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Comment by mncharity | Hacker News Reader

It's not just fish. A staple of graduate student conversation is "Food X was a favorite of mine at home, but" "I can't find it in Boston" or "the American version is a bad tasteless joke".

One issue is lag - the American general food supply diversifies more slowly than the population.

Another issue is corporate consolidation of the food supply chain. For example, New England used to have a lot of small confectionery manufacturers, from big factories to mom&pops, which over the last three decades have most all been crushed out by Nabisco. Which is much lower quality. So "why doesn't Boston have good confectionery like", err, Castile? Well, we used to be a lot closer, but Nabisco et al.

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Mexican food was a favorite of mine in the United States, but in France it tastes like cardboard. I want to find <some product> but France doesn't sell it.

This conversation can be had in literally any country in the world. Can't find a decent cheeseburger in Delhi, can't find decent cheese in Shanghai, nearly impossible to find good tequila in Germany.

Every country has foods they're good at and foods they're not. As far as the death of small producers, why by Boston chocolate when I can buy actual high quality Swiss chocolate at a lower price? Why buy some marginal local beer when I can buy literally the best beers in the world. Globalization certainly has its negatives, but on balance there is more variety than every before.

> Every country has foods they're good at and foods they're not.

I mean... sure.

But I've travelled a whole lot of the world and some places on average have way better food than others. It's sort of impossible to go to Lyon, France, say, and then pretend everywhere else's food is just like different, but no worse.

If you spent a year or more in a Lyon I think you'd have a much easier time thinking of things you wished they had.

Indeed. But dramatically less so than, say, Lyon Puerto Rico.

Sorry, I just don't buy it. I spent a year in Japan and they had lots of great foods that I have only found pale imitations of elsewhere. But they also lacked foods that I love and can find in the allegedly culinarily impoverished United States. And I can say similar things about other places I have traveled (including Puerto Rico), although without the same sort of supreme confidence.

Hmm I remember living in a middle-sized city in The Netherlands that probably most things were available in good quality as long as you knew where to look. Mexican food I can't judge, but Indian or Thai or REAL Chinese food wasn't a problem, with a few options to pick often. Italian and French of course. Good burgers yes.

There's of course a difference in culture. You can't find sesos even at the best butcher shops while in Argentina they're in any medium sized supermarket. That's just stuff that nobody but the very adventurous will eat outside that cultural zone.

I can speak to the lack of real Indian food in the Netherlands, there's about one restaurant in Amsterdam which serves proper food. The rest all serve British Indian Restaurant cuisine, which is the equivalent of Febo representing all Dutch food.

To be fair, you probably can't get a good burger in Delhi because of the Hindus.

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