Went to Europe for two weeks. Ate like I was getting paid to do it. If I ate that amount of charcuterie and carbs at home, I don’t even want to imagine.
Came back and discovered that I’m now the weight I haven’t been since getting pregnant for the first time. (If you give birth after 35, the pregnancy weight doesn’t understand it’s supposed to go away after the pregnancy).
If I said it once, I said it twenty times. There’s something wrong with food in America. And I never buy canned or frozen and cook everything from scratch.
Also, the number of smokers in Spain is out of this world compared to America but life expectancy is higher and nobody is fat.
I really miss those weight-loss charcuteries.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes. We may be the greatest country on earth in many ways.
But not food.
Every other country I’ve visited is SO PROUD of their food. And for good reasons!
America?
Our beef isn’t even the right color. We do really perverted things to food here.
There are several contributing factors, but most of them come down to: industrial ag.
Crowding, chemicals, inappropriate feeds, antibiotics given to livestock for weight gain, soil depletion, mass production, refrigeration, animals bred for maximum production rather than flavor, and long-distance transit.
Ask any Peruano what country has the best food, and they will instantly tell you, Peru. Ask any Viet and the answer is VN.
Ask an American… and the answer will always be some other country.
I feel like we’d be more patriotic if we had better food 😉
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Even at the mega expensive farmers market here in town, carrots don’t taste like they do in Spain. They taste better than what’s sold at a grocery store but not as good as in Europe and at 5 times the price.
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IMO a lot of that comes down to breeding and soil. We do not take care of our soil, and have not for generations. Stuff is missing– stuff like magnesium– and unless you put it back, then no matter how responsible and organic your methods are, nothing with taste that great. The vegetable cultivars we favor are bred almost exclusively for size and appearance. It’s hard to sell a carrot that isn’t just the right shape, and within certain expected size parameters. American shoppers are weird that way. You can breed some exotic ones to be purple or yellow or white, but that’s a very niche market. To sell a lot, they have to look exactly like the kindergarten-picture-book version of “carrot” or people don’t know what to do with them. Zero food culture. Breeding for flavor is not a thing here. We breed for: shipping hardiness, size, sugar content, and uniform appearance.
I grow native landrace pumpkins in my garden. I never liked pumpkins before, I have no idea why I tried growing these in the first place. A lark, I guess. It turns out I LOVE pumpkins. They’re like butternut squash, but ineffably *better*. So delicious. They’re hardy, compatible with the local climate and soil conditions, they can be stored on the shelf for a year or more without spoilage, and I save the seeds to plant next year. Four years in, I’m being selective, saving the seeds from the best ones. Someday, maybe it’ll be my own cultivar. But I cannot even *give* them away, because nobody knows how to cook a pumpkin. Mine don’t *look* like their storybook idea of “pumpkin”– they’re smaller, the shape is highly variable (some of them are squat and ridged, some are smooth softball sized things, and some even have necks!), and they’re not that grocery-store-pumpkin shade of orange. More of a dusty, peachy color. It’s like there’s a mental block for unfamiliar-looking produce. This is deeply sad. People have no idea what they’re missing out on.
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Ok, I lied, I *can* give away garden produce, to exactly one person: my elderly Philippina neighbor. She has a deep appreciation for fresh produce, and no mental blocks about every vegetable looking like the Platonic Form of Green Bean. So she is happily sharing my garden’s overwhelming output of marble-sized tomatoes and red-speckled green beans. Peppers are just coming in and now I have african basil and lemongrass going… and I’m so excited to share those. It’s like she’s the only person I know who understands what food is!
This all feels very subversive. Like we are secret members of some underground food cult. I’m trying to convert my back-fence neighbor, who occasionally gives me fresh eggs from her flock of hens. But *even she* is weird about produce. Sigh.
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I noticed this myself when I’ve been to Europe, I’ve been to London, Rome and Limerick, Ireland, even Canada the food was better. Too many Americans think that if food doesn’t look uniform or has an odd color or shape, it must be rancid or inedible.
And the state of nutrition among young people is atrocious, I’ve worked in many schools where kids throw out perfectly good fruits and vegetables because they’re “yuck” but eagerly eat chicken nuggets and frozen pizza. The vegetables are just simple things like iceberg lettuce and baby carrots and fruits like sliced apples and diced peaches, nothing exotic. It’s disturbing to see that much produce go to waste, chicken nuggets and frozen pizza is the most processed “food” out there
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I agree about the food, but I think the car culture in the US plays a big part, too.
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Maybe, where I live in northern NJ there’s a lot of farmers markets and food specialty stores selling artisan cheeses or candy or whatever but they’re in towns that have pedestrian malls and the residents are affluent. If one lives way out in the suburbs where the only shops are big box stores in a strip mall, the quality of food is going to be worse since one has to drive there.
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Yes, we walked everywhere in Spain. My legs still feel pleasantly exhausted.
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It’s American exceptionalism for you. We’re richer than those other countries. Ultra-processed food started here. It made lots of people lots of money.
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Fine, want a diet of starches and processed food in the US?
Go all in for it.
But don’t bullshit people who know that Toronto pizza is better than Chicago pizza and it starts with the wheat.
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