America does not have a good food culture | Hacker News Reader

America does not have a good food culture

walkingtheworld.substack.com

92 pointsresolutebat228 comments

Broken record time -

Surely people see the straight line that is zoned car culture suburbia ---> American food culture. Drive in foodchains are a response to cars. Supermarkets & weekly out of town grocery runs are a result of cars. Americans have an oddly compartmentalized (because it somehow dissappears the second they step in Europe for vacation) dislike for density everywhere.

You fishmonger can't be colocated with your favorite restaurant, because no one randomly picks up fish on their way back home. One one makes fresh baguettes, because no one stops by bakeries to pick up fresh bread on the daily. When everything is out of the way, an organic culture of any kind struggles to develop.

There is a reason NY and SF have amazing food culture, and density has a lot to do with it.

I'll go one step further. (Rest of) America doesn't just have bad food culture. It has bad community culture of all sorts. Suburbia is literally characterized by being boring. Americans are perpetually scared of strangers and neighboring kidnappers.

The US had unfair stats. It has incredible nature and Americans are filthy rich. It's biggest cities have really interesting people and everything you can imagine, can be found in NYC.

But, that isn't the America people have built. Most Americans aren't in NYC. The nature comes for free and the money only serves to further highlight how little there is to spend on if you aren't in a couple of select cities.

Yes, it seems naive to point fingers at 1-repeat-offender for all of these problems. After, almost nothing is mono causal. But the 'almost' means that a select few things are indeed mono casual. I believe American 20th century urban planning decisions are 1 such offender.

Suburbs get such a bad rap in certain online circles, and yet so many people choose to live in them. I'm from Europe and live in a flat in a historical city centre, but I think I'd prefer suburbs, if such a thing existed around here. Sure, historical city centre definitely has its charms and conveniences, but the peace and quiet of suburbs sounds amazing compared to the soundscape (cars, dogs, neighbors) I have to endure every day. I've even set my sleeping schedule to the schedule of the yappy dog in apartment below me - there's no point in trying to sleep till 8 am when the thing starts barking at 6:30 am anyway.

Yeah. These romanticized threads always give me a kick. Every large city here in Germany has a chronic smell of diesel and dog piss. There's a level of grime to everything that would really bother someone used to an American suburb. Not to mention the majority of apartments are in old buildings with no ventilation or cooling.

Like you said, there's advantages but ignoring the downsides is amusing if you've ever actually lived in a large city.

It's a bit different in Australia in Melbourne/Sydney. You have suburbs but they have all developed micro cities around the train station. So you have these spots that don't smell like piss and smog, have a supermarket, bars, restaurants, and brand new highrises with high quality apartments.

Super easy to live car free since your day to day stuff can be accessed by foot, and the train to the CBD is super easy to access as well.

Never had the pleasure of visiting but if this is accurate it might sound like the best of both worlds.

One word: earplugs. It changed my life. Yes it's weird at first but sleeping like a baby beats any minor and temporary weirdness.

Can't really use them because of my tinnitus...

The 'peace and quiet' of suburbs is only assuming that you get lucky. Much like any place, if you have a horrible neighbor they can and will make your life hell, but in the suburbs you're stuck.

As someone that lived in the suburbs as a kid I hope to never go back. Being in the city proper and having easy access to everything and nature within a bus / bicycle ride away is far better than living in the burbs and everything is 5-10 miles away. It's even worse if you're a kid, because I frequently had to wake up at 6AM for school, take a bus at 6:45 and get to school by 8AM. That was partly why I did so horribly in highschool.

Your chances at peace and quiet are much much better in the suburbs though, where there's probably less than 5-8 families which could disturb it, whereas my apartment buildings alone has 25 families, and the neighboring buildings (definitely within earshot) have dozens if not hundreds more. All this density also translates into much more car traffic outside my window, much more dog barking (when people walk their dogs), much more children making a racket when playing etc.

Another European historic city center flat dweller. I grew up in the suburbs (small city suburban, very quiet when I was a child, and even with new buildings behind us as a teen it was quiet and calm. The closest multi-tenant building was about 600m away, the city center was only a 20-minute bus ride away). But despite the annoying churches (no place in the center where you are more than about 800m away from one), I prefer it here. Everything is in walking distance, I have the choice of almost all drugstore and supermarket chains, even specialty stores.

I don’t mind some dogs, still better than villages. My sleeping schedule is my own, if I wake up from some partying drunk kids, I go back to sleep.

Supermarkets are not a result of cars. They are the result of people not wanting to spend 3 hours in 10 different shops to get what they need. Your logic is all wrong.

First, I don't know why this is going grey at my time of writing because it's true and if that's unsexy I guess me and a lot of Americans are just not meant for a life in France because bouncing around small specialty stores sounds like hell. Second, I honestly don't get the hate for super markets. You might not find high-end wagyu beef at Wal-Mart but you'll find basically any spice you want, a few different varieties of fish, lamb, beef, basically the same staple meats as any other country, and lots of regional 'niche' things from around the world. If the variety was bad it'd defeat the whole point of going to a supermarket. Yeah I guess you might miss out on the "opportunity" to buy a twelve dollar loaf of bread but if you can't make at least ten different good meals out of what's available in a supermarket your issue is frankly skill and not ingredients.

Except in France the bread is pretty cheap even from an independent bakery because there’s one every 50 metres so the competition keeps the prices down.

Bread has become way more expensive in France even in small bakeries. Easy to remember the price before the euro introduction and now and you will see the huge inflation in bread prices

Before the euro it was somewhere between 1 and 2 francs, IIRC. Now it's between 1 and 2 euros. Checks out.

a good 7x increase.

Inflation is huge. Doesn't change the fact that compared to anything similar you can get in the US, a €1 baguette is vastly cheaper

Come to Montreal. We have a pedestrian culture, with supermarkets but also tons of small shops.

People like both. But when you have enough cars and lose the density you lose the small shops.

Never said you cant have both at the same time. But supermarkets clearly win on convenience.

Just like most us cities too. I love Montreal but it's not more pedestrian than say, NYC. Shutting down 2-3 streets in the summer is basically the biggest difference.

NYC is the exception in American cities. What other examples in America are comparable to Montreal/NYC? In terms of just having entire swaths of the city be walkable with lots of small shops.

I mean Montreal is the exception in Quebec too, but I get your point. I think north america in general is just not very walkable. Even cities like Quebec City (very walkable old city) only have a very small area that I would consider walkable. Another example here in Quebec would be Laval, which is very close and well connected to Montreal yet still almost always requires a car to get by outside of rush hour.

The weird thing is going to other cities around the world after visiting NY / SF and such, is that even NY / SF feel overpriced and subpar. It's odd just how much better food is in Tokyo / Melbourne / other great cities around the world. And cheaper!

Currently living in Melbourne and it’s so hard to bother cooking at home because I can go on a 5 minute walk and find somewhere that will serve an absolutely delicious meal that looks like it could be put on display in an art gallery and it costs only a little more than cooking yourself.

Not only that, the folks working there are usually happy! It's nuts how often I go somewhere in the USA and everyone is just miserable.

> costs only a little more than cooking yourself.

that absolutely cannot be true. Eating out in melb is on average 2x more expensive than cooking yourself, unless you are not a bulk buyer, and is buying _tiny_ quantities (which are expensive), and is cooking _to_ a recipe, rather than buying what's in season and adjusting the recipe for it.

I’m single so it’s hard to cook for 1 without re eating the same thing 5 times in a row or having wasted food. Eating out _is_ more expensive but it’s only a bit more expensive and it’s massively more convenient and tastes much better.

I can go out and get a lamb wrap or a Bahn mi for $13 and a 4 minute walk and it’s extremely tasty. I really couldn’t beat that cooking for myself.

If I was cooking for a whole family then the numbers change since it’s about the same effort to cook no matter what quantity.

> I’m single so it’s hard to cook for 1 without re eating the same thing 5 times in a row or having wasted food.

That is what a freezer is for? Cook once, eat 4-5 times when you want it, not dictated by leftovers going off in the fridge [1]. That's what I did when I was single and it is what I still do since having ready-made food in the freezer to take along as lunch, for when my daughter comes home hungry from school, (etc.) is quite handy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH3UncRagXY

That's fine, but their point still stands. They find it economically similar and much higher on difficulty to cook at home. If they adapted a different system, this may change somewhat - although it's unlikely to have the same yield for a single in an apartment.

You are bad at managing money if you think eating out is just a bit more expansive than cooking

The weird thing is in Melbourne, you can get top quality food for less or around equal to buying groceries. It's an actual "economy of scale", same with Tokyo. It's hard to comprehend for folks in places like the USA, where it's definitely way more expensive to eat out (and typically worse for you).

I lived in Tokyo

When I lived there you would be able to get a gyudon for roughly 300-400 yens

It will get you full but it’s not very nutritive

You can eat many eastern / western fast food dishes for around that price, but if you want to go to an actual sit down restaurant it’s much more expensive

I didn’t cook in Tokyo because I was on a scholarship so I didn’t care, but friends told me it would be cheaper to cook too

I can go out and buy a Bahn Mi for $10AUD which includes fresh bread baked that morning, fresh vegetables and grilled chicken. It's basically impossible to match this without doing it all from scratch and baking your own bread/grilling your own chicken. At which point you have to produce like 20 in a single go to match the value of the one I can buy pre made.

Then Australia is incredible expensive

I can get the same dish in Canada for 8 AUD and can cook for less than half the money, and Canada is not a cheap country

We also have minimum wages, social safety nets, and broadly a high standard of living on most metrics compared to North America.

this is more of a comment on cost of living than anything else

Eating out in Tokyo really is cheaper than the COL would imply. $8 will get you a nice set meal at a sit down restaurant, all included, and tip doesn't exist.

And a healthy meal at that!

To a hammer, everything is a nail. To some people, everything is the fault of cars. I find this broken record to be uncompelling and tiresome.

> It has bad community culture of all sorts.

On this I agree. The irony is that rural America, highly dependent on cars, has, imho and experience, radically stronger community than dense urban centers!

When it comes to food I'm far more inclined to blame the economics. American restaurants try to get as many patrons in and out as possible. Clear that table and get the next guest in. This is just as true in SF and NYC as suburbia. TBH I genuinely do not understand how the economics of restaurants in Japan and Paris work. I've been to both and when I look at the prices, patrons, and staff I don't get it.

If there is any root cause to the woes of America it's probably the cost of land/housing/real estate. The monthly lease for a half decent commercial space is so astronomical there's no option but to cycle as many patrons through as possible.

> On this I agree. The irony is that rural America, highly dependent on cars, has, imho and experience, radically stronger community than dense urban centers!

This isn't particularly true. There's been many writings on the 'loneliness epidemic' that hits the hardest in the rural parts of America, where people die of drug abuse or alcohol or health issues alone and ignored. The community effort fully coalesces around the religious experience, but sharply ends after Sunday for most people. It's been noted multiple times over that Americans generally trust eachother lower than ever, the amount of close friends has gone down and more.

This is before we get into the community dynamics of rural communities being very exclusive towards certain groups of people.

I think it's important to separate rural and suburbia.

I agree that the sense of community can be high in rural areas. People who live there can be very strongly rooted in the place. Depopulation is taking its toll though.

Suburbia on the other hand...

The poor quality of US food is not about cars, but about the ingredients. When you compare US food vs EU food, you immediately notice that US food has a lot more ingredients and those ingredients are often very questionable. Much of that comes from how profitable it is and how EU tends to restrict things until proven safe, whereas US tends to allow until proven unsafe.

Take bread for example. Bread needs nothing more than flour, water, yeast and some salt. Here are the ingredients for Wonder Round Top White Sliced Bread: “Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% Or Less Of Each Of The Following: Calcium Carbonate, Wheat Gluten, Soybean Oil, Salt, Dough Conditioners (Contains One Or More Of The Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- And Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, Datem, Ethoxylated Mono- And Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Vinegar, Monocalcium Phosphate, Citric Acid, Cholecalciferol (Vitamin D3), Soy Lecithin, Calcium Propionate (To Retard Spoilage).” Source: https://www.target.com/p/wonder-round-top-white-sliced-bread...

That’s a lot of ingredients for the most basic of foods. I’d argue that’s not a good thing…

While the large cities in US have an amazing diversity of food, the quality of this food is abysmal. US also restricts many normal European foods because of the requirement to pasteurize. While I’m sure the periodic table laden recipes are dangerous if not pasteurized, I personally have yet to have an issue eating EU food within EU norms (yes, things spoil rather quickly by US standards; that’s why fresh food is important).

Just wait until you find out what yeast is made of.

Please enlighten us?

What's wrong with mushrooms?

Just wait till they realize mushrooms are fungi…

And here I thought “Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom” (Wikipedia seems to agree). What else should I expect to find in that yeast packet?

As an aside, anyone thinking you need all those ingredients in bread should try baking their own loaf. It’s a very rewarding process and is super simple. A good Dutch oven makes it even easier.

Yeast are amazing and useful organisms. Quite a bit of cool content on home brewing/etc. out there.

> And here I thought “Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom”.

Yes, but write out all the chemicals inside them the way you did for the wonder bread.

> As an aside, anyone thinking you need all those ingredients in bread should try baking their own loaf.

As a British expat living in NYC, I am mostly able to find a good freshly baked loaf on the way home from work. On the occasions we can’t, my Polish wife will bake her own loaf, as we would never eat the extremely sweet breads typically found in bodegas/grocery stores. And yes, she only uses 4 ingredients.

I just don’t think it’s superior because of some false pretence about the number of ingredients.

So in other words you don’t eat that yourself and prefer to eat either high end quality food (that’s unlikely to have questionable ingredients and tastes good) or bake at home? Seems we are not so different after all.

So why defend the ingredients intended to make bread last longer and appear fresher than it really is?

Co to ma wspólnego z faktem, że żona pana jest Polką?

> So in other words you don’t eat that yourself and prefer to eat either high end quality food (that’s unlikely to have questionable ingredients and tastes good) or bake at home? Seems we are not so different after all.

Sure -- I never said we were different about what we might choose to eat, but instead why we might choose it.

> Co to ma wspólnego z faktem, że żona pana jest Polką?

That we're both Europeans: it's directly relevant to the OP article and subsequent commentary in this thread.

> That we're both Europeans: it's directly relevant to the OP article and subsequent commentary in this thread.

I agree. They have weird food safety standards!

Especially when it comes to the fermented stuff. Cheese is a good example: most of the good stuff is severely restricted in the US. Idem for cured meat—they mostly don't allow non-pink salt cured meat. Cooking temperatures in restaurant settings are also on the very safe side (finding pink pork is rare for example).

All of this contributes to food that is often underwhelming taste-wise.

It seems like you are disagreeing with GP? They are saying "EU tends to restrict things until proven safe, whereas US tends to allow until proven unsafe"...while you are bringing up the example of cheese and meat, which are more permissive in the EU than in the US, from a food safety standpoint.

I was talking about the additional ingredients/chemicals in the great example when referring to EU being more restrictive, whereas EU is more permissive with traditional foods (also in my comment), which I personally find to be positive.

The US has extremely high standards for bacterial contamination risk. This was a change from standards that previously were similar to Europe. For some food products, these changes materially reduced incidence of bacterial food poisoning relative to OECD countries, so it wasn’t entirely misplaced. I am skeptical of the benefit for some foods because the benefit has not been demonstrated. Scandinavia has similar food standards, so exporting food to the US often requires that it be processed in Scandinavia first, which isn’t always worth it for European food producers.

The main barrier to exporting food to the US from Europe is the higher standard of bacterial hygiene that the US requires. The US government is pretty obsessive about bacterial contamination in food.

> Calcium Propionate (To Retard Spoilage)

(Nice euphemism, there. Preservative is a bad word? This deceitful wording should be illegal...)

I don't know food chemsitry, but it looks like they are mostly vitamins, preservatives and softeners/moisturizers. The latter two could be a result of the low density GP suggested: if you go shopping weekly, because Target is far away, the bread needs to feel fresh for a week.

However, added vitamins is either because the ingredients are poor, or to avoid lawsuits from those who expect to survive on only white bread...

> I personally have yet to have an issue eating EU food within EU norms

I noticed this for my favorite dessert: Tiramisu

There are two types of recipes: Mascarpone creme based on whipped egg whites or cream. From my unscientific studies, it looks like European recipes most often use whipped egg whites (eaten raw), while American recipes use whipping cream.

Those are the ingredients for factory produced bread. You need to go live in a higher density neighbourhood that can facilitate a local bakery. The bakery I (sometimes) go to sells 3-day fermented artisanal hand-made sourdough baguettes for the same price as a loaf of wonderbread. It's the cars.

It’s available where I live, but it’s hardly the norm in the overall US. Why should good food be only in some places and not others?

> (because it somehow dissappears the second they step in Europe for vacation)

To be fair, that is because people on vacation are by definition living out of a suitcase. It is easy to live in a tiny hotel room in a very dense building among dense buildings when all you own (for a few days) is a suitcase.

A lot of people in the US like to have space for hobbies and toys and cars and home offices and yards and so on. Which is difficult in a dense city, but irrelevant while on vacation.

> Suburbia is literally characterized by being boring.

Not by everyone.

Suburbia is bad for bar crawls, but after my 20s that wasn't a priority. Suburbia is great for access to mountain biking, road biking, playgrounds for the kids, sports fields, walking to friends houses, having space for a yard and BBQs, having friends over (plenty of parking) and countless other activities. It's really pretty awesome.

You don’t need parking if you live in a city with nice transit

Low density means you are unlikely to live a walkable distance from a friend, so suburbia sucks for that too

Honestly the only thing you said that is true is the big yard, everything else is worse in suburbia than cities

Maybe not American cities, but most suck anyway

Nah, you're right. My friends all live in the same "suburbia" as me. 50 minute drive one way. We still just hang out online, cause no one wants to spend their life on the highway. Wish we lived in a place with real transit / density.

Heck, even in Tokyo, you can hop on a bus to go do outdoors stuff easy.

> My friends all live in the same "suburbia" as me. 50 minute drive one way.

Please post the name of the suburb and city, I really want to look at it on google maps. I can't begin to imagine a housing development that takes 50 minutes to drive from one end to the other (assuming you both live at opposite edges).

> on the highway

Highway? Ok so you live in different towns probably, not the same suburb.

> You don’t need parking if you live in a city with nice transit

As long as you only ever want to see people who also live in the same transit route.

I have some friends that moved to an apartment in San Francisco, it is nearly impossible to visit them since there is no parking anywhere nearby.

> Low density means you are unlikely to live a walkable distance from a friend, so suburbia sucks for that too

This morning my elementary school age kid walked to a friends house in a different neighborhood (10 min walk). As I'm typing this, one of his school friends just walked over from his house (3 min walk) to play. Being able to walk (particularly the kids) to friends is one of the prime reasons people like the suburbs.

> Honestly the only thing you said that is true is the big yard

And the road biking, mountain biking, playgrounds, sport fields and so on.

> everything else is worse in suburbia than cities

Clearly a matter of activity preferences, so it is not an objective truth to say one or the other is worse. Dense cities are great for bars, clubs, museums, that kind of thing. Suburbs are great for outdoor activities, sports, hobbies that needs space (e.g. woodworking, try that in an apartment), walking to friends, forests, etc.

Man I’m sorry nothing you said is impressive in most developed countries cities

No transit doesn’t need to be in the same route, there are bus terminals and metro line connections

> Man I’m sorry nothing you said is impressive in most developed countries cities

I didn't say anything with the intent to be impressive. I'm describing differences between dense urban and suburban pros & cons. Neither is objectively better, they are different.

> No transit doesn’t need to be in the same route, there are bus terminals and metro line connections

Sure. So now you need to spend a lot of time traveling in the wrong direction just to get to a central terminal and then take another bus to the intended direction. It's all tradeoffs.

It’s not the wrong direction…

You are not describing differences between urban & suburban

Maybe you are for America specifically but most of what you described is normal in urban areas of Japan or Germany for instance

> It’s not the wrong direction…

You can't make that statement without looking at a specific case where someone is, where they want to go and how the transit lines run. It often is the wrong direction, which consumes time.

I was staying by Columbia in Manhattan recently and wanted to go to the upper east side (straight east). Subway doesn't go that way. Need to take one south to 42st, then east to grand central then north to my destination. Easy example of having to go away from the destination. That one is not so bad as the NYC subway is pretty quick.

Close to home if I want to visit a shopping area two miles west, I need to take a bus 6 miles south to a central terminal and then another 7 miles north. Adds about two hours to the trip. Easier to bike there.

That's always going to be the nature of mass transit because it can't possibly be point to point for everyone.

> You are not describing differences between urban & suburban

I don't know what to make of this statement, since I'm specifically describing the different pros & cons of urban vs. suburban.

I don't see how that is true.

> mountain biking

The mountains are where the mountains are. Being the suburbs or cities changes nothing.

> road biking

I would never dare road bike on American roads. If anything, cities have more protected bike lanes.

> playgrounds for the kids, sports fields

Playgrounds are about having 22 people to play a game of football. Cities have both sufficient fields and sufficient people. Suburbs struggle with the latter.

> walking to friends houses

?? More like, being forced to be friends with the 5 families on the block, because no where else is walkable.

> having friends over (plenty of parking)

Hah, solving a problem of your own creation ? Cities don't need parking. You can have plenty of friends over using transit, who can safely have a couple of beers, because they don't need to drive back.

___________

When people explain suburbs like this, I have to wonder what shaped their opinions of cities. Surely you must have a specific perspective on cities, which would lead you to believe that cities struggle to accommodate these exact things. To a degree, We are in agreement. No one wants to live in cities in the way the US has built them.

IMO, Chicago, SF, NY, Boston, DC & Philly are the proper cities (as a non-American would recognize) in the country. Of those, SF & Philly refuse to deal with their public safety issues. Chicago has peculiar weather. Boston and DC are great, but are confusingly limited to oddly shaped and tiny city boundaries. This leaves NYC as the only city that is allowed to leverage its full city-ness. The issue with NYC is that most people do the FiDi -> Times Square pilgrimage and come out disappointed, having experienced the touristiest and therefore the worst that NYC has to offer.

> I have to wonder what shaped their opinions of cities

By far most of my city-time has been in the #1 densest city in the US, NYC (specifically in Manhattan). I'm on the record (in HN comment history) on how much I loved time in Manhattan when I lived in the east coast in my 20s. In middle age now my hobbies and lifestyle and family commitments are quite different and I'd hate living in Manhattan now.

The second city I've spent most time in is the #2 densest in the US, San Francisco.

> lead you to believe that cities struggle to accommodate these exact things

Cities do struggle to accommodate these things. Cities do come with pros & cons, it's good to be open about that. Pretending there are no compromises at all to make with living in a city is not a good way to promote city life. Some people love it some don't, all depends on the priorities. Sometimes the same person (like me) will love it at one stage of life and then want nothing to do with it in a different stage, because life priorities change.

> The mountains are where the mountains are. Being the suburbs or cities changes nothing.

Despite the name, mountain biking does not require mountains. It is off-road biking in forests, open fields and sometimes actual mountains. Clearly being in the suburbs vs cities changes everything. It is difficult in a city to ride out your front door into a forest or the mountains in reasonable time (Central Park doesn't count, as much as I've enjoyed tons of time cycling there, it's not mountain biking). In many suburbs this is easy. In the suburbs I'm less than a mile away from forest land where I can ride for hours (or even all day). Such places rarely exist within a city.

> I would never dare road bike on American roads. If anything, cities have more protected bike lanes.

Yeah, no. I did spend a lot of time road biking in Manhattan but I was much younger and foolish. As a road cyclist (more than a mountain biker) I don't really want to risk my life road biking in any city. Out here in the suburbs, I can ride out my door into rarely-used mountain and rural roads where I'll see a car maybe once or twice an hour. It is prime territory for road cycling. If I was living in a city I'd have to put the bike in the car (but what if I don't have a car?) and drive out to the suburbs to look for safe cycling roads.

> Playgrounds are about having 22 people to play a game of football.

Playgrounds means for the kids. These exist in cities but out in the suburbs they are larger and easier to access, cleaner and safer.

> Cities have both sufficient fields and sufficient people. Suburbs struggle with the latter.

Suburbs don't struggle with this. Surely the term soccer-mom is familiar as an archetype of suburban life? Because it is so common. I have several soccer fields just across the street and the kids take full advantage. I don't have time to research how many people in Manhattan live within a block of a soccer field but it's a tiny percentage.

> More like, being forced to be friends with the 5 families on the block, because no where else is walkable.

There are more than 5 families in a suburb. In particular, all the kids from all the nearby suburbs go to the same few schools, so they can all walk to each others houses which is very awesome at that age.

> Cities don't need parking. You can have plenty of friends over using transit

Yes you can, as long as everyone lives in the same transit. If you live in Manhattan and everyone you know does as well, it's perfect. There's even Seinfeld episodes about how people move out to Queens never to be seen again due to this dynamic. It's a tradeoff.

Dense cities can be really awesome, particularly in young adulthood. But it's not honest to pretend that there are no drawbacks. City living comes with a stiff set of tradeoffs, you gain many conveniences but you lose access to many activities as well. Whether it's paradise or hell really depends on what each person enjoys the most.

I think you're on the money with this. I live in Australia in a pretty walkable inner city area and there are countless amazing food options all around and there is also a KFC which serves absolutely appalling food for higher prices than the much better stuff around. Yet there is always a queue of cars in it since it borders a main road.

I can only assume people tolerate paying more to eat gristle if it means not having to park and get out of their cars. Meanwhile people on foot have access to everything.

I was ready to go to blows over how my home in Appalachia is home to a true food culture that is unique as far as US contributions go. Then the author mentioned BBQ so I guess they get a pass. People always seem to forget us but we really do have a unique food culture that treasures food and time together. Sure, we also are fat and like fast food but home cooked meals are pretty dang important in the rural areas at least.

* BBQ

* Biscuits

* Boiled Peanuts (Georgia)

* 9000 forms of Okra

* Beans and veggies slowly cooked with a bone, fatback, etc.

* Cornbread

* 9000 forms of fried chicken

* Native grapes called Muscadines that can make delicious jams, jellies, wine

* Countless ways to prepare deer and other small game (Sausages, Tips, etc)

Sunday brunch after church is often taken usually with friends from church. Just the other day I was at a burger joint that serves the best biscuits in my town. A few old men moved to my table and showed me a new game they came up with wood working.

Appalachian way of life has a great food culture but it's being absorbed by the large cities but I guess that's the circle of life.

Even canning culture is a thing here. Loads of people head up to the local cannery and hang out to make canned tomatoes , okra, chowchow

Edit: if you're curious about boiled peanuts, the closest thing you could probably find outside of Georgia would be edamame that's extra salty. I prefer mine Cajun

Boiled peanuts?? Never heard of that before. Sounds kind of gross. You eat them all soft and mushy? I mean I guess peanut butter is good ...

They are boiled until tender, and usually quite salty. you still de-shell them and eat the insides. I was a big fan when I lived in Alabama.

> Sounds kind of gross.

To me this is the proof in the pudding!

It indicates a distinctive difference that one group of people enjoys and another group finds repulsive. But with these types of things, if we share food culture, then many people can open doors and find that what they imagined as repulsive can actually be quite delicious. :)

apparently tons of videos on youtube.

It's a southern thing.

If you've ever had edamame, I would almost rank them as cousins. I personally find Cajun boiled peanuts to be way better but they scratch the same itch

> Boiled peanuts?? Never heard of that before. Sounds kind of gross. You eat them all soft and mushy? I mean I guess peanut butter is good ...

It's nothing like peanut butter, actually! They're savory, salty, and delicious.

They're boiled in their shells to the point that both the shells and the peanut are soft and mushy. The shells are filled with brine, and they're served hot.

It's quite a lot like edamame, but I'd have to go with boiled peanuts if I had to choose.

If you're driving through southern Georgia, you can get them at almost any gas station popup or farmers market. It's a small cottage industry.

Speaking of savory, you need to try bacon fat soaked collard greens and fried ocra.

Not just a American South thing. There's an old school Chinese snack of braising peanuts in soy sauce, sesame oil, some spices, and a small amount of sugar to make it both fragrant and quite tasty. I think Chinese style though is to shell the peanuts first before cooking for convenience of the person eating them, but I've seen some folks cook them in the shell as well.

> I was ready to go to blows over how my home in Appalachia is home to a true food culture that is unique as far as US contributions go. Then the author mentioned BBQ so I guess they get a pass. People always seem to forget us but we really do have a unique food culture that treasures food and time together.

It would make sense - in general the south has the majority of our home grown American food culture and contriubtions. They essentially consist of:

1. Southern & Soul Food

2. BBQ

3. Cajun & Creole

I can't speak to specfically Appalachia - as unlike the others - it has stayed more fixed to the region and most haven't tried it, but I could see it also being the case.

Following that category, the next largest asset in american food culture is the diversity of foods you can have, all of good quality (from people who know how to cook it). This is enormous, and not something you find it most other places abroad. You will find some varieties, but nothing like what you can see in an equivalently sized large or small city in the US. The only reason it'd rank after is that it's generally not new food contributions / culture - it's more a benefit for the eater to "eat abroad" while at home.

Every time I'm in California I despair over the utter lack of southern barbecue. Y'all've got great Asian and Mexican food, but you're missing such a quintessential staple of the human culinary experience. There's nothing like a good fatty barbecue brisket.

The south has so much good food, and it's starting to garner increasing recognition. Michelin is announcing which Atlanta-area restaurants get stars in late October. I've dined a lot in LA and New York, and honestly the south has been overlooked.

Boiled peanuts are very popular in south Indian food as well. The basic recipe is to pressure cook some peanuts soaked in water and tons of salt, although spices can be added as well. It's one of those foods that must be taken away from me, I can't physically stop eating them.

So the traditional way to make boiled peanuts in GA is to put them in a big pot over a fire and boil them for many hours on the side of the road. You see old men doing it and you pull over and pay them about $5 for a giant cup of them.

I don't have time for that so I pressure cook them and they turned out pretty good but nothing ever beats the flavor of the road ones haha

There's a whole industry of "reassuring Americans that America is number one" self-help literature, immensely popular with upper-middle-class Americans, They're one of the groups who have lots of disposable income to spend on Substack subscriptions and coastal online newspapers.

The usual article in this genre goes as follows. Pick a topic that Americans are predisposed to feel embarrassed about, and start with a thesis contradicting it:

- USPS is actually the best postal system in the world (my personap favorite, the post that couldn't deliver to AUS/NZ mid-pandemic, even though freaking Serbian post managed to do it just fine)

- Amtrak works better than Japanese rail

- US healthcare actually bankrupts fewer families than UK healthcare,

- the US has higher-quality food than the rest of the world, etc.

Then, latch onto an aspect (the US is bigger than Germany, Japan is a lot denser, the US has more food diversity, the US has better survival outcomes) that's at best significantly different from the common sense meaning of the original controversial claim, at worst completely orthogonal to it. Finally, support this modified thesis with a bunch of cherry-picked evidence from dubious economics journals, while ignoring obvious counterexamples or statistical errors (e.g. that one is comparing rural France to inner SF on food diversity, or anything at all happening in Australia, or any accounting for GDP differences, the one comparable vendor having <2% market share etc.)

There you go, the template for your hip article that will surely get quoted in the next Twitter war. I hear ChatGPT is pretty good at generating them these days, so you don't even have to be creative or have amazing writing skills to get your own.

Great observation. If you feed your examples into chatgpt and ask it for more essay topics like those, the result reads like a hilarious sarcastic roast of the US :D

This is literally anything for any place. There are surely articles in Japan by Japanese people that criticize a certain aspect of their culture and then reassuring contrarians that cherry pick things to tell people what they want to hear because it sells newspapers gets ratings etc. But yeah, jump on the F america bandwagon on hacker news and act like we're unique in these things. This is literally all humans.

The "Japan is number one" literature is presumably its own genre, with it's own unique tropes. I don't know (but I can guess: I can read Serbian and Hungarian, and I know that the jingo articles targeted to Serbians don't usually extoll the virtues of infrastructure, public services, etc. and have a rather different tone). And in any case ehat Japanese articles claim is unlikely to come up in an article on French vs US food, and doesn't provide context on the Twitter war in question.

However, if you've read enough of a foreign analogue of this genre, to be able to list its common tropes, I encourage you to make a similar post under a relevant article. It'll help people consume it with the appropriate amount of salt.

Overgeneralizing a but here, but from my POV conservatives tend to consume literature about America being number 1 while liberals consume literature about America being the worst. The reality is somewhere in the middle.

Nuance is a dead art these days. It's either I'm right and you are wrong. Its sad that discussion over the internet in general have devolved into this. And politics go this way as well .

American food is OK. I can consider an in'n'out (which I had when I visited the USA) a fabulous meal for some scenario, and a 5 course Italian meal (which I had in Palermo) as well , for different reasons.

Both are culture , just different culture. And both have good things.

Societies would be happier if we re-learned to talk with nuance.

But the actual article above is not at all like that? In fact it says the opposite (that the US isn't good at something).

I know. This was written to provide context to the Twitter war mentioned in the article.

I have never seen anyone tout Amtrak or the USPS. What universe do you live in?

Weird. As an American I feel like it's common knowledge that we have shit food options. The 70s-90s were basically the golden era of processed foods and generations of Americans have learned the hard way how detrimental this was for public health at large. We came out with things like Supersize Me and People of Wal-Mart that brought our terrible culinary cultural values to the forefront of public opinion. We were the fattest nation on earth for a while. Maybe still are. I don't know who is supposed to be shocked by the assertion that American food is worse than European food.

Depends of which European food. I'd rather eat US food than Dutch or English food. We kept eating in Chinatown in London because their food was both shitty and expensive. And we bought stuff from Indian grocery shops. I can't thank the Chinese and Indian immigrants enough for this. Germany was a bit better in this regard.

During our visits to England, in both Nottinghamshire and Sussex we had great (albeit not very varied, healthy or interesting) local cuisine. I was actually surprised, as I was aware of the stereotype that English food is terrible!

My resting theory is that England invaded most of the world because they just wanted something better to eat.

Their weather too. I always remember the opening chapter from Bleak House when anyone mentions English weather.

What I do like about their food is breakfast. It's simple, tasty and would set you up until 4 pm. Plus the tea and the cookies but I don't consider those "food".

The problem with English/British food is that some/a lot of restaurants care very little about the food, and more about maximising profits. These restaurants tend to be in the most highly trafficked areas, and in tourist spots.

So you need to research where to go. But English food at its best is as good as anywhere and pulls influence from a variety of cultures.

But I would rather shop in a general UK supermarket than a general American one any day. The food is not as processed and not full of crazy ingredients ( but is getting worse ), and you can often buy local.

> As an American I feel like it's common knowledge that we have shit food options.

If you live in a medium to large city in the United States you have great food options, but most people ignore them and go for the easy stuff.

> I don't know who is supposed to be shocked by the assertion that American food is worse than European food.

The article was probably intended more to play to the “America bad, Europe good” meme that permeates social media, not to shock people into some revelation.

The reality is that America does have good food options if you go looking for it, but it also has large amounts of convenient and processed foods for people to choose from. Turning this into another culture war topic isn’t really helpful.

The food options in big cities aren't that great, even if you go to try look for them.

This does not in any way reflect the America that I live in. The many immigrant communities that have made this city their home have high expectations for their food regardless of price point leading to a great variety of inexpensive and delicious food.

The produce is amazing and there are places to get great quality produce at a reasonable price.

There are dozens of locally baked breads for sale in local grocery stores.

So what’s the point of making such a generalized assertion? America is a big country and in my America the food is fucking dank.

I was in Europe (France, Spain, Germany) recently and the food was just better, every meal I had was delicious and much much more affordable than the US. The vibe of the restaurants and cafe in Spain was remarkable. It was like New Year’s Eve every night of the week.

Even the service at restaurants was absolutely outstanding and there is no tipping culture.

It personally just think food is the culture and America does not have that culture I’m sorry to say. Am I saying the food is bad in the USA ? Not at all. But it’s not in our DNA.

There are exceptions of course, Netherlands ? I still don’t know what they specialise in ? Sandwiches ?

America focuses on GDP and productivity, we kick ass there. USA !!!

This comment was so obviously written by someone with no clue before I even saw the username

What, you don't enjoy German dining where the vast majority of restaurants serve food made in a factory? What an unsophisticated palette you have. /s

https://youtu.be/wzc_VNh42HM?si=ngrOt5nHsadPCRuR

German food, great sandwiches, find me a better airport to eat in America than Munich?

To be honest I never really compared airport food because I barely eat when traveling so I'll concede this one.

Honestly this is what I meant by food culture.

Austin airport is ok, they have salt lick bbq, but that’s about the best thing I’ve had in an American airport.

In Spain recently I had one of the nicest Spanish ham and cheese sandwiches I can remember.

In the USA and Australia food feels more like a business, in my opinion in the flag ship European counties decent food is a right. Japan is similar too. When I’m in the USA I hang on review sites because it’s so hit and miss, in Tokyo or Barcelona I’ll happily just walk around and try random places.

The best food in America is Mexican.

Have you left the US and ate well? For what ever reason the food immigrants brought often isn't that great compared to what you get in the original country. Or there might be one spot that does it legit. But this food often made to cater to american tastes.

Thai food in the US is nothing like what you will get in Thailand. Average ramen in japan is better then US. Same for sushi. Mexican food drops off quickly the further you get away from san diego/tijuana. We just don't have the freshest ingredients for some of dished from places far away.

Counterpoint - I've had several people including vietnamese americans say that the pho you get in the US is better than what's in Vietnam because of the food inspectors and other government systems that ensure a safe food supply line and cooking preparation area etc versus Vietnam. I'll tell you I lived in Colombia and the best bandeja paisa is in texas versus the places in Colombia. I've spent years in Mexico and I can find mexican food that is almost as good. Nothing beats ramen in japan or sushi for that matter but some of the best sushi i ever ate was in a large city in the middle east and I've done several trips to Japan.

Americans aren't as stupid as you assume we are. We know often food like Chinese and Mexican is catered to us but the same happens all over. It's not like we're some special lazy garbage people. If you go to Spain and order Chinese, it's made to accomdate their tastes.

It's funny you mention that about vietnam. I have read that online a few times. I've mentioned it to a few vietnamese-american friends and they looked at me like I'm crazy. There are a lot of places taking shortcuts with pho in the US though.

I dont think americans are stupid,we just don't grow up eating food that is interesting and don't get used it. we eat carbs, sugar, butter/cream with lean cuts of meat. it takes work to explore food beyond that, so it doesn't happen and we get watered down international cuisines

> If you go to Spain and order Chinese, it's made to accomdate their tastes.

Just like how pho and bandeja paisa in America is accommodated for the American palette which would be why Americans (I'm assuming you are American) would prefer their version of the dish over the country of origin's version?

Furthermore maybe you like the Middle East's sushi more because the Middle East has no sushi legacy and can appeal to the Western palette more?

I agree that America can have incredible cuisine that rivals other countries, but that's sort of the article's point - the majority of America is still devoid of this excellence.

You need a immigrant community large enough to be cooking for their own palate. Los Angeles, for example, has a population of ~30K Thai, ~180K Japanese, and ~5M Mexican origin (numbers from Pew).

Plenty of options in LA for northern, Isaan, central and southern Thai between Western Ave and Thai Town, and pretty good ramen, soba, and sushi in Sawtelle, Little Tokyo or Torrance. Perhaps not best in the world, but not at all catering to American tastes and could rank above average in the origin country.

I spent time in Korea and with Koreans in the US and they've told me that food in Koreatown in L.A. is better than Seoul.

The food can exist, but you need to really search it out. That is different then if we had a strong food culture, this food wouldn't be hidden away in ethnic ghettos.

Sure, good example of that is r 3.4 out of 5 on the Japanese restaurant review site Tabelog is miles better as a signal of good food than any number of 5 star yelp reviews in the US.

My larger point was that LA and NYC (and specific communities in other cities —SF, Houston, etc) have a subculture that celebrates true renditions of various cuisines as cooked by an self-sustaining immigrant community large enough to not require external validation by Americans lacking in food culture to stay in business. You have to get lucky in most of the rest of the states.

I'm American and have traveled to France quite a bit and 100% would never say anything other than their food is way better.

If you cooked your favorite dish, your way, with French ingredients it would be better.

It's not just the cuisine itself, it's the quality of the ingredients and the care that goes into the ingredients themselves.

I live in San Francisco, Northern California has some of the best food in the US because there is a diverse group of people here with equally diverse and delicious food traditions, and access to very high quality ingredients.

All that to say, French food and ingredients are still better.

Some American food is French food. Creole food is amazing.

Creole food is amazing, and is French inspired, but I think it would upset some folks to straight up call it French.

Yeah... I'm sorry Louisiana

> If you cooked your favorite dish, your way, with French ingredients it would be better.

My favorite dish is fresh, wild-caught Alaska salmon. I'm not sure how one would cook that with French ingredients.

Salmon Meuniere w/ French butter.

Presumably with European butter, garlic and rosemary - all of which is readily available in all 6 of the grocery stores within walking distance of my apartment in LA.

Why would you put butter on salmon? Maybe on that farmed stuff? Wild fish have plenty of oil in them already.

I don't put anything on it but salt and pepper. Maybe some lemon wedges on the side.

farmed salmon is alot fattier than wild caught

Just enough butter so you can melt the herbs de province and garlic into the butter and brush it evenly over the entire fish. Then a bit of salt and lemon and sprig of rosemary, bake in foil at 375. As you said, with salmon less is more. The butter isn’t so much for taste as for perfecting the outer appearance and ensuring the garlic and herbs are evenly distributed. Experiment with dill seeds!

Also - we’re talking about how French cuisine is better and you’re rejecting butter? The conversation can end there: French cuisine is better because they use butter! A tip: every bit of salmon you’ve ever had at a restaurant was cooked with butter. Try it!

It's the fresh ingredients that make the difference my friend.

The fish, the veggies, the fresh garlic, whatever. That's what you are eating. You are not eating all the crap you put on it.

That's the point I'm trying to make. In America it's all about whatever nonsense we put on the dish. In France and much of Europe it's about the quality of the ingredients of the dish themselves, with minimal other stuff. Some olive oil, some butter. Here it's like the most complicated sauces slathered all over sub par main ingredients.

I'd much rather have some high quality (yet not expensive) pasta simply cooked with some olive oil and a bit of real parmesean cheese than a complicated sauce on low quality pasta.

Yes I’m sure in France they eat their fresh caught Alaskan Salmon plain with zero accouterments. (?!!)

French cooks would add fresh European style butter and fresh local garlic - both of which I can get at the farmers market. In France they’d use ail fumé d'Arleux - in California we’d use white Gilroy Garlic. Gilroy is 3 hours away, and the garlic comes straight here. Alaska is closer to California than to France, and we have cows here too.

My whole point is “how do you make wild salmon better: add some fresh ingredients”. The same they do in France. I’m not a fan of the dill seeds French fish plates usually have, tho I do add a little.

What are you talking about? French cuisine has plenty of sauces, and virtually no one eats cooked salmon with absolutely nothing else. French cuisine is pretty much at the bottom of the list of “not complicated” and “no toppings”, and good for them - plain food is not simply better. At LEAST a bit of lemon for goodness sake!

I have eaten simply cooked salmon in France many times, no sauce.

Its not that.

It's that the average French person has a more refined and demanding pallette than the average American.

The factory trawler caught frozen fish we purchase in huge quantities at Walmart and Costco is simply terrible compared to what you would find in the average French grocery store.

It's not like all the salmon in the world is the same. Go to a poisspnerie in France, you will find out what I'm talking about.

We're talking past each other. I'm sure I can't argue about the average french person and the average american person and I'm sure I don't want to. I was responding to "how can you make salmon better with french ingredients".

What’s your second favourite dish then that isn’t a single regional ingredient?

Specificity aside, the fish available at markets across France makes the fish counter at a typical American supermarket look quite unappetizing.

the seafood we get here is terrible outside of a few exceptions. And it takes work to get those. Which makes no sense with how much coastline there is. I dont think american like seafood.

Perfect example. Mine too!

Trust me, go to Paris, or anywhere in France really, get some salmon from a local poissanerie, buy some local fresh veggies and make it how you normally do.

It will be amazing

> It will be amazing

No, it won't. It will be Atlantic salmon, probably farm-raised, and it will suck.

(France is closer to Scotland than Arizona)

Also, as in Japan, the expectation of quality and the buyers for the suppliers have vastly different definitions of quality.

As with anywhere, you can easily choose to buy farmed or wild, whatever you want.

The higher level point I'm trying to make is that you can't go to Costco in France and get that cheap Chinese factory trawler caught fish like most Americans buy frozen from Walmart or Costco.

What the average American callas acceptable fish would not he what the average French person calls accepable.

America is a big place.

I'm pretty sure that the seafood I get here in coastal Alaska averages higher quality than anything you'll ever see in Paris.

Yeah, geographically big, but it's population centers are not equally spread out.

For example, Alaska. 0.2% of the US population lives in Alaska, and a small percentage of those live in the coastal regions.

The average American lives in LA, New York, Atlanta or Texas, etc. Not rural alaska.

The French also have Saumon à l'oseille, although I don't know where they get the salmon from, maybe Norway. But they have Maquereaux au vin blanc made with locally caught fish.

This writer is a prime example of a new writing genre, the American that sees the best in other countries but the worst in his own. It’s irritatingly present everywhere, especially by people (like the author) that have admittedly spent a couple months in France but feel justified in saying things about the food culture.

Here’s my experience, having lived in Europe and traveled around for about a decade.

- French coffee is terrible. American coffee options are dramatically better and the vision of American coffee as watery and overroasted is about two decades out of date. In fact, the entire third wave modern coffee industry is an American food phenomenon. Italian espresso and Turkish coffee, the “predecessors” of contemporary coffee culture, are actually not that appealing to most people in real life.

- America is significantly more comfortable with experimentation that just about anywhere. Sometimes this has bad results. Other times it has world-changing ones. A fairly significant amount of “food innovation” in Old World countries is actually traceable to American experiments.

Edit: just wanted to also add that this meme of all European meals as being “I’ll pick up some ingredients from the local grocer, then spend two hours preparing the meal, which itself is an hours-long social gathering” is just that - a meme. It happens sometimes, maybe more than in America. But Europeans eat fast food, they buy prepackaged meals at big box grocery stores, they get lazy, like anyone else on planet earth.

It's weird, in the 90s and 00s the people I met who had never left America seemed to think America was #1. Now, the people who have never left America seem to think it's shit. Ultimately it's just a lack of a frame of reference plus whatever they consume in their favorite media bias channel.

The median American has access to a wider variety of global cuisine restaurants than the median French person does. On the other hand, the median French person cooks and eats better food in their home (by far).

I suspect the dispute is just because the two sides are measuring different things.

I think it has more to do with the quality of the ingredients.

The quality of the average ingredient, both in taste but in wholesomeness is drastically different between the two countries.

One simple example that says so much. Check out the differences in food advertising laws. In France it's illegal to advertise non wholesome foods like soda beverages to kids. It's a whole different landscape.

Yes, I lived in Italy for a number of years, and a lot of the food is not particularly complex or fancy, but starts from very high quality ingredients.

Often in supermarkets, produce doesn't look perfect, but tastes great, because they optimize for taste rather than being something you can transport from LA to Minnesota in the middle of winter in a truck and still look good.

It's not just quality of ingredients (though that is part of it); it's also culture. Southern Europeans (understood in a broad sense to include the French) are less likely to tolerate regularly eating highly processed food, takeout, fast food, etc. and much more likely to cook at home from scratch than Americans are. Of course, the distributions overlap; there are Americans who eat like the stereotypical French person, and vice versa.

I've yet to find a grocery store in Europe that favorably compares to whole foods

This doesn’t really address my point.

> Food in the US isn’t central to our identities, not yet at least. It is still largely a utilitarian and transactional thing— something necessary to get enough calories, hopefully tasty ones, to stop being hungry and keep working.

I never really thought about it, but this is spot on. I typically eat a bowl of cold cereal for breakfast, while reading in my phone. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch in front of my computer while working. And whatever I can find to eat quickly in the evening so I can get to more important things. That has pretty much been my food life for 50+ years. I look at food as mainly a way to consume calories to keep me alive so I can do those things that matter to me.

French food can be good, and the best French food is probably in France. But the 2nd best French food is surely in the USA...and the 2nd best Italian food...and the 2nd best Indian food...and the 2nd best Ethiopian food....you get the picture

French guy does not have a baguette to snack on. But I get it, I might be salty too if I lived in a country that was once a world power but is now a provincial backwater, and one of whose main remaining sources of pride is food (an extremely valid source of pride to be sure, much more so than haute couture for example)

Hands down the worst Australian food is in the USofA.

WTF even is the Outback Steakhouse, some kind of bizzaro seppo joke?

Can't tell if you're serious or not but Outback is not Australian.

It's a cartoon caricature of Australia dreamt up by American franchise operators, ergo "worst Australian food" .. not even remotely like Australian food.

Yes, but it’s equivalent to going to taco bell and deciding based on that that America has terrible Mexican food.

Logically and linguistically it isn't equivilant at all.

Let's say hypothetically that the US has the best Mexican food - even better than Mexico itself, and that food is sold in Food Truk X that tours about in Dallas Texas.

Taco Bell still exists and (it seems that) you are open to the notion that Taco Bell is terrible terrible "Mexican Food".

Ergo, the US has both the best and the worst Mexican Food.

Outback Steakhouse is the worst "Australian Food".

Hey since you want to throw slurs around, let's do it!

Lived in Melbourne for years and "Modern Australian" cuisine is frankly the joke, it's far less interesting than the cuisines of the American South and Southwest which are rooted in the local produce and native cooking traditions of the New World, whereas Aussies seem content to slap together their spotty understanding of a couple European cuisines and serve a pavlova for dessert. Anyone who's curious to try "modern Australian" need not bother, as they've already tried it without knowing it, there's nothing new or local.

Sure .. but where are your slurs, wtf is "Modern Australian cuisine", and does anyone give a toss about Melbourne (it was overflowing with pretentious hipsters long before Sydney)?

Well that was anticlimactic

Anyway the real reason I replied was because I'm sick of seeing this slur 'seppo' online because it's basically like the N word but attacking all Americans instead of just some of them, and in five years down under no Australian ever dared to use it against me in person, it's just pussy keyboard warriors who break it out.

> Well that was anticlimactic

Agreed. I was mildly excited when you promised slurs, disappointed that you had none - insults are considered an artform here.

> and in five years down under no Australian ever dared to use it against me

It's regional, in some parts of Australia it's as common as "Yank", elsewhere you'll never hear it <shrug>.

> it's just pussy keyboard warriors who break it out.

Again, if you're going to throw slurs they actually have to have some bite that'll stick.

Still, no hard feelings, have an upvote for participation, and hopefully I catch any reply you make, it was only by chance I saw "the S-word" on newcomments and followed up on it.

I'm not Australian, but Southern American food is absolutely horrible, as someone who has lived there for decades (so more than your "years"). It's completely overrated, and the only thing arguably worse is the people who try to evangelize it.

I worked with an American from the south, "born and bred", as he wouldn't let us forget it. We were having a lunch conversation once where he was telling us about all the different cultural variations of southern food. Naturally, a co-worker and I were curious, so we were asking questions. We then went to talk about regional variations of our food (Chinese / Indian), and this was the American's response: "How many different ways can ya'll make dim sum and butter chicken?"

He seemed to not understand that regional variations actually exist outside of USA, and never backed out of his viewpoint that "only country in the world is the US that has cultural and regional variations of food".

I don't get

Give me your address, I'll send you a printout

Second best French would be in the UK, I’d say. Second best Indian food would depend on which regional cuisine but I’d say the UK or Malaysia would come before the US. Second best Turkish is probably Germany. Second best Thai and Greek is probably Australia. The US probably does have second best Italian though.

I think there's room for reasonable people to disagree about specific national cuisines. Where I don't think there's much room for disagreement is that if you looked at the rankings for all the world's national/major regional cuisines, the USA would have the lowest total by a healthy margin.

I've been told by multiple Indians the best place to get Indian food is in London. Even compared to India itself in some ways it's better, as you can get food from all the different regions in one place.

Indian food is the national food of the UK

Lifelong Indian here, London and Amsterdam had the best Indian food I've ever had outside of India. I've tried Indian restaurants across most large (and many small) cities in the US, in several countries in Europe, and obviously India. And then regularly eat/cook south Indian at home. To rank roughly:

1) Home

2) India (anywhere)

3) London

4) Amsterdam

5) San Francisco

6) New York City

7) San Diego

8) Los Angeles

999) Rome

I don’t know if that’s true. I currently live in Europe but lived most of my life in the US.

I’ve had amazing Italian and Indian food, and more authentic, in Amsterdam, than I ever had living in the US (lived in multiple cities and regions). Also incredible fresh Mediterranean food in Amsterdam and Switzerland, in addition to Mediterranean countries.

I’ve had delicious food in the US, but it was usually so good because of fat/salt content. When I have good food in different European countries, it’s more the freshness of the ingredients and preparation, as well as unique flavors. It’s rare to find food as fresh as I’ve gotten used to in Europe when I visit the US now.

There's a saying in gourmet circles that a reliable way to find a good French restaurant in France is to look for one with a Japanese chef. So I wouldn't be surprised if the second best French were in Japan...

The notion that the US has a singular food culture is suspect, it is much too large and too regionally and ethnically diverse for that to be operative. I always find it odd when Americans think the US has shit food options. Sure, there are parts of the US that have poor options but that is true across Europe too. Europe is not the good parts of France.

I’ve spent a lot of time across Europe and am a food nerd. I’ve also lived across several different parts of the US with distinctive culinary cultures. There are a few things which I think don’t translate well in this conversation. The US is a very large place with diverse climates and local agriculture, with different regions settled by different ethnic groups that have very different food that reflects local agriculture. Several claims are region dependent, both in the US and Europe. The US also has diverse cultures in relation to food, the eating and food preparation rituals are quite different across the US in my experience.

As an easy example, there is no food culture in Europe that is materially superior to Mexican food culture, which is the major operative food culture in parts of the US. I loved living in those parts of the US for that alone.

There are a few recurring patterns in the cuisine though. Many parts of the US have much better and more diverse vegetables, it is one of the things most consistently commented on by USians that live in Europe (I agree FWIW). Seafood is better in many parts of Europe, outside of New England and the Pacific Northwest. Beef in the US is better. Cheese in Europe is better. Things like bread depend entirely on where you are on either continent. Beer is mostly (not always) better on average in the US these days, and was often recognized as such a century ago before Prohibition destroyed it.

USian food culture is really diverse. If you do a road trip across all 50 states and eat the truly local cuisine and experience the culture around that cuisine, it is astonishingly local and often surprising. Much of it was brought by immigrants from Europe, or Asia on the west coast, and adapted to the local ingredients and milieu.

I love European cuisine and many aspects of the culture around it. Some of it is qualitatively better than the US. But many parts of the US have strong iconic food cultures that have no European equivalent that are unjustifiably ignored, with BBQ, Southern, and Mexican probably being the most identifiable. I don’t even like some of it but I recognize the rich culinary and cultural history of this food and the amount of care that goes into preparing it.

I really don't accept this as a generalized concept, denying the experiences of the roughly 1/3 of Americans who live in big cities in the US to then base your perspectives of the food culture of other nations on their big cities (Author was quick to note his experience in Paris) seems obviously biased. Further, I've not found a grocery store chain in Europe that is of comparable quality to Whole Foods (Don't pretend a store with 500+ locations is some impossible food-y standard).

Fair enough but you'd still need to compare to the actual experiences of the average American in a big city, not a wealthy person who can order takeout of a different cuisine each day.

> a grocery store chain

Here's your problem right there. There's not a real need for this, when you can just go to your local market.

Whole Foods works in the US because in most places this is the only option to obtain (quality) fresh produce. Not so in France.

It's a fundamentally different approach.

Ignoring the, let's call them foreign options of diversity, America as a whole is still too diverse IMO to really box it in as good or bad.

Cajun/creole is completely different than tex-mex is completely different than venison is completely different than barbecue is completely different than cheesesteaks.

Heck, even BBQ varies wildly. KC BBQ tastes completely different than (the superior) Carolina style.

Though I'm sure I'm just stating the obvious here, which is why such comparisons are silly and impossible.

Whenever I visit two things stand out to me:

- the abhorrent sweetness of nearly all things. There's some sort of sugar added to everything that makes it quite gross if your pallet is not accustomed to that.

- in contrast, the absolute blandness of fruit and vegtables. It is almost like they removed all the taste from those and replaced it with water. It does look very good though, spotless and excessively large, almost perfect, but tastes like nothing.

Also portion size, while this already has become oversized in Europe as well over the last two decades (with the exception of high end 7 course meals in expensive restaurants that are more bitesized), the US serves portions that would comfortably feed a family of 4.

One nice thing for the none timezone adjusted when you fly in: hotels serve steak for breakfast. That would be hard to find here.

It should be noted that McDonald's France rakes in over 5 billion euro per year.

Someone's eating it, and I don't think American tourists would account for it by an order of magnitude.

I also agree with the other poster that Italian food is far superior to French. So is Mexican (either "genuine" Mexican or Tex-Mex).

I've long had the impression that French food only got the reputation of being "good" because it was being compared to British food. :-)

You should look up french mcdonalds.

I did. Where do you think I got the 5 billion euro figure?

Yes, McDonald's France has some local items, as they do everywhere*, but they also have Le Big Mac and Le Royal Cheese (because of the metric system, as all Pulp Fiction fans know).

* Here it's the "Denali Mac" which is a Big Mac made with Quarter Pounder patties.

The thing you're missing is that McDonalds (and indeed, most fast food franchises) are far, far better in anywhere else but the US. McDonalds in Japan for example is leagues ahead any McDonalds you could find in the US and that's because they're often using higher quality fresher ingredients with stricter food standards.

> It is also a rather narrow definition, because having access to a lot of different restaurants serving a lot of different cuisines is currently only available in a handful of large and mid-sized cities.

It’s interesting to me how many people simply don’t believe that diverse cuisine could be universal in the US. I’ve been to towns of 5000 people with restaurants from four different nationalities.

Yeah, small towns all over the us can be very diverse. Article also acts like France doesn’t have poor people eating Nutella sandwiches everyday

To poor people in the US Nutella on a French Baguette would be a treat.

In the US poor people eat "peanut butter" that is made from some peanuts, and a bunch of hydrogenated palm oil or whatnot. The bread isn't even legally bread by French law, it's some weird thing made in a bread factory not a bakery and its shelf stable for 2 weeks but also not nutritious.

You can walk into a Walmart and get a jar of the cheapest store brand hydrogenated oil peanut butter for $3 or so, and a loaf of the cheapest store brand white bread for $2 or so.

Your luxury French Nutella desert sandwiches would cost closer to $10 for the Nutella and like $3-4 for the baguette

I'm not joking, Nutella is viewed as a real luxury here

I can’t defend American supermarket bread, but do you… not know that Nutella has palm oil in it?

Yes, I do

I dont personally eat nutella

I'm trying to tell you that it gets way worse than Nutella, Nutella is not poor people food here

You kind of proved the OP point since a poor french would probably eat a baguette with butter and a vegetable soup.

Ironically, Nutella is not French at all.

Italian, Mexican, Chinese, and regional American restaurants of the fast-food variety? That's four.

Tongue in cheek response aside, four is a tiny amount. It certainly isn't "a lot" of choice.

If you've got that popular selection above, you're still missing Sushi and Japanese, Spanish, Turkish, Belgian, Thai, German, French, Vietnamese, Greek, Indian, Colombian, Argentinian, all Caribbean options, Korean, Russian, Peruvian, Scandinavian, Brazilian, Ethiopian, Irish, Austrian, Dutch, Chilean, Polish, Moroccan, Persian, Lebanese, Pakistani, Malaysian, Filipino, and Indonesian.

And those are the well-known options. After that you're just venturing into cuisine where well-off city dwellers cannot immediately picture a dish.

This is the exact quote I came here to respond to, and it’s a shame you’re getting downvoted for it. Your average town of 10,000 people just about anywhere in the US will have a pretty decent Vietnamese or Korean restaurant, a great taqueria, a boba place, a craft brewery, a couple of hipster coffee joints, along with the stereotypical American fast food that you would expect. It’s not 1990 anymore. Immigration, internal migration, and the internet has made our palates pretty diffuse nationally.

That said, some of the statements in the blog post feel valid. The average American probably has access to a broader, more interesting, and arguably better variety of food than the average person in France, but the average eaten meal is almost certainly worse and less healthy, as we prioritize speed and convenience out of either necessity or preference.

One big difference I noticed when visiting France.

They have strict laws against advertising non wholesome foods and drinks to kids.

Its amazing how much of our advertising effort is spent on getting kids to ear and drink candy/soda/etc. You don't notice how pervasive it is until you experience the total lack of it.

On the International Space Station American and Russian crew agreed the French cuisine is the best of them both. Deliveries with European ATV carrying French food were seen as a particularly great opportunity for a better choice of food on the station.

Imagine bbq on the space station

My local BBQ place where I grew up -- Fincher's BBQ in Macon, Georgia -- sent some BBQ to space on STS-33 with Sonny Carter, who was from middle Georgia. Not quite the ISS but pretty close

They are still talking about it on their website 53 years later.

If you vent the smoke into outer space I guarantee you some hungry aliens will show up.

> agreed the French cuisine is the best of them both

OK, but that's not what the article is about. The writer is talking about "good food culture", not "good food"

Another example that makes me cringe every time is how Americans seem to have absolutely no knowledge or respect for food names.

Like the champagne vs sparkling wine debate. Like, yeah, champagne specifically comes from the champagne region, and it’s a white sparkling wine made with the « méthode traditionnelle ». We have hundreds of wines made with traditional method, with their own name, many better than actual champagne. But if you allow yourself to call everything champagne, you lose variety AND quality (just use crappy wine with a soda stream and call that champagne, this is probably what you get in some places in the US). Same for cheeses, don’t call it gruyère if it’s not Swiss or French, it might be the same ingredient, the same recipe, and might taste the same or even better fwiw, if it’s not from the correct region it’s not gruyère. And don’t get me started on American « parmesan ».

If you don’t respect name, there’s no way to be sure you’re getting the real stuff, and at this point you’re juste at the mercy of big industries selling you whatever crap they want. That’s why American products suck.

But is this not a prime example of gatekeeping?

… no?

When big companies fight Chinese copies is it just gatekeeping?

What a topic. The most disappointing thing for me coming back to the US from abroad is the food. We have a lot of immigrants but for whatever reason the food here just doesn't stand up to where it comes from.

American food it self is pretty underwhelming. It lacks flavor. Americans won't eat the flavorful parts of meat, wont eat anything with a head. Even boring Britain eats blood in blood sausage, you cant get out side specialty butchers in the US. It tastes great. Why can't we get fresh shrimp with their heads and shells on? The parts with all of the flavor. There are no spices or intense flavors. Even the sub cuisines the US does do OK in doesn't have intense flavors. BBQ got brought up which often relies on sweet sauces.

NYC pizza is a close to other countries ime of what food is like. It can be fast and good. It can be high end if desired. It's iconic and almost every likes it. Halal trucks also. Food trucks seemed to have potential, where people could experiment but they have gotten expensive, basically sit down restaurant prices.

Singapore has the best food culture imo. If you want an example what to strive for. Where there is good food at all price levels and experiences. People expect good food. To many places in the US get away with bullshit.

Part of the issue with the US i think is that its to hard to run a restaurant. There is to much overhead, regulation, hiring i suspect. So food quality suffers to keep a profit. There are to many mid tier burger places serving that same things. You cant just run a grill on the side of the road in the US with some seating.

IDK what with these comments acting like food in France is only baguettes and cheese? One of the popular food places in la marais is a falaffel place.

Damn I keep going, US has so much potential but its just wasted.

> I’ve spent enough time in places like Germany, Japan, Romania, Vietnam, Turkey, and Peru, to understand how different we are when it comes to food, and to see how little it matters to us, culturally speaking, compared to almost everyone else.

I am skeptical of this trope that Americans are somehow uniquely spiritually deficienct (for lack of a better term). I have heard this about food, socialization, work culture, and just about everything else. I used to believe it before I had really travelled or met people from other countries. I even planned to move to a different country because I had always been told of how much better they were.

I wouldn't call myself worldly now but the more exposure I have the more I feel people are fairly similar everywhere. They have different preferences partially shaped by their experiences and countries have various pros, cons, and quirks but it's along a spectrum. I don't think absolute statements about counties like this are particularly informative.

Is it fair to say that big foodie cities like NYC/LA/SF also happen to differ radically from the rest of the nation in their attitude and expectations of food quality?

Not really, no. Restaurants in NYC are a bit better and more varied on average than in, say, Phoenix, but I wouldn’t call it a “radical” difference.

No offense to Phoenix, but the difference between NYC and Phoenix is "radical" in every sense of the world.

Often times, Random neighborhoods in NYC have better food scenes than most major cities in the US. (including Phoenix).

I lived in Phoenix for 18 years and New York for nearly 8 now, and I really don’t think it’s radical. You can find decent food from most world cuisines in Phoenix. In New York you can find 100 examples of each of them, as well as some less common ones. But it’s not fundamentally different.

Foodie cities have amazing options, but they're different from the ubiquitous excellent food the French have.

Foodie cities have great farmers markets, but in much of France that's just ordinary in any town. Foodie cities have a wider diversity of ethnic restaurants than French towns, but in the towns every restaurant is always solidly great. There's just no room for Olive Garden.

I don't mean to get all utopian. I've had some so so food in France. But you can get great wines in every convenience store, for shockingly little money. The French really do care about food way more than Americans do. Those Americans who try are seen as being kind of weird.

A friend from rural France visited me in Seattle a few years ago, and we went to a farmers’ market. I explained that the market was only open on weekends. He seemed genuinely confused and asked “where do people get their food the rest of the week?”

> There's just no room for Olive Garden.

This is just so untrue. There's tons of fast food restaurants all across Europe. There's a McDonalds in most historic city centers in Europe, and often a Burger King and a KFC as well. You picked Olive Garden as an example, and it's correct that they don't have any franchise locations in Europe, but there's plenty of American fast food (and fast casual to some extent) in Europe from other brands.

They just have mostly the bottom of the barrel stuff, the stuff you find everywhere (Mcdonalds, KFC etc.). France even lost BK from 97 to 2012. I recall seeing only like 1 BK location in all of Paris back in 2015.

Look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fast_food_restaurant_c...

The US section is significantly larger than any other country. Having lived in Paris, the French are missing out on a ton of amazing fast food options.

I picked Olive Garden because I know that they have fast food, and it's pretty popular.

What they don't have is that sit down casual niche, of deeply mediocre and inexpensive food. It's filled with trattorias and bistros, which make the food in house. It's slower and pricier and smaller portions, but the food is made with more care and they feel that deeply.

" In a recent survey of French restaurants, more than a third fessed up that they serve industrially prepared, and often frozen, food. Fast-food outlets, mind you, weren't even included in that poll, which was conducted by Synhorcat, a French restaurant trade group. "

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/08/200106073/fr...

Ouch. I'd be interested in digging into that more deeply. I wonder which and where these are.

But Olive Garden has all you can eat pasta....I like all you can eat even though I probably don't eat enough to get my moneys worth, its the thought that counts. :/

One thing I hate about Paris is that everything is closed up pretty early. I'm forced to buy stuff from those convenience stores run by middle eastern folks.

> The reality of food in America, outside of a few high-status neighborhoods scattered around the US, is that most people don’t prioritize the varied experiences of eating at a diversity of bespoke restaurants, and so the median food eaten in the US is not from some well reviewed Indonesian place on the Upper East Side, or from that really cool Bolivian place in Alexandria.

Okay, but like the median food eaten in France is not fresh baguettes and pate either. So then this is still not a fair comparison.

But I think there is largely some truth that the US mostly inherited a Northern European food culture that valued utilitarian foods that preserve well. The idea of getting fresh groceries every day to Americans is pretty abhorrent.

> the median food eaten in France is not fresh baguettes and pate

It is. Fresh food every day is the norm, not an exception.

I've never been to France but as a midwesterner, I can confidently say I have easy access to a wide variety of farm fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat. I still often choose to eat fattier, saltier foods with lots of preservatives, but that doesn't mean it's unavailable. Whether that makes my cuisine "worse" depends entirely on the metric you're using.

I have a friend, one of the most unique individuals I've met, who proves that it's possible to have strong food culture in the US (SF at least). For him, food is an all-day event starting at 6:30am when he goes down to the docks to buy fresh fish. Then he'll go to an olive orchard to pick olives, which he takes to a friend who has the machinery to make olive oil. He picks cilantro from his garden to start the chimichurri as he peels garbanzo beans for the hummus. Etc etc.

When I was visiting him I wanted to stop by the Safeway a block from his house and he was fascinated by it because he had never been to a Safeway before.

It's amazing, and I respect it a lot, but here I am, I just ate some freeze dried french fries, and I'm OK with it. Most Americans are like me, and we're all OK with it. That's the point of the article. But, I will say, if you want to be a true foodie in America, the opportunity is there.

It's quite funny to read this as a British citizen. Just ask any European about popular views of British cuisine.

(Which are outdated, and often wrong)

America has some fantastic food culture and like everywhere else it has comfort food and frankly bizarre food. Everywhere does.

The complaints about portion sizes and fast food are about one segment of food culture overall.

It’s telling that the presented argument for our best food is barbecue, food that lacks vegetables. Us Americans do not know how to properly cook vegetables. Personally, I’ll take Greek and Italian cooking over French, but anything is better than the US. When I look at what my American grandparents ate vs my Greek grandparents, the difference is shocking.

My American grandparents and friends cook meals like steak, potatoes, and asparagus, which I find remarkably bland. When they go out to eat, they go to restaurants where there are no vegetarian dishes, everything is cooked in butter, and often has sugar added. The food is so over-engineered to stimulate the taste buds. They are going primarily for the atmosphere.

When I cook at home, I mostly make Greek recipes:

- Yemista: stuffed tomatoes and peppers with rice, pine nuts, and herbs

- Dolamdes: Grape leaves stuffed with rice

- Spanakopita: Phyllo stuffed with spinach and feta

- Potatoes roasted in olive oil drizzled with lemon juice

Not everything is stuffed, but that’s what the Greeks are great at! The food is so much simpler and more flavorful than steak and potatoes. When I’m in Greece, my family hardly eats any meat because the vegetables dishes are so great. Country salad with fresh tomatoes, onions and lettuce. Xorta: freshly boiled greens. Multiple dishes with eggplant and tomatoes cooked in olive oil. Kalamata olives and spread. Etc.

In Greece, love is expressed through food, so people spend a lot of time cooking food at home. But the quality of food at restaurants is so wonderful as well. It’s delicious, made with simpler ingredients, and vastly more healthy than what is served in most restaurants around me, which are unfortunately Texmex (flavorful but extremely unhealthy).

I have had wonderful vegetable dishes in Asian, Ethiopian, and Indian cuisine as well, but since I’m Greek, I recommend people tryout Greek cooking some time. It’s wonderful food and much vegetable focused than the stereotypical gyro. A good cookbook to get started is Ikaria by Diane Kochilas.

"Authentic X-country food" in US is not authentic. The mildest andhra chicken curry is unbearable for the average American palate. What US has is the appearance of diversity.

We have better food than France by any measure I could come up with. Despite this, the typical person living in France is eating far better foods than we are.

Tyler Cowen made some similar observations about barbecue in the US.

Also, food is improving here, a lot. I'm old enough to have seen people start to care more and learn about what's possible. We're not going to turn into Italy (which clearly has far superior food than France!) overnight, but it's nice to see higher quality food become more available and more popular.

It's amazing to me that someone would have the audacity and simple-mindedness to declare that 330 million people don't have any food culture. It boggles the mind. America is not France, or England, or India, it's food culture is as valid as any other country's.

I remember this Twitter thread and, as someone from the south, I was bemused that the defenders of the US mostly talked about restaurants rather than barbecue. Also how few people made fun of France for how much they love their (catastrophic) version of the taco.

Food is a utilitarian and transactional thing across the entire world. Especially in countries that have food scarcity.

The writer is bashing food that is 'transactional', when the article is literally about how he's paid a lot of money to travel the world and try diverse cuisine...

The joke I remember had "the cooks are Italian, the lovers French", not the other way around. Are Italians known for love?

You don't say. That's quite a revaluation.

This reads like the author barely knows the US. The US is 50 countries pretending to be one.

Even that chart about the US spending 1.5h on cooking is silly when you consider bbq culture in texas for example.

One of my first impressions of California in LA when I moved from a different state was how tasteless and bland every food I could get was. LA had a "foodie" reputation so I was shocked. Food trucks had "ok" fish tacos but even in regular tacos in mexican neighborhoods I tried were not spicy enough or even when spicy very tasty enough. I went to different neighborhoods to places with "5 star reviews" and ordered a lot using Doordash. I even took others to show them how great Thai food is and they commented (correctly) how that food they had wasn't particularly tasty. I don't know to put it, like the food was afraid to offend my taste buds maybe.

In NYC the pizza, italian food, Deli food, Shawarma trucks were all amazing to me. Miami, had a lot of tasty Cuban food (best ceviche I ever had).

I also had good french food in the US. You can have better tasting food in the US than anywhere in Europe, but the author is right that most people in the US don't go out of their way for that experience. The local cuisine in any part of the US reflects what the locals prefer. Any asian restaurant in the south will serve you iced tea for example and it all tastes the same.

Ultimately the author and the snobbish french are criticizing the tastes of the majority of americans not what type of cooking is available. They do not believe in democracy when it comes to culinary taste, they are culinary chauvinists who believe their measurements of taste and how their food makes them feel is superior to all else. Never mind the subjectivity of culinary taste.

The author is also clueless about how much food means to americans. In most of the US outside major cities, there is little to do outside of work other than eat. Just drive a lot to places and eat. Home cooking and soulfood mean a lot in the south.

The author and others just refuse to open their minds up to the possibility that other people can taste the same food (like me and LA area food) and have that mean something wildly different to them. How the food makes us feel is what we like ultimately and that is shaped by our life experience.

There is some significant food culture in the US:

(1) In grad school, the little town had lots of pizza shops with booths good for student couples! One of our profs was from Italy, and we asked him which was better, US pizza or Italian pizza?

His definite answer: US!

(2) I make pizza: Currently have a batch of dough rising: 750 milligrams of water, 1 Tablespoon of active, dry yeast, 1 Tablespoon of salt, and 1000 grams of bread and pizza flour.

Water, yeast, salt, and flour -- they may be the standard ingredients for a lot of breads, French baguettes, and Italian pizza and are part of culture.

(3) Last week had a big dinner -- carryout Chinese. We tried, but the Chinese food is a lot better in NY!

(4) I was raised on picnic pork shoulder BBQ, chopped. Now I'm where get the same thing except "pulled".

I make picnic pork shoulder BBQ -- on a rack in the bottom half of a granite roasting pan in an oven at 200 F to an internal temperature of 180 F (maybe 10+ hours) and then separate, chop, and sauce. Maybe add coleslaw.

(5) At least in NYC, the pastrami and corned beef can be terrific!

(6) US has strong traditions of turkey and/or ham at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. The gravy and dressing can be quite good. Typically there are deviled eggs, various salads, vegetable dishes, maybe some French cut green beans with some beef consomme, etc., various desserts, etc. There is a lot of associated "culture".

(7) Backyard outdoor grilled food parties are a big thing, a big "culture".

(8) The best in ice cream is really good, and likely the US has the best in the world.

(9) US pies, apple, cherry, pecan, etc., can be world class good desserts.

(10) US T-bone steaks are world class food.

(11) A California style Caesar Salad, borrowing a lot from France, can be terrific: So, the dressing starts with oil, vinegar, mustard, garlic, herbs, and then anchovies and an egg as an emulsifier. Then there are toasted bread cubes with the dressing as "croutons". The greens are Romaine lettuce. And can have more, e.g., some meats. It can be quite good and filling.

(12) The US does good things with lobster.

(13) The US was drinking enough fine wines from Europe -- e.g., from Bordeaux, Burgundy -- that wine growing got to be serious in NY and now CA, apparently a big, huge thing in CA.

(14) Can argue that in an important sense the US is by a wide margin the best in food in the world: So, look at the research and books of

     Nathan Myhrvold

     https://modernistcuisine.com/

That is, after doing mathematical physics for Hawking and getting rich at Microsoft, he attacked food seriously scientifically.

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