What Americans eat: borrowed fast food, lack of calories and pepper sweets - ForumDaily
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What Americans eat: borrowed fast food, lack of calories and pepper sweets

You can eat cheap and fast in America, or high quality and expensive. There are grocery stores with very low prices, where the food tastes quite artificial, with a bunch of enhancers, flavors, and colorings that are “identical to natural.” However, there are also high-end supermarkets, and in many areas of the city, “farmers markets” are held on weekends, where they sell quite expensive but natural products. You can also travel outside the city to farms and pick berries and fruits there. There you can buy honey, fresh chicken or pork. Before Thanksgiving, for example, Americans often go to farms to choose a turkey, which will then end up on their holiday table.

At the same time, the taste of products is different from the Ukrainian. For example, often in bread add a lot of sugar. Because of such "insidious" components in the products, many of my friends, Ukrainians, on arrival suddenly gained extra pounds, although it seemed to them that they ate like at home.

The selection of products in the US is truly impressive. Before coming to Washington, I had never seen egg pasta, buckwheat pasta, brown rice pasta, or lentil pasta on the shelves. Meat and minced meat here can be selected according to fat content, for example, consisting of 95% lean meat, 5% fat. A bunch of products attract consumers with their “50% less fat content”, “reduced salt content”, “less sugar”.

Throughout the year, you can buy decent greenhouse berries and fruits: raspberries, strawberries, blueberries. Sometimes there are several varieties of fresh mango, and apples and pears of autumn varieties are not as miserable as we have next summer. Vegetables are also year-round for every taste: tomatoes and cherries, and "grapes", and yellow, and black, fleshy and watery. And the price is almost stable throughout the year.

And America is “the country of big freezers.” Americans love to buy frozen prepared foods (from ready-made macaroni and cheese to lemonade concentrate), and they themselves have huge freezers at home, where they even freeze bread and coffee beans.

Beverages

Locals drink a lot of wine. And unlike most Ukrainians, mostly dry. This is part of the culture of moderate consumption of “a glass or two of red in the evening,” even on weekdays, even when alone. And this is not considered drunkenness at all.

If Americans invite you to visit (just for dinner, a party or a birthday), it is enough to bring a bottle of wine with you. And the locals do not advise focusing on the “more expensive is better” price. You need to know the manufacturer or just try. Under $10, and sometimes up to $5, you can buy decent wine.

Juices are not advised to drink, because it is mostly tinted and sweetened water. I was very surprised by the 0 Calories lemonade: sweet soda without dyes with different fruit flavors.

Restaurants

Also an interesting discovery for me was what is typical american dishes or restaurants don't actually exist. Even fast food, which we consider American, was brought to the United States by migrants. Burgers and hot dogs are from Germany, bagels are from Eastern Europe, even French fries are French fries! At the same time, fry the most unexpected foods in oil - from cucumbers to ice cream or cookies Oreo, the Americans came up with. By the way, Caesar salad, despite its name, is the creation of an American chef, albeit of Italian origin.

Washington has the largest community of Ethiopians outside of Africa, and they have opened a lot of their own establishments. Vegetable and meat dishes there are mostly spicy, they are served on injeri - a large pancake made of gray flour. They eat this not with a spoon or fork, but with pieces of the same pancake, which they simply tear off with their hands.

Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese dishes, especially soup pho (foul) with noodles, meat and soy sprouts - also became a real discovery for me here.

But most places served mexican food. Tapas, snacks in almost every bar / cafe / restaurant, just as in our country almost every establishment considers it necessary to have sushi or pizza in the menu. In Ukraine, I didn’t like Mexican food at all, but here it’s impossible to refuse guacamole or burrito because they are cooked by real Mexicans and mostly use authentic products.

Also in Washington schools almost everywhere there happy hour , "happy hour". From about 5 to 7 pm on weekdays they offer drinks and light snacks (from French fries to oysters) for almost half the price. Inviting colleagues to a “happy aura” and chatting for an hour over a glass of wine or beer for only (!) $3-5 is a very common practice.

Incredibly popular food trucks, that is, cars, trailers, where they sell to my surprise a decent meal. Not far from work at lunch hour for such restaurants on wheels There are long queues, you don’t always even want to stand. It’s interesting that in some of these mobile kitchens the food is so delicious that local “foodies”, in our opinion food lovers, generally hunt for them, following their movements on special websites or on social networks, because some trucks change locations every day.

But according to the law, everyone should be attached to a regular cafe with appropriate conditions for preparing and storing food, so the quality is well controlled.

If you really want to eat, you need to go to the “buffet”: you pay $10-15 for entry and eat as much as you like. Everything there is in the best traditions of Turkish all inclusive: so many varied foods, to try everything at once is simply impossible.

Many local establishments have vegetarian, vegan, lactose-free, gluten-free, and organic options. When a colleague in Ukraine told me: “When I became a vegetarian, I stopped going to restaurants, because - how will they surprise me? Salad? Here, it seems, on the contrary, a person with any preferences will find something interesting.

Confection

For dessert, locals buy muffins and cupcakes, a huge selection of pies, cheesecakes, donuts, and cookies (a very popular one is with chocolate pieces).

I was personally struck by candy M & Ms, with a variety of flavors: peanut butter, white or dark chocolate, almond, caramel, as well as crunchy, coffee, mint fillings, pretzel cookies, birthday cake, special M & Ms for use in baking. And all this in different colors and in different packaging.

But I do not like chocolate in America. Even famous brands Hersheys and ghirardelli resemble our “tiles”. That's why Americans give each other Belgian or Swiss chocolate during the holidays.

But it is interesting to try unusual sweet fillings - for example, pumpkin, which can be found in pies, bars and candies for Halloween, and “Christmas peppermint candies,” which are even put in donuts in the form of cream in winter.

The original column is published on the website of the Ukrainian Service.VOA". Reprinted with permission from author Maria Prus and publications.

ForumDaily is not responsible for the content of blogs and may not share the views of the author. If you want to become the author of the column, send your materials to [email protected]

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