and
The latter sounds like Kraft-style singles to me, so I took that to mean that a) Kraft singles aren’t “real” American cheese, and b) I’ve never encountered “real” American cheese.
But looking at that again, I’m not sure why adding an emulsifier and pasteurizing don’t count as being “processed”, and Wikipedia seems to agree - American cheese is, by definition, processed. It does note under “Modern varieties” that some American cheeses can be very much like unprocessed cheese, while others with more additives are decidedly less so.
Anyway, the point is that I don’t really think of “American cheese” as, well, cheese, so I was surprised to learn there might be an actual variety of cheese called “American”. But apparently, there really isn’t.
And for the record, alice_in_wonderland, if I asked my husband to buy cheese, I would likewise expect him to bring home a block of cheddar, or maybe colby-jack. If he bought American cheese instead, I’d still eat it, but I’d say, “Next time, get real cheese, please.”
I think that there is. It’s not American vs not-American, it’s more of a continuum. Some of it’s pretty good, and some of it’s unpalatable, and some of it’s somewhere in the middle.
