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Miguelitro's avatar

Having lived significant periods in India, Brazil, China, Taiwan and Mexico, I want to venture an opinion. Most of the world is narrow but deep, while the US is broad but shallow.

What I mean by this is that even a relatively small city in the US will have a dizzying array of choices compared to a place of equivalent size virtually anywhere else. In the almost 70 years since the immigration act of 1965, cultural diversity has permeated the vast majority of the country, not just my hometown of LA or NYC. Salt Lake City or any other US city of similar size may well have more diverse food choices than Rome, Italy.

And the immigrant subcultures here care deeply about their food. In LA you see this in spades. It may be the richest food scene on the planet. Many non immigrants are zealous converts.

Other parts of the world, by contrast, offer very little variety outside of the biggest cities.

In Portugal, for example, you’d better like ham and cheese sandwiches, caldo verde. basic chicken and fish, linguica and boiled potatoes because that is all you are going to find in most towns. But they do it very well.

The same goes for India. It’s dal, subzi, chappatii etc everywhere you go in the north. Any roadside dhaba will give you great food--the same thing every day. To be honest, I get a bit bored of eating the same thing all the time and get homesick for LA.

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Michelle Richmond's avatar

I lived in Paris for about three years recently. I now live a few miles south of San Francisco and have also lived in New York City, Atlanta, and Miami. I grew up in the Deep South, where my grandmothers grew their own vegetables, and the mid-day meal (dinner) combined with the evening meal (supper) took many hours each day. Between cooking and eating, food was the main event, and not just on Sundays.

But back to California: I think it's really hard to beat not only the San Francisco food scene, but the Bay Area food scene as a whole. That includes hundreds of inexpensive hole-in-the wall restaurants. And diversity DOES matter when it comes to food--at least to me. I felt this painfully every time I tried to find a decent burrito in Paris, or a great plate of noodles (Fresh Noodles in Les Halles, by the way...as for the burrito, I never found one).

But the post is largely about how much time various cultures spend eating. That chart of time spent eating might have something to do with the fact that lunch is a long affair in France. This is particularly true in Paris. But when you see a group of young office workers "enjoying" a two-hour lunch in Paris, you know that they won't leave for home until seven or eight or nine at night--which means they're trading time at home with friends or family for more time with their office mates, basically on the clock. My son's school had an hour-and-a-half lunch break, which made the school day much longer and meant that several months out of the year, it was dark out by the time he got home from school. The long lunch spent in an institutionalized setting was definitely a downgrade from time spent relaxing at home.

The primary sandwich of France--and one of the most popular lunch foods-- is jambon y fromage: a piece of processed deli ham and a piece of Emmental cheese on a baguette with butter. The baguette and butter: absolutely amazing, far better than any baguette you'll find in most places in the US, including San Francisco. But the deli ham is a real dud.

I'm sure there is great food at very expensive restaurants in Paris, but what we experienced day-to-day living there was the scourge of "brown food." At any mid-priced restaurant, other than creperies, ordering the plate du jour or a main item off the menu often resulted in a plate of brown food: browned potatoes, unpleasantly soft vegetables, overly sauced meats. And the salads often contained mostly potatoes and marinated peppers, with a few pieces of green--as opposed to salads in many places in the US, where diners expect salads to be packed with locally sourced greens. We found "brown food" even at very nice restaurants in Paris, too. In the best food regions in America, the food comes straight from the garden, and it is less "fussed" with. In many high end restaurants in France, fussing with the food is the point.

Sure, it's nice to sit around for a long meal. But let's not forget that Picard, which sells only frozen food, is one of the most popular grocery stores in France, and that Monoprix and Franprix, where most Parisians buy their groceries, have far less fresh fruits and vegetables than you'll find in grocery stores in Anytown, USA. I went to the farmer's market every Saturday in Paris. The eggs, cheese, butter, and milk were amazing, but the produce was often outrageously expensive--I remember paying nine dollars for an anemic head of broccoli and expecting it to taste amazing for that price...but it just tasted like broccoli. The farmer's market was always pretty crowded, but the Monoprix was always more crowded.

There are a lot of things to love about France, but part of the problem with the food culture there is the lingering belief that only the French know how to do food. This leads not only to a real paucity of variety, but also an unwillingness to change or improve. And though I understand that variety isn't everything, it does make food far less boring.

By the way, when we wanted to get away from brown food in Paris, we went to MELT--a barbecue joint in Batignolles that had an American provenance. It was always packed. It was started by two French men "after criss-crossing Texas in 2013 in pursuit of the best chefs in the industry."

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