Sorry USA, Europeans have better food and here's why.

Edit to the Video: There's a slip-up in the numbers I presented - 2.2% of the American population is (roughly) 7.5 million people, and not 2.5 million people. Although hey! for what it's worth: Chicago is still a great visualization. It is just that instead of the city proper, you can consider the "Chicago Metropolitan Area" for a size comparison. Cheers! ❤

Over a decade ago, my wife was prescribed diuretic medication to control the swelling in her lower extremities. We then visited my folks in Switzerland, where we ate a variety of (local recipe) foods, whatever looked good to us. about 36h after arrival in Switzerland, my wife's swelling subsided, and she no longer needed to take the medication during our 3 weeks stay. 24 hours after arrival back in the Midwest, my wife's swelling came back and she had to go back to take the medication again. Today we buy food at farmers markets / health food stores and local farms (heirloom tomatoes for all kinds of sauces and salsas) meat from Belti Cows (a.k.a. "Orio-Cows). I make my own European style, dark, splintering, full aroma crusty bread, with organic flour from the USA and some from Canada. My wife does no longer need the medication.

EU: food additive is acceptable when proven harmless USA: food additive is acceptable unless it's proved harmful BTW absolutely correct information you have about the farmer's markets , here in Slovakia every town and village has farmer's markets on town square where we buy fresh veggies and fruit. (The ones from the store look nice, but they taste like a wet postcard).

On one of my first trips from the US to northern Germany after meeting my German wife, my mother-in-law was unable to pick us up from the airport and have a meal waiting for us when we arrived. Instead, we went to a greek restaurant nearby after arriving by train and dropping off our luggage. I ordered something that came with a salad and was amazed at how the red bell peppers smelled and tasted. It smelled more like a red pepper than anything I had previously eaten. I asked the waiter/proprietor why the pepper smelled and tasted so good.  He explained that he gets up early in the morning three days a week to go to the wholesale market in Hamburg, about 100 miles away. There he buys vegetables that have been only lightly cooled during the entire way from Southern Europe to Hamburg. It turns out that when you cool red peppers (and other vegetables) too much, they lose aroma and flavor. It is important enough for people in Europe to have these aromas and flavors that they take extra effort to handle food in ways to preserve its flavor. (Of course they also keep it safe to eat.) I now live in Karsruhe, at the northern end of the Black Forest, in southern Germany, and have been very satisfied living in Germany for many years. BTW, not everyone cares as much as that restaurant proprietor, but the fact that he was able to get those peppers says volumes.

I went to Germany in December of 2023. As an American, I was blown away. The food not only tasted better (even McDonald’s was way better), but it had a different effect on the body. I noticed I got satiated faster, ate less, had more energy, and never felt overly stuffed. The lack of overly processed food made a huge difference.

I am Polish and I can confirm, that we care about seasonal food. Why would I buy strawberries out of season that taste as if they were washed in a washing machine and are terribly expensive? What’s the point? And there are plenty of different seasonal food that are worth waiting for. There’s a special season even for potatoes here - in the summer we buy only the young potatoes that have completely different taste and texture than the ripe ones in the autumn.

I believe that the culture/tradition of cooking your own meals is a factor too. Sometimes when I look up recipes online I'll stumble across an American one. In way too many of these recipes will you find "Add 1 cup of whatever brand name pre-made mix". "Crush 5 oreos", do this, do that with some processed brand name product. Here in Sweden you bake with the basic ingredients, you cook with the basic ingredients. Very seldomly do you use pre-made mixes or processed food in your own cooking/baking.

Just a little anecdote. As a Swedish child of the 70s, I have picked strawberries directly in the fields. There used to be those farms where you could just go out in the field and pick as many boxes full of strawberries as you wanted. Once you were done, you would walk over to the farmer and either pay for the number of boxes you'd filled, or by weight. And there was a succession of strawberries that ripened at different times. The first ones were of a type called Precosa, around midsummer, it was deliciously sweet and perfect for immediate consumption, with a little milk and sugar poured over them. A few later came a type called Zephyr, still very sweet, but not as sweet as Precosa. And last, Sengana, an even less sort, mainly suitable for making jam or cooking. I don't know if it still exists, but it has at least become very rare. Cheap labor from Eastern Europe meant the farmers started employing professional berry pickers, that cleared the fields way more systematically than five year old kids and their parents would. The numer of self-pick fields shrank, and the berries were increasingly no longer sold directly at the farm, and you would be clueless about whether it was Precosa, Zephyr, or something else. Also, families wanted more exciting things to do than spending hours picking strawberries. But it was very definitely a very direct connection to the food you ate, one that is now being lost. But Swedes are at least still very excited about strawberry season.

Tomatoes are an excellent example. The tomatoes I've experienced in Italy, Albania, and Greece are a world apart from the softball sized, bland monstrosities that are the norm in American supermarkets. I remember sitting at a random restaurant in the mountains of Albania and ordering a tomato salad that consisted nothing other than olive oil, tomatoes, and salt, and it tasted so good. In France, I can go to any random supermarket and buy a peach. It's sweet, juicy, and soft. In the US, they are huge, and taste like cardboard, even when it's considered "organic", from Whole Foods.

I'm French. I had a school exchange in Florida a few years ago, and I was baffled at how different food culture is in America. Frying bacon is considered cooking skill. Everything tastes bland. Vegetables look like they're grown directly in their plastic bag. Biscuits and cereals are colored so crazy it makes you doubt how safe for consumption it is. And I don't mean to disrespect, I'm just highlighting how alien it looks from a European perspective

After traveling in the US for a few weeks, I was so happy to finally find a bakery that offered sour dough bread. And the I was very disappointed because the bread tasted so sweet that it resembled a Hefezopf in Germany. This seems to be a general rule - every food item in the US is usually much sweeter than its equivalent in Germany

When I was about 8, my thrifty (she complained if a loaf of bread was more than 20¢ at the store), widowed mom took me to the area north of Quebec City to ensure I experienced something special. We stopped at a roadside artisanal bakery that used a wood-fired outdoor clay or brick oven. She bought me a slice, a SINGLE SLICE of freshly baked bread with hand churned butter for 25¢! It worked. All these decades later, it's a wonderful memory.

Greetings from a former part time small (or, in terms of average US farm sizes: microscopic) farmer from Austria growing peaches for about 20 years. On the the average, we sold about 75 to 100 % of the fruits directly from the farm (some people bought 0.5 kg, some 40 to 60 kg and above), sometimes customers waiting for the harvesting, sometimes even strolling through the lines with the trees while we were just harvesting the fruits they were going to buy a few minutes later. And of course my parents were keen that each child who wanted to could fetch his/her own peach from the tree (under guidance to correctly grab this sensitive fruit). Quite romantic view, I know and also not possible if a family's income really depends totally on farming, but nevertheless a time in my life I wouldn't like to have missed.

I live in North Macedonia and pepper season is a cultural phenomenon here, everyone goes out and buys the freshest peppers to make their own ajvar. You can smell roasting peppers everywhere at the end of September.

I came across this argument as a guide in France to mostly American tourists. Many tried foods, such as French breads or cheeses, when at home they said they would not eat them. And then told me they had less or no reaction. Which made me really wonder what all is put in American foods. I would take my guests to local French markets and buy something seasonal for them to taste, such as strawberries or raspberries. The comment was always how cute, and small, these fruits were. And then, after tasting, how amazingly flavourful. I appreciated food here in France before, but now even more so. Thank you for your insightful and very well researched video.

I'm from Germany, I love Italian food. When the food is cooked and prepared directly by an Italian, everyone in Europe knows that it only contains the best ingredients! the French are similarly meticulous. However, I like the Italian dishes best. Mediterranean. the Italians have a good nose for the best restaurants. If you ever see Italian tourists outside of Italy sitting in a restaurant, you know that this is the best restaurant in the area! If you're on holiday in Italy, it's a holiday for your taste buds!

Oh boy is there a lot to say on this subject. Well done. I’m a chef that has travelled to Italy for 21 years and have now lived in Italy for 10. The cultural priorities and preferences cannot be emphasized enough. As you mentioned, bad ingredients with no flavor and too many preservatives would not be acceptable here. The basic knowledge that so many Italians have about seasonality and what products are local is so often impressive. Italians are also taught more about nutrition and exercise so there is an overall better understanding about how to take care of oneself. (And a desire to do so.) One thing I always notice when I go to the US to visit is the packaging. There is so much plastic. You’ll see pre-prepped vegetables with pictures of cute little veggies with smiley faces all wrapped so perfectly and conveniently with no connection to the earth and where the food comes from. In Italy there is much more natural food available. You’ll see vegetables with their tops attached, dirt and evidence that the product was from the ground. People like knowing exactly where their food is from. You can’t do that when the product was harvested so long before in another country. I often have friends and family tell me that there are food items that make them sick in the US but they can eat them freely here. It’s incredible. When we moved here it was rather shocking at first to see how quickly items went bad. What have I been eating my whole life? Broccoli last only a few days here but weeks in the US? It’s scary. Convenience is definitely the priority in the US. On a visit home I once made my daughter homemade waffles and my husband’s family could not understand why I would bother when there were Eggos in the freezer! The flavor difference and the lack of chemicals in the homemade version meant nothing to them. Another thing I find interesting is that there are convenience foods here but the ingredient lists are so short comparatively and not too bad. High fructose corn syrup for example is banned in the EU. One Italian friend once mentioned a connection between national healthcare and the incentive to take care of oneself and to educate the public so that there is a healthier populace. It taxes the healthcare system less that way. In the US with our for profit healthcare, what incentive to leaders have to educate the public? The health insurance and drug companies are making much more money this way… A sick population gives them higher profits.

I am italian and my uncle grows crop to feed bulls and get great meat. It is a small business with 200ish animals and he sells them as certified, high quality meat bread and fed locally. Also, I have a small garden where I grow tomatoes and I can confirm that they taste better than the ones I buy at the supermarket. with 12 plants I feed my family tomatoes all summer and autumn long. I also grow hot peppers, green beans, salad, onions, fennel and radicchio depending on the season. Next to me lives an old couple in retirement and he has the passion for gardening and he grows a lot of stuff which he then gives us and others for free. Obviously we (us and the other people he gives vegetables and fruits to) are happy to help when we can when they have problems.

In Denmark, we rave about the early potatoes. Yes, we have a potato season! Plus the strawberry season.

I am from the Czech Republic. It is quite common here to find trees along roads connecting villages where apples, pears, walnuts, cherries, plums, and even sour cherries grow, and you can pick them completely for free. Not only people without money have access to fresh fruit during the season, but they can even earn some extra income by picking and selling them afterward. We have forests here where you can pick blueberries, wild strawberries, mushrooms. None of what I've mentioned here did I see as an option when I visited the USA (Washington).