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This depends on the metrics chosen to evaluate. My german passport offers significantly more visa free travel options, but the German government is notorious for not really giving a shit about citizens getting stuck in crisis abroad. For example when the Sudan civil war broke out, Americans were evacuated in a pretty crazy and expensive military operation, while Germans were told to buckle up and keep their heads close to the ground...
Which is a great marketing stunt that most countries (Germany included) couldn't afford, but otherwise, how often does it actually happen? I doubt they're spooling up Black Hawks to evacuate tourists every time there's a crisis somewhere.
And the USA is?
Get real. They won't help you either or if they do they'll charge you!
When it comes to that nothing beats a French passport.
France chartered planes when no one knew how bad it was.
Americans were just looking with envy.
I know of one case where they just married so that the spouse could be evacuated.
One of my absolute favorite things to do any time a friend from overseas who only knows American food from our media portrayal comes to visit is to take them out to eat and watch their eyes light up. The best reaction I got was from a UK friend I met on WoW— "good lord I see why you're all so fat" said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. If there's one thing America can do it's cook.
Not realizing this is typically American.
> [...] said through a mouthful of cheeseburger
> If there's one thing America can do it's cook
FWIW, a variety of other opinions exist :)
I don't blame him.
UK is also a place with amazing immigrant/ex-colonies cuisine (as in great places to eat), but if we were talking about the British cuisine itself, getting above it is far from a high standard.
Our day-to-day diet is poor (we're probably the most Americanized European country when it comes to diet), but there are good bones we could build on. Someday. A lot was lost to industrialization and WWII and can't be recovered, but much still survives.
But the food I actually saw in the USA was mediocre.
I didn't have any interest in 20 varieties of Oreo or bars of chocolate with bits of pork in it (for the latter, I'm vegetarian); the stuff that Whole Foods sold had slightly less flavour and variety than European discount stores like Aldi, Trader Joe's might as well have been a corner shop; the fancy restaurants were merely OK, the only positive of the fast food joints was the low cost, the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafes and diners were on par with the random UK town centre breakfast diners you try once to see what they're like and never go back to, all the pubs were somehow even worse than Wetherspoons (UK chain with a bad reputation), the "cheese sauce" on tortilla chips was on par among the absolute worst approximations of cheese I have ever encountered.
And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?
The best food I had in the country was at a place covered by an NDA; but even that, the best, was "4 stars out of 5" by European standards.
America, outside of New York and maybe Orlando, isn't really set up to entertain international visitors. Many restaurants charge a high price because they serve food that kids like and parents can tolerate. Fast food is optimized to eat in the car; delivery pizza is optimized to be delivered, which is something you should never do to a decent pizza. Nachos are a meme. Whole Foods was good ten years ago; a decent host should have pointed you to Wegman's or Market Basket or Publix. Trader Joe's is great when you live here and you want to get a good price on a bag of "wild rice" (manomon) or pecans, but you wouldn't usually live off of it.
If you want to enjoy the food here, you probably need to go with a local.
>And why is half your yoghurt thickened with gelatine, anyway?
Because Americans didn't eat yogurt until they started marketing the fat-free stuff as a diet food. Real yogurt is an afterthought for most manufacturers, though Dannon sells the real thing. Now everyone has switched to strained ("Greek") yogurt so the market for the normal kind is even less.
My visits there were between Christmas 2014-15 and the end of summer in 2018, Whole Foods wasn't that good even on the first trip.
> If you want to enjoy the food here, you probably need to go with a local.
I did, that's how I got the "oh, you gotta try this while you're in Manhattan!" cafe — can't even remember the name of that cafe now — and Whole Foods, and the Co Op in Davis, CA: https://maps.app.goo.gl/38HdERDX99vxBzF66
Overall your description seems to be broadly agreeing with me, so I'm not sure how it's supposed to "abolish" my low regard for American cuisine?
Shows something about my perception of time. I have some fond memories of the first time I went to Whole Foods in 2003 when I was eleven at math camp in Charlotte. At that point the "organic food" movement was just getting started, so food labeled "organic" was usually from independent farms, and the store had so many free samples you could practically have lunch for free. By the time I was in college I was going to a warehouse market (Your Dekalb Farmers Market in Atlanta).
I'm not sure why you would go to a grocery store as a tourist?
>Co Op in Davis, CA:
Davis is a very small town that basically just serves the University. Why would you go there? Was it for a symposium? I'm sure it was pretty good for local produce by the standards of a small town when it was the season in California, but it's not exactly the sort of place where you would normally visit. I lived an hour away for five years and never went.
Anyway it just seems like you got some dubious advice, and on behalf of America, I'm sorry.
My partner at the time had family living there, working at the university; this is also how my trips were each a month long.
If you want to surprise the entire world by having your government do anything like that, entirely your choice.
But it would be a surprise, especially as the people your electorate just voted in appear to be against all regulation and federal agencies.
Americans voting for that would be as much of a surprise as the President demanding transfer of ownership of an ally's territory and refusing to rule out use of military force to get that.
Walk into a restaurant in Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Tel Aviv, Seoul, Tokyo, Lisbon, the food is going to be much better.
Maybe at the top, the very best restaurants, the US holds its own. But the standard for the average restaurant is low.
It's not usually the "top" restaurants that are the best in the US, I take people to dives, little holes in the wall, and greasy food trucks that just happen to be where some artisan decided to hone their craft. The place that cheap plastic tables and still has a line every day.