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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Go to Italy or France, or any EU state. The food is better and often cheaper in almost every case.

Even a McDonald's hamburger is good, and not dominated by the fake chemical garlic substitute. In the US, McDonald's french fries contain: Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Natural Beef Flavor [wheat And Milk Derivatives]), Dextrose, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate (maintain Color), Salt. natural Beef Flavor Contains Hydrolyzed Wheat And Hydrolyzed Milk As Starting Ingredients.

In Italy, the ingredients are: Potato, Oil, Salt.

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I hate to break it to you, but a lot of that difference comes down to labeling and disclosure requirements. If the Italian fries don't even have to disclose what type of oil they use, they probably also don't have to disclose the oil stabilizers and seasonings they use.

Let's not forget that Europe had massive epidemic of horse meat being snuck into the supply chain with no one catching on.

I think your cultural palate is showing. The marketing of a few simple ingredients sounds good except it's not like American McDonalds is putting them in for no reason. You can make the case that fillers are used to cut cost but for french fries all that stuff costs extra. To Americans that shit tastes great.

* The beef flavor is mimicking frying in beef tallow. If you use Marmite in your brown gravy you're using the same trick.

* Americans, being flushed with corn and corn syrup which is sweeter than granulated sugar, developed a sweeter tooth than other places which is why the dextrose.

* Potatoes once cut and exposed to air get that gross dark color. Most home cooks usually solve that by keeping them submerged in water until frying but Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate works the same.

Mate, that is labelling requirements. I guarantee most/all of those ""horrible"" ingredients are present in Italian McDonalds.

EU law mandates listing all the ingredients in the food, you can't pick and choose:

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/f...

But what does the EU consider an ingredient? Apparently you can just say oil and call it a day. The U.S. is clearly requiring that everything that composes the oil is listed individually. Surely you can see as clear as day that "oil" is not very specific?

>The U.S. is clearly requiring that everything that composes the oil is listed individually.

Unless you can put it under "natural and artificial flavors and colors" which covers all the things you should actually care about.

I hate to break this news to you but there are countries outside of the EU.

The FDA also bans more food dyes than the EU.

I didn't say there was no world beyond the EU. I'm not personally acquainted with every nation's food regulatory regime. I was just struck by the obvious qualitative difference between even the lowest quality food.

Feel free to regail someone who cares about the food regulations of the world.

The FDA factoid is cool -- they just didn't ban the dye that causes cancer.

> Feel free to regail someone who cares about the food regulations of the world.

You're the one that responded to my comment about comparing the US to the rest of the world by saying I needed to compare it to the EU. I didn't hop into your comment chain with random factoids.

> I'm not personally acquainted with every nation's food regulatory regime.

Didn't stop you from providing uninformed commentary tho.

> difference between even the lowest quality food

Have you been to a farmer's market in the US? Potatoes are potatoes. In fact, potatoes are native to this continent and we have more potato cultivars to choose from. You can get very high quality meat there.

Saying all US food is lower quality is kind of a wild opinion.

Not to be “that guy” but you did reply to someone saying “most other countries” with a counter argument citing three, then waved away the fact you’re unaware of most other countries. That’s where the pushback is coming from. The US tends to be a little more progressive than the middle of the pack in this space and set the global standard for food safety regulation where none existed before. The cherry picking of a few examples when discussing global comparisons is fraught and the US always exists in this world where whatever topic there’s always some other place doing better on some metric used as some argument the US is a steaming pile of refuse with wandering zombies laden with cancer and illiteracy. It’s not intellectually honest or particularly helpful in discussion of the actual problems. Anyway - that’s where the pushback came from, not that these three countries regulate food dye additives better or not.

I love all kinds of world cuisine, but I did not find the food in France to be better or cheaper than the food in the US, on average (and I love French cuisine). The pastries and wine though... different story!

This is CLEARLY due to less strict labelling. I mean they just say "oil", what kind of oil?!?!

McDonald's hamburger good in Italy? No way.

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