American Food - yum

I was once taken, along with a group of friends, to an excellent American restaurant on Bondi Beach.  We were dragged there, quite unwillingly, by our American buddy, Jeff.  He insisted that we would love it, and sure enough, we did.  It was vaguely Tex-Mex-themed, meaning we drank a lot of margaritas while eating enormous plates of barbequed meats.

My main meal (which Americans call an entrée), consisted of an entire pig’s worth of ribs, half a chicken, more potatoes than I’d ever seen in one place, and a metric shit-tonne of BBQ sauce.  It was delicious, and I somehow managed to eat it all.  This, Jeff assured us, was authentic American food, and a great night was had by all.

Over here in the USA, the place you go for authentic Australian food is Outback Steakhouse. It serves up classic Aussie cuisine, like Alice Springs Chicken Quesadilla®, Aussie Cheese Fries, Baby Back Ribs, Teriyaki Filet Medallions, and of course Gold Coast Coconut Shrimp. Shrimp. Not prawns. Shrimp.

Authentically Aussie

You can whet your appetite for these staples of Australiana by starting out with a Walkabout Soup Of The Day, and for the more delicate eaters, why you can avoid all of the manly, meaty mains (sorry, entrées) by sticking to a good ol’ Classic Blue Cheese Wedge Salad. Ah, the taste of home.

Basically, Outback Steakhouse is the American restaurant on Bondi Beach, with a few cringeworthy ockerisms thrown randomly at the menu.  Its only similarity to an Australian restaurant is that it serves as an uncomfortable reminder that nobody (including Australians) has a fucking clue what Australian food is.

Drive-thru everything

There’s a short answer to the question “Why is there an obesity epidemic in the USA?”. Essentially, you can live your entire life without having to get out of your seat, and shitty, unhealthy food is not only ubiquitous, but also incredibly cheap.

Cheap, horrible food

I should say, before anyone stops reading what must look like another high-and-mighty rant about the diets of others, that there is also a plethora of excellent food available here. Praising and gushing never makes great copy, so I’ll do my best to remain acerbic by using the good food as a platform for complaining about Australia.

Yum

For this post, I’ll confine myself to she supermarket . It starts well (and ends well, but we’ll get to that later) with what Australians call the ‘Fruit and veg’ section, known over here as ‘Produce’ (pronounced “PRO-doose”).  I’m not sure if it applies to the whole country, but around here, the produce is exceptional, whether you’re at the IGA, the Wal*Mart, or at an organic local farmers’ market.

Mangos and papayas

Of particularly high quality are the peppers (one Americanism I like, using a single word to encompass everything from a yellow capsicum to a habanero chili) and the summer fruits. I’ve never tasted berries, cherries or peaches this good, and they’re significantly cheaper here than they are back home. Every time I get excited about low prices, I feel guilty, knowing that they’re the result of horrendous labor laws – it’s easy to underprice watermelons when they’re picked by illegal immigrants making $1.20 an hour.

I've paid $9 for ONE of these babies

Next up comes the liquor aisle. I knew beer was cheaper over here, but I didn’t know that it’s basically free. Thirty-can cases of beer start at around fifteen dollars, rather than the forty dollars you’d pay in Australia for six fewer. There’s also an alarming variety of low-quality drinks, fairly obviously aimed at poor alcoholics, kids and other binge-drinkers. There are the 40 oz malt liquor bottles (beer so crappy you’re not allowed to call it beer) with names like ‘Colt 45′, and ‘King Cobra’, and the half-strength two liter vodka bottles that sell for eight bucks.

Giant beers, fiddy cents each

There’s a reason for the difference in price and product – when your liver packs it in and you need to spend three months in hospital recovering, the government doesn’t have to pick up the tab, so the incentive to curb alcoholism just isn’t there.  This also explains the four dollar packs of cigarets, and the lack of any anti-smoking or anti-drinking advertising. Still, cheap beer is great.

Conveniently bagged single pickle

The stand-out item in the deli section has to be the massive pickle.  Americans take pickles seriously, selling these massive cucumbers whole, halved, and in ‘spears’ – quartered pickles that are each the size of a whole Australian number.  They’re delicious, and an amazingly low-calorie snack. I eat a lot of them.

Pre-vomited to save you the effort

The deli itself is horrible, or at least all the ones I’ve seen so far are horrible. Nasty salads, nasty meats, and when most products have inexplicable amounts of sugar, chemicals, and high-fructose corn syrup in them, I’m loathe to buy anything that doesn’t come with nutritional information on it.

A small selection

The actual supermarket aisles are pretty depressing.  There’s a similar amount of shelf space given to the entire gamut of herbs, spices, canned vegetables and rice as there is to cake frosting.

1.8 liter bottles of chocolate syrup

There is a serious leaning towards horrible, sugary crap – well, fructosey crap to be accurate, as high-fructose corn syrup, sugar’s evil twin, is the norm here.  It’s not just worse for you, it’s much less tasty. Coca-Cola is made with HFCS here, as opposed to the cane sugar version you get everywhere else.  This explains the fact that a Coke will set you back $1.20 in a restaurant, while a Mexican Coke is often an option for $2.

I'm not making this up

The real horrors are in the freezers.  It seems that the predominant theme for frozen ‘food’ is “the first four things you think of when you’re stoned, all in the same box”.  There’s ‘Pancakes & Sausage On A Stick’, there’s the ‘Eggs, Potatoes, Bacon & Cheese Breakfast Bowl’, the ‘Hamburger Pizza’; the list goes on.

Everything you want, mixed in a bucket

This is, in all seriousness, the real reason that Americans are getting so big. The prices for these pre-cooked, ready to heat and eat monstrosities make them a very tempting solution to the problem of being an overworked, underpaid parent.  If you’re coming home from work exhausted, living on a tight budget, and nobody’s ever taught you how to shop for and prepare good food, then these brightly-colored, extremely inexpensive meals become a seemingly excellent solution to your problems. The food industry profits from your situation, and then the medical industry profits from the rapidly-declining health of your family.

You sons of bitches, Kraft

Honestly – what the fuck is “Whipped topping”?

mmmm, cheap meat

Fortunately, after the heartbreak of the freezers, you arrive in the promised land.  A wall of delicious, inexpensive cuts of meat greet you as you exit the lane of horror, offering a chance to rid yourself of the foul taste of capitalism’s inevitable abuse of the uneducated with succulent cuts of beef, pork and chicken, all quite reasonably priced. Now is not a good time to imagine the hell on earth that is the beef industry. Focus, please!

If anything would make me religious...

Americans don’t kid around when it comes to meat.  We Aussies, like a lot of folks from a lot of countries, think that we understand, revere and excel at barbeques. We could not be more deluded. Aussies like to burn meat outdoors while we get drunk. Americans barbeque. Proper coals, a variety of woodchips for smoking, and more flavors of marinades, dry rubs  and sauces than you could possibly imagine are available here, and so far, they’re all good.  There appears to be a barbeque channel on cable, or it may just be a cooking channel that I keep switching on at the right time.  There’s certainly a lot of shelf space at the local library dedicated to the subject – the banner on this website is a photo of my first crack at an American barbeque – that’s a pork loin roasted and smoked in a kettle-style barbeque, marinated in a jerk rub. It was unbelievably good, if I do say so myself.

Please, don't get me started

But I digress.  There’s a downside to even the meat section of the supermarket, and oddly enough it’s the one item you can’t get Americans to shut up about. Bacon. I guess they’re allowed to call it that – I mean, it’s pork, and it’s cured.  But it sucks.  You can make your own American bacon in Australia – here’s the recipe: Take a slice of bacon, remove the rind, cut off the meaty end (you know, the bit you can buy on its own as ‘short-cut bacon’ – the expensive and lean part) then get your laser out and slice the remainder into eight paper-thin sheets. Ta-da, American bacon. I guess it’s handy if you like your bacon incredibly crispy, and can’t stand to wait more than one minute to get it that way.

Smile for the camera, lunatics

This brings us to the checkout, where you’ll see the scariest thing of all -a wall of grinning women making crazy-eyes at you from the magazine rack.

Well, that’s a trip to the supermarket here in the USA. All that’s left to say is that there are other options for shopping, which I’ll get to shortly, and that while I’ve left out all of the mildly pleasing things that would’ve made this post less interesting, they do exist.

Kraft wants to kill you. Make no mistake.

One last question, regarding the picture to the right – really?

Here, as someone legally unable to work, I don’t really have that option. In fact, it’s pretty reasonable to expect me to do all of the domestic work (aside from cooking, since neither of us wants to avoid that), so I’ve had to climb a steep learning curve over the past couple of weeks.

It’s all working out fairly well so far, owing mainly to my ‘grazing’ approach to housework. Basically, I try to clean something every few hours – before it gets dirty if possible.  This system is very effective for childless, bone idle people, but I’m not sure a stay-at-home parent or working person could get away with it.  I’m just hoping that by the time I’m either of those things, I’ll have this whole homemaker shtick down pat.

Cleaning a kitchen seems like a big, unpleasant, daunting task to me. Cleaning a basically-spotless stovetop while I wait for a pot of coffee to brew is stupendously simple. If I do that, read a chapter of my book, then wipe down the benches on my way back from the toilet a couple of hours later, it’s no big deal.  Later that evening, when I’ve had several too many coffees, I’ll mop the floor. And so on it goes.

So far, so good. I may make a good husband yet!

Up next is some non-fiction – a book about Poincaré and Einstein’s study of time, then a couple of volumes of Dave Barry’s collected columns – I’ve never read any of his stuff, I just know that about a third of all the amusing quotes I read online are attributed to him, so I’d like to get a better look at his shtick.

The municipal library here is very well-stocked for a town this small, and then there’s always the college library to hit up if I run out of interesting titles.

Sigh, it’s a hard life!

Freshly painted, comfortably carpeted, and way too big for the four of us – especially since two of us are cats.

WordPress is shitting me to tears with its inability to insert a simple image into a post without completing ruining the layout, so I’m going to give up before I end up hurling my wife’s laptop at a wall, and instead I present a series of hopefully self-explanatory pics. It will just have to do.

Australian toilets understand this – they are designed so that one needn’t be confronted by the totality of their business every time. American toilets have what I can only describe as a display shelf. It’s not an easy adjustment.

The first queue took us about ninety minutes to get through, for the privilege of being fingerprinted, retina scanned, photographed, DNA swabbed, rectal probed and made to complete a match.com dating profile. I guess they take security seriously, or at least the appearance of security.

Once we were through security, it was a simple matter of hauling our luggage a mile or so to the domestic terminal, only to discover that there was no food there. Back to International for my long-dreaded first encounter with the American diet. I was not disappointed. Deeply disgusted, mildly disturbed, and a little closer to death, but not disappointed. We went to Pinks of Hollywood, a local hot dog chain. We both had the LAX International Dog, which featured a 10″ tube of rubber filled with hog anus and squirrel meat in a bun, topped with sauerkraut, chili – which I had been looking forward to, but now can’t bare to look back on, bacon (which will get its own post shortly), mustard, onions, relish and cheese. It was bad, but I was hungry. For a side dish, I decided to just grab whatever the chubby Homeland Security dude in front of me ordered, which turned out to be Nachos Chili Cheese Fries. I should have been forewarned by the listing of “cup of cheese 50c” on the sides menu…I can’t even begin to describe it – a picture will have to do the work this time.

Having completed our feast, we walked back to domestic for the next queue, this time for the shoe removal and x-ray process.  It wasn’t the hour and a half it took to get to the head of the queue that really hurt, it was the sign at the head of the queue saying “first-class passengers enter here” that we hadn’t noticed before queueing with the economy-class riff-raff (it’s unlikely that either of us will ever fly first class again, and since we didn’t take full advantage at the time, I feel justified in looking down my nose at everyone for a few seconds, for the sake of getting added value).

I got through the X-ray bag check area, barefoot, beltless, irritated, but my carry-on didn’t. I stood for fifteen minutes while a security woman sat motionless, wordless, arms hanging limp by her side, staring vacantly at the X-ray monitor, until a supervisor came to see what the hold-up was. “There’a a laptop in one of these bags” she explains to the boss, who yanks the bag out of the machine and says “fixed”. Awesome, good to see everyone’s on the same page. By that stage, my wife Keren was so overtly pissed off on the other side of the gate that she earned herself a pat-down and a full body scan.

After all of that, and the inevitable hour-long delay before boarding, the extra six inches of seat and extra foot of legroom really did make a difference. It also worked out to be $20 cheaper than flying economy, or coach as they call it in the US (you don’t pay to check each bag when you fly first class, and we had a LOT of baggage) so that was nice. Flying over the US at night is a whole different experience to crossing Australia – the two countries are not too dissimilar in terms of geographical size, but the US has fifteen times the population. It’s covered in towns and cities, unlike the vast, unbroken visual silence you encounter when crossing the mainland of Australia.

At Cleveland airport I sucked down my first American coffee, bought from a surly woman at a Dunkin’ Donuts for the ridiculous price of $1.20, and served in the three seconds it takes to pour a – please excuse my language but there’s no other way to describe it – a fucking massive bucket full of liquid. Not bad. Not great, but cheap, fast, and they actually mean it when they ask if you want cream. For some reason, I’d always thought that Americans just called it cream in the context of coffee, but really meant milk. Not so. It’s cream. And holy shit, do I love cream. I was starting to warm to the culture, after my initial cheese-fueled horror.

We were picked up by an Oberlin conservatory graduate who supplements his music earnings by offering a driving service in the area, who took us to our new digs while answering all of our stupid questions. Nice guy, name of Danny. After twenty minutes or so, we pulled up at our palace, safe and sound, tired as hell but deliriously happy.  It was even prettier than the photos.