Food in the US - or what are we really eating?

Interesting. How much did your steak cost in NZ? If I had to hazard a wild a$$ guess, Americans may be more attuned to get more (food) for less ($$) in terms of grub. If so, that's likely not conducive to quality. At any rate, that sounds like a great trip, and that final pic of the road would be a lot of fun to drive a Ferrari on!
T

 

What were you riding? Part of a tour?


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Damn, I'm majorly jealous.

 

USA supermarket CAFO meats are pure trash. I get all of mine from a deli or a butcher; the difference in quality is vast. The kicker? The price is about the same.

 

This trip looks amazing. Congrats and thank you for sharing!


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I agree with the posts here. The food in the US is not food. When i moved here, it took me 6mo to adjust to the food and i was lucky to be able to go to restaurants and good grocery stores. Still had trouble digesting and feeling super bloated most of the time.

Every time we go to Europe or Brazil, my wife and i rediscover what real food is. When we went to Brazil for the first time in 2010 ( first time since i moved to the US), and we had a first meal..we just could not stop eating and were amazed how good it tasted. My family was looking at me as if i was crazy and asking what is wrong since for them the food was good but not worth the excitement we were showing.

We were in Rio last year, and went on a date night in a new restaurant, nothing super fancy, and we could not believe how good the food was. The meat, the vegetables, the fish my wife ordered..We just could not stop talking about it.

So i really think there is something (or somethings) wrong with the food chain in the US. When i go to a restaurant here in Chicago or NY..the food is ok, but i would never rave about it. They all taste the same. I cant explain but it's all very generic tasting. As if the taste was fake and engineered. The fruits i buy at whole foods or Marianos taste OK. But if you go to any market in Rio and pick up a mango or strawberry or bananas, you will see what their real taste is. They taste so good you actually want to eat them, not just bc it's healthier than cookies..

 

One of the big unseen (tasted) dangers in modern food are the antibiotics still lingering in meats that may undermine the effectiveness in medicines when a person really needs them to function.

 

A local restaurant owner originally from Italy closed shop and went home due to what he called a genuine inability to purchase decent ingredients for his restaurant.

Also, my daughter lives in Ireland, and event the beef in McDonald's is better there. All farm raised Irish beef. Fresh, healthy food in the grocery stores at a fraction of what we pay here in the US.

 

The first time I had real asparagus was in college. Dated a girl who cooked it straight from her garden. True fresh food is a delicacy.

Cool trip Mark.

 

I lived in Brazil and the USA and don't have a decent explanation on why their food tastes so different. However, I discovered the following:

1 - Beef: in the US cattle are restrained indoors for part of the year and the diet is highly dependent on processed ration, whereas in Brazil cattle is raised free on the pastures and only eats grass, salt, and water. Regardless of the breed, I noticed that American cattle looks big and strong whereas Brazilian cattle is more on the thin side.

2 - Fruits & vegetables: a mango in Brazil tastes completely different than one in the USA, even though they were probably produced in the same place. The explanation is that fruits in the US needs to be imported or/and shipped over a long distance and therefore they are harvested much earlier than the ideal maturing time. In Brazil they harvest vegetables only when they are mature and it reaches the markets in one or two days. I heard that the price for such freshness and quality is a high waste rate. Also, I heard that fertilizers and agrochemicals are heavily used in the USA and it has a big impact on taste. Seems like most of the soil used in Brazilian agriculture is already good and demand less fertilizers and agrochemicals.

I have to say though that I bought great beef, lamb, and veal in New Hampshire and Vermont but they were all from local small producers.

 

So what is the solution? Most of us are too busy to grow our own food and invest the time to seek out only the best products to cook with. We are left with the products our local grocery provides and making the best choices we can at restaurants. "Organic" has become more of a brand name than a description of the product. Is it hopeless for us?

 

It sounds like you would prefer a farmers market over a grocery store. There are also pretty good butcher shops in the US if you look around there. It definitely beats the grocery store.

 

A friend just got back from touring Italy, France, and bits of the UK.

At home? She avoids all "gluten," and had been diagnosed as having "celiac disease." I've seen her have issues with VERY small amounts of wheat flours (i.e.: a bit used to make a roux.)

In Europe? She at first avoided "gluten," but then ate breads, pastries, and pastas like there was no tomorrow. Nope, none of the "gluten" gave her ANY problems.

 

The common brand breads here in the USA are complete trash. They start with low nutrient value wheat and add potassium bromate and load them up with corn sugar. It's a negative quality product start to finish. It's impossible to buy a quality bread from a supermarket these days.

 

Things are not uniformly better in Europe. The UK chain Iceland banned the use of Palm Oil in products it retails for environmental reasons, but gave the statistic that it was the basis of more than 50% of its products!

I know that my favourite bakery has changed all its products to palm oil based facsimiles of their products of ten years ago. They are no longer satisfying at all. I buy them based on the memory of how they used to be and association, but I'm drifting away.

The brand name ice creams nearly all use palm oil and other oils, in place of cream. After you eat them you don't feel full and satisfied, and you are aware of an artificialness and a strange aftertaste. I first noticed this about seven or eight years ago because my pets stopped trying to eat my ice cream. So I started reading the labels and buying the real cream based Ice creams. The weird thing is that now they won't even touch those, they act like you have put a piece of plastic in front of them. If I make Ice Cream myself they go nuts, which makes me highly suspicious of the "food science" that goes in to these.

Another thing is Supermarket Pizza. They retail for virtually nothing ..................... How do you make a full size Pizza for retail £1.50 ????