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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

These kind of blanket comparisons between Europe and (presumably) US tend to fall flat; my general impression is that’s the main use of microwaves in the US as well. US restaurants have fairly large portion sizes and people take the remaining food home to reheat eat later.

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To stray away from "blanket statements" and "general impressions", can we find the sale of microwave meals differences between the US and Europe? I would imagine that would be the most telling statistic.

I think that line of reasoning is a trap. It is easy to come up with narratives that paint people in other countries as being “weird” in some way, but we shouldn’t. The UK has all its articles about weird EU regulations, the EU have articles about the funny things Americans do, and the Americans read articles about how weird Japan is.

This isn’t a celebration of diversity, it’s an industrial process where you find something bizarre or distasteful about another country and amplify it for views on social media.

I don't think that's the only result of that line of reasoning. We don't have to poke fun of other cultures in order to appreciate the differences. Sure, the lowest common denominator of these types of mass-produced articles are to ridicule or present as a freak show, but I feel that in a more curated and personal space like hacker news we can identify the differences and explore their deeper meaning without succumbing to the mean.

If the US uses microwaves 90% to reheat hand-prepped meals, 5% to heat water, and 5% for mass produced meals, and Europe’s figures are 94.5%, 5%, and 0.5%, the sales stats per capita may well show that the US eats 10x as many microwave meals while still mostly using their microwave to reheat hand-prepped food.

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