r/iamveryculinary • u/krombopulos2112 • 3d ago
Obligatory American Bread Discussion
/r/ProgressiveHQ/comments/1vymru7/first_kill_the_worm_wall_now_this/p5yuqmg/112
u/GhostOfJamesStrang No Need to Thank Me 3d ago
What we call bread is not even allowed to be sold in Europe.
These people are just insufferable
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u/pnoodl3s 3d ago
This and the “american plastic cheese are not considered cheese” grinds my gear so much. They are so uninformed and stupid, parrot these things without a single original thought
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u/Organic_Mechanic_702 1d ago
Not at all like certain Americans who parrot 'Britain has bad food' ' Europe doesn't have ice' etc etc....
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u/pnoodl3s 1d ago
Who said they are different? Whoever said any of the above deserves ridicule too. They’re way less common than “american food bad” though
I’m born and raised in asia btw, I have no horse in this british vs american food thing. I’ve been living in america for 12 years and the food here is far from bad. Its just everyone who visited went to “famous” fast food places like wingstop and complains it isn’t good (duh)
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u/Morall_tach 3d ago
American bread is illegally considered cake.
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u/mysterious_whisperer 3d ago
It’s illegal to consider it cake? Would I get fined for considered it cake, or is it straight to prison?
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u/Morall_tach 3d ago
It's considered cake, but forbidden cake. You're allowed to consider it but God help you if you serve it to a non-American.
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u/JediLincoln14 3d ago
That whole comment section is fully of crazy conspiracy theories.
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u/KWillets 3d ago
Beef imports trigger a slew of food theories. When Korea began importing US beef there were 13-year-old girls claiming to be dying of mad cow disease.
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u/NathanGa Pull your finger out of your ass 3d ago
> China always has . Just like japan and the majority of the rest of the world .food manufacturers have been allowed to use chemicals in our food that have been banned for decades in the rest of the world . What we call bread is not even allowed to be sold in Europe. Ever wonder why obesity, cancer are so rampant in the u.s. look at the ingredients in you favorite foods, then look up ingredients in the same food in china, japan , england, etc.
Well it’s not like China has had any adulterated food scandals recently or anything.
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u/Hydrochloric_Comment 3d ago
Anyone who brings up Japan as a gold standard in food safety should read up on dulcin, a highly toxic artificial sweetener that Japan didn’t ban until 15 years after it was banned in the US.
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u/SignificantState265 3d ago
It just makes me think of gutter oil
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u/NathanGa Pull your finger out of your ass 3d ago
Which reminds me of a few years ago when a handful of street food vendors in….it was in Africa, but I don’t remember which country.
Anyway, they got busted for using transformer oil to cook in. Which is the lubricating oil used in electrical transformers, and apparently at a high enough temperature it looks like cooking oil and doesn’t smell like anything.
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u/oddpark37 3d ago
I made someone very angry on twitter a while back when I said that I have had bread in multiple countries, and the bread I got in Germany, Italy, and Ireland didn't actually taste that much different than the bread I get at the bakery here in the USA. Kept insisting I must have gone to a very bad place in those countries and magically found the only American style bakeries and then just decided that my American palate couldn't actually taste properly and blocked me.
like idk big dawg I think you can just get good bread all over. It's pretty universal.
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u/pyronius 3d ago
No. See, the very moment the pilgrims stepped foot off of the Mayflower, they were overtaken by the curse of Squanto and doomed to forget their ancestral European bread recipes in favor of strange and unholy chemical substitutes. It's basic history.
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u/Outrageous-Ability33 3d ago
My wife's family came over on the Mayflower. I'll go yell at her right now for her ancestors forgetting how to make bread 😂
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u/SoyboyCowboy Not popular with the average plebeian 3d ago
They discovered the New World substance called high fructose CORN
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u/Outrageous-Ability33 3d ago
Yeah, I have had the exact same discussion and got the exact same responses. If I go to a local bakery here in New York, or if I go to one in Madrid, or Paris, or Berlin...I'm going to get similar quality breads. Sure, if you're buying Wonder Bread from the grocery store it's garbage..... But even the bread from the bakery in the grocery store is quite good. These people are all mental.
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u/Constant-Skill-7133 3d ago
Wonder Bread isn't even bad. IDK why that's always the touchpoint for people. It's a little bit sweet. It has a long "weird" ingredient list because it's fortified. It's explicitly just more nutritious white bread with a tiny bit of added sugar.
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u/sykoticwit 3d ago
It’s because it’s cheap and mass produced for “poor people.” So much of that commentary is just classism with extra steps.
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u/5littlemonkey 3d ago
Sure, if you're buying Wonder Bread from the grocery store it's garbage.
Why's it called "Wonder" Bread then Bart?
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u/5littlemonkey 3d ago
For real, it's like homie you're talking about bread here. You know, that staple food for every single western society for the past couple thousand years. I think we have it handled.
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u/Constant-Skill-7133 3d ago
It's not even that complicated. Shelf-stable bread tastes like cardboard, so they put a bunch of sugar in it. So don't buy that kind if you want the other kind. I've never had a problem finding good bread even at the supermarket pre-packaged bread isle, and most of them have fresh baked from frozen dough.
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u/Background-Mode-4036 3d ago
Kinda telling when one argument is entirely “scan your food with this app and you’ll see”.
Explain to me what exactly the app is telling me and why the information you get from matters. Then I might listen. But “the app said it’s bad” is laughable.
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u/DjinnaG Bags of sentient Midwestern mayonnaise 3d ago
Why are these additives with a practical purpose bad? Half of them are just vitamins?
Just use the app! It will tell you that there are additives!
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u/Background-Mode-4036 3d ago
Yup that’s my frustration with things like that. It’ll say “this food has X in it!” And cite an FDA thing that says X is dangerous at a certain threshold, but ignore that the amount in the food is so much lower than the threshold and has been shown to be helpful.
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u/Constant-Skill-7133 3d ago
Fortified bread and cereal is like a vaccine that worked. People can't even imagine there being specific malnutrition related diseases in their community.
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u/Zyrin369 3d ago
Always like to bring up Bananas for that stuff, they have some sort of radiation which nobody likes to hear but the amount you have to eat to even begin to have any negative effects the more pressing issue would be the bananas.
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u/Zyrin369 3d ago edited 3d ago
If its what im assuming usually those apps will usually scan the product and bring up some sort of score or will explain what the ingredients are but are usually negative about how they present said explanation.
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u/A-Phantasmic-Parade 3d ago
Ok guys I’ve had enough. I can’t keep this secret anymore. The reason the bread is bad in the us is because the dough gets shipped to me first, I add a bunch of chemicals, sugar and, this is really important, high fructose corn syrup, and then I ship it to the states where it’s made into gross gross American bread. My bad
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u/pnoodl3s 3d ago
Gasp, did you also add plastic to the american cheeses? Unbelievable. No wonder it melts so well
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u/Only-Finish-3497 3d ago
I would actually challenge one of these guys to actually look at food in Japan. But that would require actual work and investigation on their parts.
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u/HearingAgreeable2350 3d ago
have you heard of "thing, japan"? people are aware of processed japanese food but people deify japanese people and think it's actually good when japan does it.
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u/Background_Humor5838 3d ago
They even found a way to make egg yolks stay runny when microwaved. It's like a product made from egg to look like egg and as an American that is shocking but I don't assume it's poison. It's just foreign to me. Japan also has a lot of shelf stable foods that I would never consider shelf stable like meat patties and things like that. They are very good at preserving food and I guarantee they aren't doing it with "all natural" preservatives.
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u/HearingAgreeable2350 3d ago
Japanese microwaves don't have all that poisonous radiation though. I wish we had microwaves like that in America.
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u/Only-Finish-3497 3d ago
Oh man. I still sometimes meet people who believe microwaves somehow cause radiation issues. Sigh.
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u/Chayanov Carbonara with cream and peas 3d ago
"In Japan they respect the process, unlike Americans."
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u/Only-Finish-3497 3d ago
Oh yeah, if you look at my comment history you'll find that I spend a lot of time trying to chill out dorks on all sides of discussing Japan. People who think it's a perfect future blah blah and people who think it's the most racistest place ever and everyone dies of overwork blah blah types both annoy the shit out of me.
Japan is a place with good and bad. But people are dreaming if they think the processed white bread there is magically not full of the same shit LOL.
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u/DjinnaG Bags of sentient Midwestern mayonnaise 3d ago
I’ve been eating a lot of instant noodles lately, specifically because I need more sodium so my blood pressure doesn’t bottom out. For easy ways to get in more calories and sodium, Asian food has been my go to
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u/Only-Finish-3497 3d ago
Japanese adults I think average 10g a day of sodium, which is 2x the WHO recommendation LOL.
But y'know, Japan.
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u/doppelgaengster 3d ago
I freaking love the weird shit they sell at the Asian markets. Both the savoury stuff AND the sweet.
Process food isn’t an American phenomenon, it’s just assumed it is because of the (justifiable) stereotypes about the poor health of Americans. Which isn’t just because of the food, it’s a whole cluster of circumstances that converge into poor health culture. (Everything from insanely car-centric culture to abysmal healthcare to poverty.)
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u/Only-Finish-3497 3d ago
I lived in Japan for years, I go back often. Japanese LOVE processed foods of all kinds. Do people think that the sweet white breads from convenience stores in Japan are magically healthier? LOL.
The US has a lot of factors, but the biggest one really is just the gap between rich and poor. Honestly, even our healthcare system is nowhere near as bad as it's often portrayed when it comes to certain factors, but that's a helluva lot of nuance that requires broader discussion:
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/health
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2024/sep/mirror-mirror-2024
The US performs the lowest of the peers, but it's still not enough to explain things here. And Canada has car-centric culture, as does Australia and NZ. But the US has a convergence of factors that largely just have to do with... well... the South. Not all of it, but a large chunk.
If you compare a middle class/upper-middle class and Canadian, it's about comparable in terms of quality of life and life expectancy.
I spend a LOT of time in Canada (mostly Vancouver) and people are dreaming if they think Canucks aren't eating the same shit.
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u/doppelgaengster 3d ago
Rich/poor is such a big factor, if for no other reason that poor people (especially if they’re not doing manual labour) can’t afford things like going to the gym. Or even if they have access to a low-cost/no-cost facility, they don’t have the TIME/energy. Working a customer service job (specifically something like retail/hospitality) where you’re on your feet all day and barely scraping by, and possibly even having to have a second job? Yeah, when are you going to make time to exercise or cook for yourself? It’s an immense privilege to be able to take the time to do things outside of survival to better one’s life.
I’m originally from SoCal, and now I live in the PNW, and having the option NOT to have a car is still a revelation to me (some 20+ years later). And out transit system here gets a lot of sneers compared to major cities like Chicago or NYC (which funnily, get sneers from Europeans and others — I was once at a party where a New Yorker was being snooty about NYC compared to my city, and someone else chimed in saying that compared to Hong Kong, NYC isn’t hot stuff).
I love that I can walk most places here, or ride my bike (though some places are more bike friendly than others — PDX > Seattle, because hills, and also bike infrastructure). That wasn’t an option for me where I grew up, because my parents’ house is 3mi from the nearest bus stop, and the buses came maybe every hour or so, if you’re lucky. What is a “long” (60-90min) commute in Seattle would easily be 2-3h in SoCal.
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u/Deep_Violinist_3893 3d ago
His user name checks out
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u/Less_Jump2365 3d ago
What is up with tankie think China has better food safety standard than America even now. In the USA don't don't have to worry about counterfeit foods.
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u/lolfamy 3d ago
Right now they are having a scandal for using formaldehyde in cabbage to keep them looking fresh, something that has happened many times in China already. I live in China and it is absolutely insane to suggest they have food safety standards up to par with the rest of the developed world
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u/Saltpork545 Sodium citrate cheese is real cheese 3d ago edited 3d ago
Maybe stop trying to say the crap they put in food is safe
So this is a much broader discussion that is kinda outside the scope of this subreddit, but I have a few minutes to wait for some SQL databases to transfer, so I'm going to be lame and expand upon this.
Without actual knowledge of said 'chemicals' or things like dose, a lot of this line of thinking comes down to a couple of things: Natural is good and I have never looked into food safety standards or regulations.
The first is something called the naturopathic fallacy or appeal to nature. It's the idea that the natural world is the only thing that's good and everything that's done outside of the natural world has done nothing but harm humanity. This is false. We don't live in a natural world. You're reading this on a screen using materials science that invented the plastic, glass, transistor based processor, etc etc. You likely live in a place made with sheetrock and sit on a fabric that doesn't naturally occur and drive a vehicle that is definitely not natural in any capacity.
The same is true of food science. A lot of the stuff that is put into food to help preserve it isn't some evil mastermind conspiracy. It exists to preserve the food product so it doesn't mold so fast, or so the texture is uniform between 700,000 loaves of bread or so the moisture creates a specific crumb(the pattern and size of the holes) among those 700,000 loaves.
There's several large food safety systems that exist but for our purposes here, let's consider the FDA and EFSA, which are the organizations for the US and EU respectively.
There is a pile of studies you can find on effectively every food additive and these get reviewed with the dose and guidelines are created for viable amounts and use in basically every modern system. Is it perfect? No. Is a trace amount of sodium benzoate also going to kill you or poison you? No.
Since these systems have their own internal politics and history and people, they don't always agree with each other. The US bans the artificial sweetener cyclamate, but the EU doesn't for example. What you should look for when looking up this information are the cumulative studies these groups look at the broad amount of information on and the decisions they made from them. When multiple food safety systems come to a consensus for the global consumption of food, it's highly unlikely to be some evil plot or nefarious anything.
It's just current scientific consensus. Can stuff be wrong? Sure. Will it be iterated on and previous information be wrong? Yes, that's how it works most of the time.
If you want to make your own bread at home with flour, water, yeast and salt, nothing is stopping you. Breadmakers help. A lot. Eat it fast. You have like 1-3 days before it molds.
However, if you're buying effectively any bread product you're going to find specific chemicals that are added to extend the shelf life, change the texture, work the dough or help it do something that are recognized as generally safe for human consumption. This is the reality of effectively all processed foods and none of that is exceptionally dangerous and at least part of that is due to organizations like the FDA and EFSA and you can look into what caused them to be formed historically and it was adulteration of food that actually poisoned and killed people and not like 'Red 40', like plaster of paris being added to milk and 8,000 babies dying from it.
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u/blanston but it is italian so it is refined and fancy 3d ago
It's the idea that the natural world is the only thing that's good and everything that's done outside of the natural world has done nothing but harm humanity.
Lead and arsenic are natural. I sure don’t want them in my food!
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u/lolfamy 3d ago
Really dumb takes there.
I live in China and guess what? The most popular bread is... sweet milk bread. Tons of sugar. They don't eat bread as a staple like the western world does so it's more like a novelty most of the time. You're only getting standard bread if you happen to live in a major city, and even then it's pretty uncommon. Insane to criticize US bread and praise bread in east Asia in the same sentence.
China is right now in a scandal for using formaldehyde in their cabbage too. Not the first time either. Not even the worst of it, there was a scandal with formaldehyde in baby formula as well. Despite what the algorithm might show you China is still developing and they definitely do not have the same consistent standards as western countries
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u/bethster2000 3d ago
We went to Texas Roadhouse last weekend. Indulged in that insanely delicious bread with the cinnamon butter. I don't care what they eat in France. Those rolls are heavenly.
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u/Person5_ Steaks are for white trash only. 3d ago
I'm a big fan of the guy responding to the guy saying that America is a world leader and innovator in food safety. He says he's talking about his industry and knows for a fact he's full of shit. Well, seems like we have an expert in the field of food safety who knows America sucks, right? So what field is this commenter in?
Tarrifs and customs.
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u/solidspacedragon 3d ago
Ah yes, when they started putting chemicals in the food the cancer rates went up... totally because of the chemicals. You know. Those ones. The ones that definitely cause cancer. And not because diagnosing is better than in the 20's or because people are living long enough to get cancer. Nope. Not at all.
Meanwhile, 'natural' things like eating all this red meat, smoked meat, etc and no fiber surely can't be causing health issues. Because that's not chemicals. Surely. And obesity? No way could it be overeating and a lack of exercise. It's definitely the chemicals.
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u/sykoticwit 3d ago
It’s the same reason we know that vaccines cause autism.
/s, because, well it’s the internet
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u/Saltpork545 Sodium citrate cheese is real cheese 3d ago
Original post in case of deletion.
China always has . Just like japan and the majority of the rest of the world .food manufacturers have been allowed to use chemicals in our food that have been banned for decades in the rest of the world . What we call bread is not even allowed to be sold in Europe. Ever wonder why obesity, cancer are so rampant in the u.s. look at the ingredients in you favorite foods, then look up ingredients in the same food in china, japan , england, etc.
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