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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

Blood oranges are indeed great, and no doubt fresh squeezed blood oranges are wonderful.

But I have (and still occasionally) live in Italy and have been very frustrated and annoyed with Italian OJ. I have to vehemently disagree with the notion that any kind of Italian OJ, at least as sold in grocery stores in Italy, is even remotely as good as the US kind. Italian OJ is high-temperature pasteurized, depulpified, put into tetrapak cartons, and radiated. It tastes like a mixture of the orange juice you get in plastic bottles in US vending machines, plus Tang. The blood orange version strongly brings to mind Minute Maid Fruit Punch. And it's expensive!

The US OJ industry makes stuff which is far from fresh-squeezed, but it is absolutely light years ahead of European variations in taste, and I think the reason is simple: Americans drink a ton of it. It is one of the very few foods in the US which Europe simply cannot approach.

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You're drinking the wrong stuff, is all I can say. You've got to get the ones from the refrigerated section, not that crap that is sold at room temperature - that's no good.

And if you don't want it out of a box of any kind, you can get it fresh squeezed from many places. Nothing beats that.

> You're drinking the wrong stuff, is all I can say. You've got to get the ones from the refrigerated section, not that crap that is sold at room temperature - that's no good.

Trust me. I've been there many times.

    > Americans drink a ton of it. It is one 
    > of the very few foods in the US which 
    > Europe simply cannot approach.

Just like coffee, I presume.

What else, in your opinion, makes that short list? Fried chicken comes to mind for me, although Korean fried chicken may have surpassed the traditional US creation.

The book I posted elsewhere points out the biggest thing: barbecue. They "grill stuff up" here in Italy, and it's quite good - especially a fiorentina steak - but it's not barbecue.

On the good side, you can get quite a wide variety of food in the US. Italy is very nationalistic about its food, and people, in general, are not as inclined to try new and different cuisines.

> They "grill stuff up" here in Italy, and it's quite good - especially a fiorentina steak - but it's not barbecue.

WELL.... the US makes great barbecue, but that's a unique cuisine. My experience in Italy is largely Emilia-Romagna, the breadbasket of Italy, and what they grill, out in the countryside, is nothing short of amazing. Grilled salami on piadina (a unique soft local flatbread), big slabs of grilled pancetta dripping with fat and salt, just unbelievable. I have had absolutely nothing approaching this in the US grill-wise.

So here's my list.

The US does better:

* Sandwiches (easily)

* Hearty soups

* Non-european, non-mediterranean international food (easily). Ethiopian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Indonesian, Cuban, Mexican (duh), Vietnamese, Persian, Afghanistani and Pakistani, all vastly superior in the US than in Italy, if you can even get it.

* Anything US Jewish Traditional

* Large-fish seafood in some cases: stuff you make steaks out of.

* Cookies (sorry Italy)

* Cereal

* Steaks, maybe, it's a tough call

Italy does better:

* Seafood except for a few big fish. No comparison.

* Most meat dishes of all kinds, except maybe steaks.

* Italian food (of course)

* German, Spanish, Greek, and Turkish food

* Salads

* Ice cream, without question

* Nearly all desserts

* By-the-pound deli-ish things

* Cheese and basically all milk products, no comparison

* Charcuterie (Salames, Sausages, pancettas, prosciuttos, etc.) So much superior to even the best stuff in the US that it's not even funny. Heck I'm married into a family which makes their own salame and prosciutto at a local farmhouse. This is not uncommon.

* Vegetables of almost all kinds. The only exceptions I can think of immediately are things that are unobtainable in Italy, like pecans.

* Organic products.

* The flour is more flexible. Italians have both soft (low-gluten) flour for pizza and piadinas etc., and a hard (high-gluten) flour for breads. It's very hard to get equivalent types or quality of flour in the US despite our huge wheat industry.

* Bread and pastries. No contest.

> * Bread and pastries. No contest.

I'd give that one to Austria, of the places I've lived, actually. The US has some pastry type things that are not common in Italy, like muffins, but like many things there, many people put too much fat/sugar in them, icing on top, etc... which kind of wrecks things.

Another surprising one I'd give to Italy is hot chocolate - it's thick and creamy, not like the watery stuff you get elsewhere.

> I'd give that one to Austria, of the places I've lived, actually.

Pastries, sure. Bread, no.

Ice Cream or Gelato?

(In my mind it breaks down to gelato, soft serve ice cream, and hard ice cream)

Well, I don't know if such divisions make sense in context of this discussion. In Italian, "gelato" refers generally to all ice-cream-consistency-frozen-desert-ish stuff, including for example sorbet (sorbetto). So my comparison was the whole US family versus the Italian family of frozen gelatinous ice-cream-like desert substances. Italy wins hands down, no contest.

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