=food =america
- In India,
it's common for people to eat mostly Indian dishes.
- In Thailand, it's
common for people to eat mostly Thai dishes.
- In Japan, it's common for
people to eat mostly Japanese dishes.
- In Indonesia, it's common for
people to eat mostly Indonesian dishes.
So, many people around the world
have the impression that Americans mainly eat "American food", and the only
kinds they're familiar with are hamburgers, fries, and pizza, which means
Americans eat those every day. (Around 1/3 of Americans eat fast food in a
day, of any kind.)
But America is something of an exception in how
much of its food culture is taken from other countries. There are Mexican
restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Indian restaurants, and so on, to a
greater extent than in most countries. This makes it harder to talk about
"American food culture" in general, but there are still some common themes
that are somewhat specific to America and found in both fast food and
hipster restaurants. Unfortunately, as is often the case with American
culture, the things I like happen on an individual or subculture level,
while the overall trends are things I dislike. Here are some of them.
trans fats
If I wrote this
post a few years ago, I'd be complaining extensively about partially
hydrogenated vegetable oil, but it was finally banned at the start of 2020.
Still, I wanted to at least mention it; one of my grandfathers died from a
heart attack that was probably related to how much McDonald's his wife fed
him.
Yes, that's been used around the world, but the USA was
where it became popular, it spread from the USA around the world, and at
least some countries banned it earlier. Margarine even used to be
marketed as "healthier" than butter because it had less saturated fat, but
of course it wasn't, and saturated fat intake isn't even particularly
relevant to atherosclerosis, which is a
fundamentally
autoinflammatory disease.
burnt food
Some celebrities
hire
Francis Mallmann to burn their food.
Here's a guy
sticking a steak in a fire and getting ash all over it.
Places like
the NYT started writing articles about how burning food is good. That
trickled down, and it's still around: deliberately burning food is
definitely a trend in American hipster restaurants today. That's bad food,
not just in my opinion but objectively. It's not just bad food culture, it's
a condemnation of the system that generates American culture in general.
You might reply that "de gustibus non est disputandum" but if I can't
say that burnt food is objectively bad, then those magazines can't say it's
objectively good either. It's not like all those people spontaneously
decided to start burning their food: they got memed into it, and I'm doing
my part to meme people back out of it.
Other people instead reply that burning food
is objectively good because it "adds flavor". That's technically true: it
adds "cancer" flavor, because what you've added is compounds (like PAHs,
HCAs, and nitrosamines) that increase your chance of getting cancer. Some
people are proud of having acquired a taste for burnt food, but if you're
going to acquire a taste for something that involves spending money to burn
stuff and increase your cancer risk, maybe you should just start smoking
cigarettes instead.
Some people have a natural predisposition towards
a bit of smoky flavor because prehistoric humans cooked things over open
fires, and that's understandable - but then you see hipsters getting burnt
food together with quinoa and kale, which "taste kind of bad but are really
healthy".
quinoa
Unlike some
plant proteins, quinoa is
a "complete protein", meaning that it contains all nine essential amino
acids that our bodies cannot make on their own. OK, so quinoa contains every
amino acid you need. So does "wheat and beans". So does "rice and lentils".
There's absolutely no reason why you need to get all your amino acids from
one single grain, and getting all your protein from quinoa would be stupid because it
doesn't have very much protein.
If quinoa
isn't particularly healthy, then why did it become a fad? Well, it has
several important attributes for that:
- It's not
hard to incorporate into meals, yet it's easily distinguishable from the
standard options.
- It's not very expensive for American hipsters.
-
It has a vaguely unpleasant taste, which some people think means it's
healthy.
It tastes slightly unpleasant
because it has residual
saponins even if the coating is removed. Those saponins taste bad
because they're bad for you - except perhaps in specific situations where
you're trying to kill cancer cells, but chemotherapy isn't usually a good
goal for diets.
"Health foods" are generally scams. You know what's
actually healthy? Not burning your food.
cinnamon
While I'm an
American myself, I've come to agree with some of the complaints Europeans
often have about American food culture, such as "Americans use too much
cinnamon".
The flavor of cinnamon comes largely from cinnamaldehyde
and cinnamic acid, which were so named because...cinnamon contains them. Are
those antioxidants? No. They're anti-microbials.
Cinnamon inhibits bacterial growth. That's what it does for you. But what do
Americans do? They make
cinnamon rolls where cinnamon-sugar paste is put inside the
food. It's not accomplishing anything, it's just flavor.
So, why do
Americans like that flavor, more than Europeans? That's because American
kids grew up eating sugary stuff with cinnamon. There's an unconscious
reasoning that happens:
1) This has
sugar, so it's probably a fruit.
2) This compound is in things that are
probably fruits, and fruits tend to be good for you for evolutionary
reasons.
3) Therefore, these compounds are probably good for you, at
least if they're combined with sugar.
But that's wrong! A cinnamon roll
is not a fruit! You've been fooled!
Do you like cinnamon when it's
not combined with sugar? If not, is it really cinnamon per se that
you like?
food coloring
Another
common comment that Europeans make about American food is that it has an
unnecessary amount of food coloring. I can taste most artificial food
colorings, and they don't taste very good, so I'm inclined to agree.
In terms of health effects, I'm mostly concerned about
azo dyes. Azo
compounds are mostly metabolized by reduction to 2 amines, and some of the
resulting aromatic amines are easily oxidized to radicals and thus
presumably carcinogenic via DNA modification. At least large
molecules and compounds with many sulfonate groups are less likely to be
absorbed through the gut or get inside cells, but some food colorings are
pretty concerning. For example, American oranges are often sprayed with
Citrus Red 2 to
make them more orange, and some people use orange zest.
high-fructose corn syrup
In
America, Coca-Cola uses high-fructose corn syrup, while in Mexico it uses
cane sugar. That's because America subsidizes corn production and has
tariffs on cane sugar imports, due to the political influence of corn
growers. There are also government limits ("marketing allotments") on the
amount of sugar each processor is allowed to sell per year.
Fructose
and glucose are metabolized the same way, so does it matter? Yes, somewhat.
High blood sugar levels are bad because sugar is can react with things, and
fructose is somewhat more reactive than glucose or sucrose. Cane sugar also
has a bit of molasses flavor, which I personally like.
I'd like
Coca-Cola better if it used cane sugar, but I still wouldn't drink it; my
preferred drink is usually high-quality green tea, which I make myself from
loose leaves. So, I'm not really the target market and they don't have much
reason to care about my opinion.
super-hoppy beers
For maybe
10 years now, "hoppy IPAs are too popular in America" has been a recurring
complaint by some beer drinkers. I don't have anything original to add, but
this is my blog and I can complain about what I want.
The reason this
is so contentious is the allegation that a lot of people buying super-hoppy
beers are being pretentious - that hoppy IPAs are bought by people who think
drinking something with higher IBU makes them a "connoisseur", but don't
actually like them very much, or don't even think that beer is something
you're supposed to like drinking rather than just a way to get drunk. Most
kids don't like the taste of beer because it's bitter, but that doesn't mean
that drinking the most bitter beer you can find makes you more mature.
Expertise isn't "doing the opposite of what novices do".
Obviously
people don't like to be accused of being pretentious posers, but there are
pretentious posers in every cultural sphere.
Also, hops are related
to marijuana and have some related compounds that probably have a (weaker)
psychoactive effect. So that's probably part of why some people like very
hoppy beers.
non-plates
Some restaurants
like to put food on things that aren't plates. I think this is a primarily
American phenomenon. I'll just link to the
WeWantPlates subreddit and
one of my personal favorites there.
kombucha
There are
people out there who take perfectly good tea, ferment it, and then claim
it's healthy because "it contains antioxidants". The antioxidants were
already there, they weren't made by fermentation.
Fermenting tea
doesn't make it any healthier; fermentation just makes it worse and takes
more effort. The fermentation
makes acetic acid and CO2, not antioxidants, and fermenting tea can produce
mycotoxins, which...are bad.
corn-fed beef
Normally, cows eat grass, microbes ferment it to lactic and butyric acid,
and then cows get energy from those acids. This involves a lot of
intermediate conversion from lactic acid to glucose.
If you feed cows
starches (like corn) and antibiotics to kill the microbes that would normally ferment
it, they can absorb sugars directly, and can gain weight more quickly than
they can from eating grass. This saves money by saving time, but also, when cows gain weight more quickly, they
have more fat distributed in the muscle, which is "better marbling" and
often considered the sole determinant of beef quality in America. Is that
really the only important thing about beef? I personally don't think it's
that important at all.
Corn is also easily storable, more so than
hay. And of course, America subsidizes corn production. When you put all
this together, most cows in the US are fed corn (and soybeans for protein)
for at least part of the year. But to me, corn-fed beef is just slightly
wrong when compared to pasture-raised beef, like it's "dirty" somehow -
which, besides flavor compounds, also refers to things like liver activity
and overall oxidative stress levels afterwards.
tomatoes
Most tomatoes
in America were bred for durability and are picked before they're ripe. Many
Americans don't even know what good tomatoes taste like, which is like how
many people living in cities have never seen the Milky Way.
Try a
Purple Cherokee or Brandywine tomato sometime if you get the chance.