Not just typical. It should be celebrated. I for one throughly enjoy seeing cross cultural exchanges of any creative type. Exotic doesn’t need to be derogatory or dehumanizing. (it’s really unfortunate that it most often is.) Everybody is exotic somewhere.
You should see some of the “American food” they sell in some parts of Europe and Asia. I feel like it’s pretty typical everywhere to misunderstand and exoticize other cultures.
Wolf314159@startrek.website 1 day ago
yermaw@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I want to visit America one time just for the food. I keep hearing from American TV about twinkies and red vines and all kinds of stuff, then I try them whenever I get a chance here in the UK and theyre so bad. I need to know for sure whether we’re getting a version that conforms to our food laws and they lose a lot in the process or if theyre really that terrible.
blarghly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I really doubt you’ll be impressed. Those foods are made for children, who have bland pallettes and like sugar. And adults who never advanced past this stage.
You can get good food in America. But it won’t be a twinkie.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
The store-bought junk food is pretty bad in America, to be fair. But foreigners also tend to overestimate their popularity, because American media is largely funded by product placement; The average American probably hasn’t eaten a Twinkie in months or even years.
Restaurants are where you’ll truly experience American food. You’ll be amazed at how much flavor is packed into each dish, and at how large the portions are. But the latter is largely a cultural thing; Americans typically have leftovers that they take home. Europeans will see the feast-sized portions on the table and immediately go “no wonder Americans are so fat…” In reality, Americans would expect to take half of it home.
bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
I’ve had one Twinkie in the last 20 years, and it was breaded in panko and deep fried.
blarghly@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You are extrapolating a lot from your own experience. I can confirm from my own upbringing that my family always had junk food or soda in the house - eating it was a daily occurance, and it was re-added to the grocery list each time we ran out with little thought given to the potential health impacts. And we only took home leftovers if it was, like, a really big meal.
Sure, not all Americans are like this. I’m not like this, and none of my friends are. But I am aware that I very much live in a bubble.
HoopyFrood@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Americans typically have leftovers that they take home
Are you just not aware of how overweight Americans are on average? As i understand it we have been conditioned to believe these insane portions are “a meal”. I was simply unable to start losing weight until i traveled to Mexico to discover and internalize what a normal meal portion is. If you go to a restaurant in the US, you should expect to see most of the people around you finishing their plates
countrypunk@slrpnk.net 8 hours ago
As someone from one of the most obese states in the union, the core of the issue is most definitely not portion sizes. Food quality is shit and most people will eat ultraprocessed foods on the daily because money is tight for most people and fresh/healthy food is hella expensive assuming there’s even access to it. If you have the same amount of calories in ultrprocessed food vs real food, your body will still gain more weight from the ultra processed one because it is less satiating because your body burns through it much faster.
Small scale organic farming used to be the norm in my grandma’s time, but nowadays younger people don’t know what an okra plant looks like or cracked open a pecan. Additionally if you’re even able to access and afford fresh produce it’s mainly water and is not nutritionally dense. This is an issue with the entire food system that’s been built on shipping stuff from far away and profit incentives. Not to mention the targeted advertising of ultra processed foods to kids…
Also, there’s virtually no public transit and the small amount of pedestrian and bike infrastructure is laughable and outright dangerous. You have to have a car to get to most places and most places require a lot of driving to get to depending. That means sitting down for most of the day. It’s hard for most people to get exercise in daily life without being super intentional about it, and a lot of people are overworked and underpaid on top of that, so they understandably just wanna relax. As with most things in life, the answer is always complicated.
OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The US’s obesity problem is more complicated than that. It’s not just that our portions are big. Americans have to work pretty long hours too. That means much of our lives we probably aren’t getting much exercise, and when we get home a lot of us don’t have a lot of energy to cook so we probably eat a lot more pre-packaged food. Stress also contributes a lot to weight gain.
And once you have gained a lot of weight, all of those problems, plus the fact that healthcare is so expensive, make it even more difficult to lose.
GhostedIC@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Everybody in America seems to remember liking Twinkies as a kid but they’re nasty now. Debate continues over whether the twinkies changed, or we did.
Hackworth@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
The UK food laws may be partially to blame. But American junk food has also degraded over the decades. A twinkie from the 30’s-70’s didn’t taste the same as a modern twinkie, with some unknown portion of its sugar replaced by HFCS. But at least sugar is still the first ingredient in a twinkie. Plenty of other iconic junk food has been engineered into nonsense and just rides on the fumes of its former glory.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
I’ve traveled a lot for food, and, despite not living and never having lived in America, the US has the best “foreign” food I’ve ever had. The best Chinese food I ever had was in the US, for example. In fact, I think high (and high-ish) cuisine in the US is generally quite good (despite crazy sizer portions WTF).
I’ve had incredible Korean food in random towns (~20,000 pop.), incredible Indien in another (<50,000), etc.; I think the US is kinda special when it comes to foreign food like that.
And, of course, there is some American-American food that is amazing. The greatest filet mignon I ever had was also in the US (and again, random small towns, not metropolitan cities). Also: donuts (not from chains) can be craaaaaazy good. Also cheesecake, though I actually prefer the German version of New York cheesecake (cheese cake is originally German, New York improved it, them Germany improved that).
The problem is grocery store food. It all has 3x sugar and chemicals compared Europe. Literally everything, sometimes even organic stuff, tastes fake and disgustingly sweet. It drives me crazy, and is one of the top reasons I would never live in the US. I also dislike the espresso there: nearly all specialty coffee I’ve had in the US has either been extracted by untrained barista or have been bad copies of faux-skandinavian roasts. I think that situation is better in larger cities though, which I’ve spent less time in.
Ok, sorry for this very, very long ramble. Just some thoughts on American food from someone who didn’t grow up there but has tried a lot of it.
Badabinski@kbin.earth 1 day ago
God fuck our coffee. I finally got an espresso machine somewhat recently just so I could have lattes like the ones I had in Europe. A good latte should not need sugar! Espresso should be yummy!
Wolf@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
If you want good American food, when you get here go to a Chinese restaurant.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
They’re shitty junk food with nostalgia. As other’s have said, try our Chinese food. And our Mexican food. Also hit up an American restaurant here, especially a diner. Oh and wherever you go ask the locals about their local food and try it, (it’s not weird, we do it when we travel domestically) you’ve probably heard of stuff like Chicago deep dish and Philly cheeses teams, bur basically every city has something they cook good or unique and are super proud of, like Cincinnati has a style of chili they put on spaghetti.
America’s best cuisine isn’t our mass produced mass market foods, its the stuff immigrants came up with to square their cuisine with the available foods and local tastes.
countrypunk@slrpnk.net 8 hours ago
Southern food has entered the chat.
In all seriousness, southern food is some of the best food the US has to offer IMO. There’s a shitton of diversity within the category and it has a lot of flavor and spice.
Almacca@aussie.zone 1 day ago
A lot of the stuff in those foods are banned outside of America, and for good reason. You’re getting the better version, such as it is.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
America and Japan have this as a special cultural relationship. Are the yankii cringe, obviously, but my little yank heart is warmed by seeing people look at aspects of American culture and asking someone to hold their vending machine Asahi. I hope they feel the same about weebs. The thing is we all just see each other as kinda cool and exotic and so we riff on each other’s shit.