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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The people eat great food.

In my taste-experience, which of course does not necessarily correlate with their health benefits, American fruits and vegetables are low quality. Even farmers' market produce supposedly grown like 20 miles away from me tastes plasticky and empty. A few years ago I was in my birth country, Russia, in a part of the country a few hundred miles south of Moscow. The produce tasted wonderful. I suppose that this might be some inherited biological birth-preference or childhood preference of mine, but I kind of doubt it.

What is the food like in India?

Never felt this tbh (just returned from europe). Fruit tastes similar. Go to farmers markets in LA, they seem fine.

Local produce in the US- especially the south- is way better than the generic mass market stuff.

Yeah, this is one that I generally feel the Euros win on. Having a simple pan con tomate in Spain is almost irritating due to how clear it makes it that American tomatoes suck. Lots of good food to be found at restaurants, easy to get excellent meats and cheeses at the butcher, but the fresh produce is simply inferior to what you'll find in a typical European city.

Just grow your own tomatoes. It’s trivially easy and crazy cheap. And you can grow any variety you want. I’ve got six different varieties growing right now, some are close to harvest time.

We have a few out on the porch. Live in a townhouse though, no backyard for a meaningful garden.

Uh.. I mean it's food, I've never stopped to think overly much about the exact quality of produce. It looks about right, isn't filled with worms, and keeps in the fridge. That's about all I can say.

I'm a very bad Indian. Or at least a non-stereotypical one, so I don't like most of it.

Now biryani, that singlehandedly justifies the Mughal occupation in my eyes. You wouldn't believe how I missed it when I saw the awkward semi-recognizable versions I found in the UK.

But say what you will about our cuisine (Indians have multiple cuisines as distinct from one another as Greek and British cuisine are to each other, maybe more), we know how to use spices and make flavorful food.

But I like Western cuisine more overall. That's just me, no broader judgement implied.

I should add that my experience of American food has been pretty shit. The vegetables are tasteless and overgrown, the pork smells and tastes like it was marinated in a sewer (and that’s only an exaggeration most of the time), and the chicken is this spongy tasteless unrecognizable species of meat.

I’ve had good American food as well, but it was definitely the outlier rather than the norm.

Edit: also everything tastes too sweet for some goddamn reason

So you've met the people who overcook the shit out of everything.

And also beefsteak tomatoes.

I mean that even when it's just me cooking, the chicken is remarkably bad, the pork is absolutely rank for some reason, and the vegetables are stringy and bland even when I try to buy from either ethnic or higher-end grocery stores, compared to what I could do with equivalent ingredients elsewhere; and this is even more true for many (non-fancy) restaurants. I mean, seriously, what is up with your chicken? It's horrible!

(American beef is pretty decent, though.)

That isn't to say that there aren't good restaurants in the US -- I've been to a fair few -- but I don't think the food is particularly good outside of, say, New York and LA. Even San Francisco was pretty disappointing, even if it wasn't horrible.

Steakhouses and grillhouses are pretty hit and miss in my experience, and there's really only so far that I can take burgers, pizzas, doughnuts, fries, barbeque, cheesecake, etc. as "good food". Americans have managed to butcher most continenal European foods that have travelled over the pond; Italian-American is on the whole really not close in quality to Italian, for example. This goes down to individual food items, too - the bread is just better across the Atlantic, as is yogurt, as is the seafood (especially around the Mediterranean), ...

And don't get me started on the "ethnic" cuisines. Most of the Japanese food in America is a travesty (or at least it was until very recently, and I haven't had the opportunity to check in the last five years), similar with Korean food (mostly pretty shit). Most of the Chinese restaurants in SF were unimpressive; I think I thought one, maybe two Chinese restaurants were good, and maybe another handful were passable to decent? I thought SF was supposed to be a city with a high Chinese population? And I haven't even got around to most of the Malaysian or Thai food.

Put another way, America is the only place I know of where the food processing is sophisticated enough yet the average food quality is bad enough that the food in Honey Honey Boo Boo makes sense.

On the other hand, Western cuisine is good. The few times I've been to Europe the food has generally impressed me. I'm not sure why Americans can't seem to replicate it.

I'm in it for the grease and massive portion sizes my dude, they could paint the cheese green and call it lettuce and I wouldn't complain.

(You're Japanese right? Maybe it's because they didn't use much MSG)

I'm in it for the grease and massive portion sizes my dude, they could paint the cheese green and call it lettuce and I wouldn't complain.

I see that you truly are an American in spirit.

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