Super-Size Me: Adventures with American Food

I just have to say something about American food for those who haven't been here. All foreigners here feel they have to discuss it and compare notes whenever they meet and it's not that hard to see why; you'd expect the food to be the same as other Western countries but, in so many ways, it just isn't.

The bread it sweet. I don't understand why, but they add glucose syrup to all bread here. You know the hamburger buns at Maccas, all the bread is pretty much like that. You can buy wheat bread (light brown) or Italian style but they still have added sugar!

Everyone who comes to American for a holiday comments on how fatty everything is. They don't seem to really bother trying to keep their meat lean. Supermarket chicken and beef are very fatty but the bacon is unbelievable. Bacon is not middle rashers like in Australia, the American cut is about 90% fat!! (I normally trim the fat off the edge of my bacon but when I tried that with American bacon I had nothing left!) More surprising is that they do have a lot of low fat products, just not the ones you'd expect - like a low-fat ice-cream with choc-chips and cookie-dough in it!

The cheese is orange! (Again, think Maccas.)

Not many Americans drink hot tea (Southerners drink a lot of iced tea) since the Boston Tea Party so they haven't discovered the electric kettle yet - they use a stove-top whistling kettle. Everyone seems to drink drip-filter coffee which is ok but most cafes serve it too so it's hard to find anything stronger. And iced-coffee often comes black and unsweetened (being cold it's very hard to get sugar to dissolve)!

One of the difficult things for me cooking for myself is that there are not many short-cut sauces. Most of the instant sauces are for very boring dishes (eg macaroni cheese) and contain tons of MSG!

All these things I'm getting used to avoiding but the problems are sometimes more fundamental. I mean that Americans have different taste-buds to us. They have cherry-flavoured soft drinks! That one caught me unawares a couple of times now.

I have been trying to eat sensibly and I feel a little reassured when I see that the staples here are enriched with vitamins: bread and rice have iron and folate added; milk has vitamins D and K added. I had assumed that the hot sunny Indiana summers would be enough to prevent rickets but maybe the winters are longer and darker than I'm expecting. The cold weather is starting already, but I'll save that whinge for another post.