14 ms·

Yes, this is a huge worry for me. The quality of food in the US is atrocious. When I was there, almost nothing tasted as it should, everything tasted bland and

• CalRobert 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I live Ireland and moved here after 30 years in the US. I agree that the TTIP is a terrible idea (and feels a bit like imperialism chasing after me as I exit). Food on the continent is a sheer delight for the senses. However, if you visit this fine emerald isle, you will find the US has no monopoly on bland, mildly sweet food. (To be fair, we _do_ have some pretty great cheese)
  • coldtea 10y ago
    >However, if you visit this fine emerald isle, you will find the US has no monopoly on bland, mildly sweet food. Well, apart from whisky, nobody ever considered Ireland a place for good food. For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine.
    • orf 10y ago
      > For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine. As someone from the UK I take offense at that, sure we might not be on the same level as Italy or France (but really, who is?) but we have some great traditional food. Pies of all kinds, fish 'n' chips, traditional sausages, good old roast dinners, chicken tikka masala and of course the healthiest breakfast in the world. Tasty stuff. And lets not forget our mayonnaise and ketchup beats all others, hands down.
      • TorKlingberg 10y ago
        I came across a great article from 1946 by George Orwell, where he both explains the problems of British food, and comes to its defence: http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/british-cookery/ http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-a... I think I blame the British connection for some of the issues with American food: overly sweet, fish without bones, little seafood, etc.
        • SideburnsOfDoom 10y ago
          A summary of the problems of British food from 1986 would no longer be applicable. One from 1946, even less so.
          • wtbob 10y ago
            True enough — but it explains where British food got its bad reputation from. As it happens, real British food is delicious: savoury, flavourful and just generally wonderful.
      • CalRobert 10y ago
        I remember ordering garlic chips for the first time after moving from CA. I had been foolishly looking forward to a meal of fried potatoes, olive oil, Parmesan, salt, and lightly seared diced garlic, with perhaps a bit of parsley (or, dare I dream, cilantro/coriander). I thought it might bring back memories of nights spent at Giants games What I got was chips with a gigantic blob of sightly garlic-scented mayonnaise plopped on top of it. Disappointing, to say the least. To be fair, there is some fantastic food, but you have to look for it. Dublin has some surprisingly good burritos, for instance. I think the issue comes from the fact that inexpensive street food in places like Italy is phenomenal, but in Ireland and the UK tends to be mediocre.
        • coldtea 10y ago
          >To be fair, there is some fantastic food, but you have to look for it. Dublin has some surprisingly good burritos, for instance. That's hardly what one means when talking about a good national cuisine though... The UK also has excellent Indian restaurants, but that's again something else.
    • vilmosi 10y ago
      > For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine. That's a myth that's refusing to die, it's not true at all.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        In what ways? Where in the world do they care for British cuisine?
        • vilmosi 10y ago
          Everywhere. I haven't stayed in a single hotel anywhere that doesn't serve English Breakfast. And I'm sure a lot of people are enjoying a Sunday Roast or a Chicken Tikka Masala every now and again. But of course, I know there are a lot of ignorant people in the world, which is why I admit the myth persists.
          • tremon 10y ago
            Chicken Tikka Masala That's not British though, it's Indian.
            • vilmosi 10y ago
              It's a British national dish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tikka_masala
              • tremon 10y ago
                Have you read the article you linked? Chicken tikka masala is chicken tikka, chunks of chicken marinated in spices and yogurt, that is then baked in a tandoor oven Those don't sound like British words... let's follow the links: Chicken tikka is a chicken dish originating in South Asia. A masala is any of the many spice mixes used in Indian cuisine. The name comes from the Hindi word for spice. The tandoor is used for cooking in Southern, Central and Western Asia. Did you mean British commonwealth, or British isles?
    • aiPhie5u 10y ago
      Having lived in various EU countries, I'm still amazed by how unaware of taste people are in UK and Ireland.
    • CalRobert 10y ago
      In addition to great whiskey (whisky is Scottish), Ireland has a lot of really great microbreweries. There's some fantastic beer here.
    • rahimnathwani 10y ago
      What foods have you tried in the UK, that turned out to be bad? Perhaps I can recommend different restaurants for you to try.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        First of all, not talking about Indian, Chinese or whatever restaurants in the UK. Talking solely about the British cooking tradition. Second, my point is not that I had some pot roast or fish and chips that were "bad" -- as in bad cooking (although you get that too a lot). My point was that even cooked the best way, they are nothing to write home about compared to other national cuisines and their dishes.
        • rahimnathwani 10y ago
          "Talking solely about the British cooking tradition." Then you're talking about food which: - Is a very small proportion of all food consumed in the UK - Is the food least likely to be affected by TTIP (as it's traditional, many/all of the ingredients are readily available and don't need to be imported) So, regardless of how you or I feel about traditional British cuisine, it has little to do with the comment to which you replied (which commented on the potential impact of TTIP).
    • chimprich 10y ago
      You're quite out of date. The food in the UK has changed beyond recognition in the last 10-15 years. It's still possible (but increasingly rare) to find bad food but in any decent-sized city there are many great places to eat. London in particular has some of the best food in the world.
    • wtbob 10y ago
      > For UK of course it's even worse, they're actively known for the bad taste and cuisine. Only by people who've no idea what they're talking about. British food got a bad reputation due to, I think, three factors: first, it's the native cuisine of the English-speaking world (which means both that people don't notice it and that there are a lot of cheap, poorly-executed examples to hand); second, rationing during and after the Second World War badly hurt both availability of ingredients and folks' taste for ingredients; third, Victorian-era institutions were terribly efficient at churning out 'scientific,' 'cutting-edge' food-like substances which were almost but not quite entirely unlike the real article. Native English, Welsh, Scottish & Irish cuisines are all delicious.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        >Native English, Welsh, Scottish & Irish cuisines are all delicious. Anybody that cares for it the way people globally care about French, Italian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Japanese, even German etc food? One can find more Korean BBQ joints than British restaurants the world over... Let's put it this way: some countries have more interesting (to the world) cuisines than others. Not every national cuisine is of the same caliber.
        • dragonwriter 10y ago
          > Anybody that cares for it the way people globally care about French, Italian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Japanese, even German etc food? As I understand, there was a long down period essentially as a side effect of the way industrialization played out in Britain, but that's turned around recently internally and there is growing international acceptance of the British cuisines among people who are into food. It hasn't reached the same kind of popular currency as some other cuisines, globally, but I'd not be strongly inclined to think that's due to inherent quality factors, rather than awareness.
  • rahimnathwani 10y ago
    I'm ethnically Indian, and grew up in London. So I'm used to having good Indian food both at home and in restaurants. I recently visited Dublin for the first time, and picked an Indian restaurant based on Yelp ratings/reviews. I've never eaten worse Indian food than I did that day. I don't believe that the restaurant operators are unable to make OK food. They were Indian themselves. Perhaps they had to change their flavours to adapt to local palates, and their ingredients due to economic pressure?
    • CalRobert 10y ago
      I think there is some adjustment happening, and I've never had great Indian food here. It's certainly not as large a part of the cuisine as it is in London. I find the same thing happening with Mexican food with regards to dulled flavours.
      • goda90 10y ago
        I recently moved from Utah to Wisconsin, and the drop in quality of Mexican food is astounding. Even the gringo-ified chains in the western United States are better.
    • tim333 10y ago
      I had a friend who was French and ran a French bistro in Galway. He said his Irish customers didn't really appreciate good food and were more into cheap booze and chips so maybe they cater to their market. That said there are some very good restaurants here.
      • CalRobert 10y ago
        In fairness, Galway is a big student town. I think you'll find similar sentiments in student towns around the world.
    • TheCapn 10y ago
      Friend of my girlfriend used to own a Chinese restaurant in Canada and said that he had to have alternative recipes for the locals because they didn't like the traditional flavors. It's a shame though, I've had his food cooked in a more "traditional" sense and it was bursting with flavors. I sort of always assumed is how it goes in North America.
  • stephencanon 10y ago
    Cheese and bread. I would take good soda bread over almost any other country's national starch. *and oysters, but one can't really take credit for the ocean currents.
  • mcv 10y ago
    There's plenty of cheap crap food in Europe, but at least it's labeled as such. Pretending something is something it isn't, is lying to the customer. It should be illegal.
• jokoon 10y ago
  Unrelated, but I was just debating GMO labels on "change my view" on reddit. I admit I was trolling that if GMO are healthy, then ultimately there is no harm in a neutral label. My comments got downvoted very hard. It boiled down that those labels would essentially be a form of misinformation, or that the uneducated public would make uninformed decisions. I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but the post got 400 comments.
  • realusername 10y ago
    It's exactly like democracy, no one wants democracy when it goes against what they personally want.
    • matthewmacleod 10y ago
      That's a bit of a lazy analogy. Loads of people want democracy, even when it doesn't achieve their goals.
      • Noseshine 10y ago
        After watching the Brexit aftermath I think it's safe to say there also are loads of people who don't. The Brexiters are all just stupid and misinformed (focus on all, and no look at ones own chosen group for comparison), "mob rule", whataboutism (the Brexiters too would have continued to argue had they lost), etc.
  • pipio21 10y ago
    The fact is that nobody knows if GMO are healthy or not. This is like saying that "machines are safe". It makes not sense, there all all kind of machines you can design. You should study a specific machine case by case. Gene modification is enormous, and open to all kinds of unintended consequences. Just because we don't understand it yet it does not mean it is safe(we modify genes without really understanding what they really do with detail, we are unconscious ignorant). I believe people should be able to buy GMO food if they what , but with traceability, if something wrong happens, and something wrong always happens with everything, to know it soon and do something about it. But traceability is exactly what companies like Monsanto want to destroy. Look at Volkswagen, when something wrong happens, with traceability the lawsuits alone could bankrupt the company if people have children with leukemia or autistic and a scientific connection is proven.
• 13of40 10y ago
  I'm from the US, and currently vacationing in Spain. My wife and I typically only eat at restaurants once or twice per vacation, so we've got ample opportunity to try local groceries. In my experience, the food here is superb. Some tomatoes we've bought are quite bland, but eggs are good. Preserved meats tend to be good (I mean tasty, maybe not good to eat all the time), and raw meats seem to be good quality and hygienically stored. I did find a decent, locally made IPA this morning for about $2.50 per 12 oz bottle at the Carrefour. My impression is that if you're a stranger to a place, it takes a while to find the good places to shop, because if you've only been there a week you might be trying to buy steak at the 7-Eleven.
  • jfim 10y ago
    Just a heads up, Carrefour actually is a very large multinational hypermarket chain, not a local grocery. It's one of the top ten retailers, on roughly the same scale as Walmart and Costco. They just don't have a presence in North America. Mind you, the food they sell is still significantly better than an equivalent low cost grocery in the US.
    • 13of40 10y ago
      I find it really odd that when comparing European and American grocery stores people somehow turn a blind eye to the "supermercat" places you can find about three to a block here, whose sole mission is to sell dusty canned goods and 90 degree wine to desperate people who can't find anything better.
• uhtred 10y ago
  If you knew what happened to the animals your cheap meat comes from, or what their meat contains, or what the process of raising those animals does to the environment, you wouldn't consider organic meat to be ridiculously priced.
  • deleted 10y ago
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• JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I get decent meat from my neighbor, who raises hogs and cattle. Bud dresses it for a reasonable price. Make my own horseradish from plants I inherited from my father. Hot as I like it. Chocolate from my sister's shop, who gets it from the Winan family who have been making it for 4 generations - they temper their chocolate only with more chocolate so no wax or junk. They get their chocolate liquor from their Nicaraguan plant that processes beans on site. Doesn't cost any more. My brother makes wine from grapes grown on my southern hillside. But I live in rural Iowa (USA). Not everybody can live this way.
  • ethbro 10y ago
    Unfortunately, a lack of standards and enforcement removes the ability of consumers to knowledgeably choose their food. If organic / grass fed / 100% / fish species meant something, then consumers could decide whether they wanted to spend more for quality or save money on alternatives. With a lack of differentiation, race to the bottom prevails. PS: The shenanigans from international importers are criminal. Trade pacts should include a clause where one-sided tariffs can be legally imposed as punishment for a lack of export policing on the sending country's side.
    • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      That's hard because each country has different standards. Why should Spain have special customs/inspections for goods destined for America? Makes it very hard to export. Simpler by far to inspect inbound with a uniform policy.
      • ethbro 10y ago
        As the proportion of international:domestic trade continues to increase, I'm pessimistic it's ever going to be effective to inspect inbound shipments. Aka blacklist vs whitelist computer security policies It's too easy for a willful infringer to cloak their goods in the sheer volume of imports. The vast majority of which, by economic necessity, will never be searched in a thorough manner. Furthermore, if you do detect counterfeit/dangerous goods on the inbound, what can you do without cooperation of the exporting country? About the only option you have available is "ban all X from Y" until the other party does something.