there's also this tendency to assume all American food is as over salted as Hungry Man dinners. if anything the Midwest tendency to not put enough seasonings on things runs parallel to their own. And imo both countries' food cultures have improved *dramatically* in our lifetimes

yeah, I would say sometimes American fast food is *really* salty in a way I find unpleasant, but that's clearly not all of it and the bores doing retaliatory shots at US food are just as stupid and tedious as this stuff

The 1970s hell UK spaghetti bolognese and prawn cocktail stuff is definitely grim but I'm reminded of the story of Wolfgang Puck in LA getting yelled at by patrons who thought he'd put food dye in green beans because they'd never had non-canned green beans before. We also had a slop food culture

Food has gotten better in America because we’ve had more immigration and we’ve been relentlessly teased by Europeans

but also I think there's just been a general improvement in availability of ingredients. It used to be functionally impossible to get olive oil or whole bean coffee in most of the US unless you either lived in a place with immigrant grocery stores or ordered them from a mail-order catalog

I can buy good Korean instant ramyun in what's functionally the UK equivalent of Big Lots. It blows my mind.

Yeah when I was a kid the only ramen you could get was Maruchan and they didn't sell any of the spicy versions in the US. By contrast i can get the very hot Korean ones here in basically any grocery store, even in no spice having Switzerland. It was NOT the case when I lived in France 20 years ago

This is a good point. It’s easier to learn how to cook now as well and celebrity chefs have made cooking sexier for lack of a better word

People are into it now! Sometimes you get abysmal creations but sometimes it's also really good. There are only a few ingredients here where I have to order them online or go to a specialty shop. when we lived in Germany in the '90s it took my mom *years* to find a single shop that sold black beans

nate it’s monday, let george get his juices flowing messing with the brits

Canadian-American agent provocateur starting a new war of 1812... I've seen it all...

yeah but we won’t get our asses beat this time, they don’t have any troops

the book "united states of arugula" is *really* good on the history of america's waves of food culture, e.g., when did salsa become america's top-selling condiment? my mother grew up in new york city, which had a *very* different food culture than the rest of the country for most of the century!

When I was learning to cook as a teenager in the 80s I was cooking with chickpeas and aubergines which I bought in Watney Market, from the stalls covered in heaps of fresh vegetables from all over the world, and Watney Market isn't even by London standards a *good* market

Back in my mafia days we'd trade chickpeas for tuna cans. Market hustle never changes, just the goods.

I remember eating my first samosa and it was like 1982 or something

I get what you're saying (I used to work right next to Watney Market) but also I don't think it's controversial to say that UK food culture has gotten a lot more adventurous and cosmopolitan since the 1970s, especially outside of major cities

the GOOD FOOD GUIDE (a book published annually from 1951 to crusade against bad british food) was the project of a socialist (and former communist) = raymond postgate (yes, dad of the bagbuss guy, its turtles all the way down)

(i guess i meant to include the point that this book was a key part in a social project to make ordinary british cuisine adventurous, and not just its spice-seeking empire wing)

Wait what, BAGPUSS?

raymond postgate was oliver postgate's dad yes

Wow, epic bagpuss/cookbook/communism lore today

No that's totally true, I spent my childhood exclusively in very multicultural places and this forms my entire view of the 80s but it's not representative

Yeah I mean I can see it with my mom's extended family in Norfolk, who are super into relatively exotic foodie stuff now based on what I see on social media, versus my mom's story of of visiting family in the 1970s and realizing that none of her cousins knew what a pizza was

In the 80s I went to stay with a boyfriend in Norfolk and his mum cooked pizza and he kept telling her how my mum cooked this really really good pizza (true but like, oh no stop saying that) she was polite though and said to me would my mum send her the recipe

The Norfolk boyfriend had never eaten Indian food before coming to stay with me and soon every visit I had to take a big bag of samosas with me for the whole family

My mom once tried to get her mom (born in Norfolk, married at 16, emigrated at 19) to cook pizza once after having had it as a school lunch in the US. She described what she'd had and her mom in turn made toast with ketchup / beef mince / cheddar cheese. In relative terms it wasn't that long ago!

My boyfriend's mum's pizza wasn't, like, BAD it just wasn't pizza