Confessions of a foodie - the food in the US...

Thursday dawned for breakfast on our first day at WMAW. Breakfast consisted of some sort of small bran or apple muffins, a collection of dry breakfast cereals, butter and jellies (what passes for jam in the US), some sort of scrambled egg or frittata dish, fruit and fruit juice, oh and something that almost but didn't quite qualify as yoghurt. If I had to describe it, it would be runny strained baby custard with Acidophilus for flavour. Thus began our introduction to American food. It was an inocuous start to what turned out to be an experience in the horror that is American food.

Watching a lot of people over breakfast was interesting. A large proportion of Americans tended to eat their cereal dry, and coffee and tea was whitened with evil UHT half-n-half. That's half milk - half cream if you're wondering. I cheated on my second cup of coffee and used the cereal milk, but most of the time it was the only option. Oh and the people that put milk on their cereal also put EXTRA sugar on the cereal, and it was already far too sweet for my taste.

I guess I should get the rant off the chest first. I'm extremely underwhelemed by American food. It's usually very sweet, bland, and high on protein and carbs and fruit and veg is an afterthought. Oh and there is no lettuce but iceberg, and I tell you it is really funny to not see gourmet lettuce varieties everywhere. In a land of such bounty I would have thought fruit and veg would be really cheap and bountiful. I'm really spoilt by our choices and food quality in Australia.

Coffee on the whole was also weak, mostly because Americans favour a mild roast coffee, and it's almost always filter coffee. I love my very dark Italian roast beans, and missed it on the trip. The Dekoven Centre had surprisingly good coffee in comparison to the rest of the trip, as they used a dark roast bean in their machines.

I also learnt that everything gets sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (which I call the Evil Stuff) in the US, and it has a distinct unpleasant aftertaste. For example, the cranberry juice at the first breakfast had it, but orange juice didn't as it was unsweetened. We'd found out things were a bit funny with soft drinks when we'd bought a Coke (Classic Coke to you Yanks) at Chicago O'Hare airport, and it tasted wrong and evil. To my horror during the trip I found out Pepsi becomes drinkable with the Evil Stuff, Americans (and I'm including Canada in this one) can't make a decent ginger ale, there is no such thing as ginger beer (I cried myself to sleep dreaming of Bundaberg Ginger Beer:-)), but real lemonade (sweetened with the Evil Stuff), which we'd call a low or no carbonated lemon squash, is available everywhere and not too bad. I drank a lot of orange or apple juice and water on this trip.

One breakfast we had English muffins as an option. Breathing a sigh of relief I pulled out the jar of Vegemite we took, and prepared myself something that wasn't sweet. Oscar from Chicago Swordplay Guild passed his emigration entry test for Australia, as he tried it and like Vegemite. Puck Curtis on the other hand saw what I was doing, and asked me if it was Vegemite. When he found out it was he decreed the stuff was evil and is an attack in the first preparation. We all laughed at that one. Apparently he'd tried it before when visiting his brother who lives in Melbourne.

The conference food was OK, but it was conference food. Stuff you eat to keep going and fairly bland to suit most tastes, but I was craving vegetables after 3 days. Fruit we could get, but it's not the high quality I'm used to from back home. We lost weight by the end of the trip, and didn't really find some better food options till we got back to Chicago after a week in the US.

The rest of the trip was just odd foodwise. We did try Chicago deep dish pizza, which was nice but huge, and pizza with just 3 toppings was really strange compared to what I'm used to here in Australia.

The one thing I will say nice things about was a breakfast restaurant called YOLK (http://www.yolk-online.com/). If you go to Chicago, go have breakfast there. Beautiful fresh fruit, wonderful pancakes, eggs etc. I absolutely loved it. The proportions were huge, so we ended up not having lunch until 2pm, and we were having breakfast around 8am.

Well enough about the food. Just remember how lucky you are if you live in Australia or NZ because you really do have it good for food choice.

Rick