with canned goods. Giving every restaurant who uses their products a homogenous taste.

not the corn growers as much as the "buyers" - sweet is an evolutionary driver and we are addicted. we have little food culture in modern USA so we are attracted (trained, led, fed) to shit that various middlemen produce and "enhance" for profit.

The American diet is heavy on sugar & sodium. When I'm cooking from recipes, I almost always cut sugar in half & leave out the sodium (unless I'm baking).

Probably a truck with a "Sysco" or a "Ben E. Keith" logo.

Try asking for something like a half-side of fries, beans or something with your meal. It probably comes in a sealed single-serve plastic bag that they nuke or drop in boiling water to heat up...they can't give you a half order because it doesn't come bagged that way.

We have a rule-of-thumb: If a place advertises on tv, we don't bother...but then we only go out to eat maybe 4 times a year. But when we do, we want it to be fresh made from truly fresh ingredients. We don't mind if it costs a little more because we do it so seldom. Several of the restaurants in our rotation we see the chef/buyer/owner at our local farmers market buying the veggies for the day/week.

I find almost all restaurant food too salty. Especially soup.

I guess it's a habit.
Food is way too sweet here. It makes me gag, but apparently, the public likes food to be overly sweet and sugar in everything.

I can just look at a plate of food and immediately know how much salt to shake on it.


But if Einstein saw me do it he wouldn't hire me.



Since my doctor made me cut out sugar all I crave is sugar. Office donuts just about kill me not to eat but they'll kill me for sure If I do.

At least that is the reason that food processors will give you.

I love savory foods and am annoyed when there are sweet flavors put into foods that are savory. Bought some whole grain wraps from Mission and they were sweet as a cookie. The ingredients proudly listed "organic sugar." I called the hotline to ask if they made any products without sugar and they sort of yawned and said "no...is that all?" *click*

Then I saw sugar listed in their "traditional style flour tortillas" WTH?

In the US restaurant food all has a similar taste which is:
- canola oil
- excessive salt
- real and artificial sweeteners

Just bought a loaf of Sara Lee's new brioche bread and granted, I expect brioche to have a sweetness to it but this has the most disgusting 'Bazooka Joe' note. An odd chemical sweetness that cuts through everything else.

Sweet is sweet and savory is savory and the two don't really mix often. I don't eat out much in America. For me the biggest shock is fruit juice in Europe vs. here.

(that I loved).

To me the great thing about Italian food is the bell tone purity of the tastes. And then the way they stack one pure flavor against another.

Basil, mozzarella, fresh tomato slice...done!

Meanwhile we sweeten fruit juice (!) and make is syrupy. We are like a nation of hummingbirds.

Made from Water Buffalo milk.

Some Trader Joe's stock it -- flown in from Italy, and some gourmet grocers and cheese shops also. And yes! whole different creature (literally). I love it when it blisters in high heat like a toasted marshmellow.

I worked for a while in the same building as Alitalia's US HQ and they would let us all eat lunch in their cafeteria because they were so proud of their food. Much of it was flown in to JFK. My grade school prepared me well for the working world

American coffee was not drinkable.

Usually are not representative of an entire national cuisine. Chinese food in America was for many years versions of Cantonese cuisine. And that food had almost a century to Americanize before other types of Chinese foods were introduced.
Sichuan style food wasn't available till the late 1970s and it didn't take more than a decade for it to be assimilated.

The same is true of Italian food, mostly from Sicily and Southern Italy and almost a century of mainstreaming.

Here in the Northwest most of our original Mexican restaurants were started by people from Jalisco state. More recently we've had immigrants from Puebla and other states. We'll see how that shakes out.

back in the day. And with the exception of transfats, sugar is far worse. But the sugar lobby won so they started to make everything fat free and replaced the fat with sugar to make the taste. Of course now we know sugar makes you obese and healthy fats should be a small portion of your diet.