American butter is shit tbf
A good example why nationalism and pride about it makes no sense. Most people had no choice in where they are from, and had no influence on something like this. Having pride in something you did not influence and had no choice in is really weird and kind of narcissistic.
This is why it gets toxic and dangerous easily. We see similar issues with fans of sports teams, even though the fan has literally nothing to do with the team.
its just an ancient tribal instinct. oh, you’re from the squirrel bones tribe? pssh, your berry bushes are shit. rat skull tribe have best berry bushes, and we have stream. squirrel bones tribe have no stream and bad berry bushes
reminds me of JP Sartre: by disparaging the jews, the anti-semite instantly puts himself into a superior group without having to actually do anything.
Nationalism works the same way. “I belong to THIS socially constructed group! We do such great things!” as if they built the community from the ground up and weren’t just thrown into a world with systems already in place independent of them that helped produce the things they’re proud of…
Like sure community is a thing but at a certain point doesn’t it get quite arbitrary what you take credit for? and doesn’t that also mean we have to take credit for all the bad things too? every Palestinian would become Hamas and every American a drone pilot. those are precisely the reasons I am not patriotic and i dont find “shut up, frog” jokes funny. “just” tribalism? “just” a wee cheeky bit o fash in the mornin?
This is about butter, not nations. The nations are merely places in which the butter resides.
Also in this case it’s kind of a great example of how positive nationalism and pride quickly turns negative. The US has more dairy farmland than any other country, im sure there is plenty of fancy boutique butter. It’s a pretty weak premise, almost certainly drawn completely from negative stereotypes.
Having pride in something you did not influence and had no choice in is really weird and kind of narcissistic.
what
When someone says “I’ve been sober for a year” and a commenter says “I’m proud of you, OP”, is that narcissistic? Pride in this sense is a sense of community accomplishment. As a social species, we share in the achievements of others as necessarily related to our own - it’s a form of creating bonds and encouraging behavior. Whether you dislike the idea of nations or not, having pride in something you didn’t influence and had no choice in is perfectly normal and not at all narcissistic.
Not the same. A more apt version using your comparison would be someone saying ‘I’ve been sober for a year!’ and the other person (who still drinks, but perhaps cheered them on now and again from the sidelines) says either ‘You mean we’ve been sober for a year!’ or ‘Yes, and it’s all thanks to me!’ - never mind they didn’t actively step in to help, or try to go dry themselves.
What the complaint you quoted was objecting to are people claiming full part of something they had no control over and no (or not much) involvement in, just to make themselves feel more important.
Yes we as a social species like to share in accomplishments, and that’s fine! But there is a line, that unfortunately gets crossed quite a lot, where people start to feel that they themselves were involved in the accomplishments of others, and that’s not so good. To paraphrase an above poster, we didn’t win the Super Bowl.
And also, some things people take ‘group pride’ in aren’t accomplishments at all. Being born in a specific place, for instance, or having a specific skin color. Or even just trying to share credit with every inventor/creator/whatever of the same gender. It does all tie back to our instinctive tribalism, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.
Not the same. A more apt version using your comparison would be someone saying ‘I’ve been sober for a year!’ and the other person (who still drinks, but perhaps cheered them on now and again from the sidelines) says either ‘You mean we’ve been sober for a year!’ or ‘Yes, and it’s all thanks to me!’ - never mind they didn’t actively step in to help, or try to go dry themselves.
That’s literally not the claim being made by these people in the OP taking pride in their community’s accomplishments though.
When someone says “I’ve been sober for a year” and a commenter says “I’m proud of you, OP”, is that narcissistic?
No, it’s an instance where what people say is not what they feel: The second doesn’t comment on their own pride, but is expressing something like admiration. At the most, pride in being friends with such a fine chap who would manage to be sober for a year.
Mostly, though, it’s just a fixed phrase of encouragement and praise, unrelated to the actual words used. The fixed phrase could be “cowabunga!” and it’d mean the same.
The secret is the west coasts.
The french guy was talking about butter from Bretagne. West coast Irish butter is amazing. West coast Scottish butter is amazing.
Know why? Because it absolutely pisses down with rain almost every fucking day in west coast Atlantic areas, the grass grows like triffids and the cows eat themselves silly
Quite simple
I shall be adopting “like triffids” into my everyday vernacular from now on.
(Heavy influence on 28 days later)
Kerrygold 🥰
You don’t think it’s gonna make a difference, but once you eat a stick of it, you’ll know.
My aunt in Yorkshire always used to say “butter makes everything better, including margarine”
Trying to figure out if this is a bit or truly worth the hype. I was about to go shopping tomorrow. Gonna make scones, so I need butter.
I recommend a butter keeper / butter pot to on the counter. They’re designed to use water to seal the air out. Butter will keep for a week or two without any quality issues if you exchange the water in the butter pot daily.
Though these are an inverted system, so if your living space is consistently warm enough to melt the butter, it may not be a great solution.
Contrary to popular belief in the US, butter does not require refrigeration. Just needs a covered dish.
Slice off a pad and pop it on a plate, then microwave it a little.
I don’t know if that’s how you’re supposed to do it, but it sure as hell works.
There are excellent American-made butters done traditionally. I hate that they’re making me defend the US but they have no monopoly on shitty food. It’s kinda just another form of exceptionalism.
There’s no secret to good butter. Grass fed cows, fermented milk, and high fat content. It’s just expensive.
Yeah, when people discuss american food they automatically think of off-the-shelf walmart stuff, mcdonalds, etc. When there are tons of artisanal food producers here, like a lot of them.
“American cheese isn’t even cheese”. I mean ‘american cheese’ is very processed. But go to Wisconsin and tell me we don’t have good cheese.
There’s plenty of good quality stuff in America. We just can’t fucking afford it.
There is even american cheese that is simply the blend of the two cheeses. No extra emulsifiers, no preservatives, no plastic like qualities. It is fairly soft, and quite mild, but it is nothing like the kraft sheets. It is just two cheeses blended together.
I was a big American cheese hater until I had land o’ lakes American cheese. Shits actually pretty good
In average American food is terrible.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t great American food, it just means that the stuff that’s sold the most is horridly heavily processed, thoroughly artificial and/or intensively farmed/raised crap.
It’s not a lack of knowledge or capable people in that domain, it’s that the system pushes cheap crap that whilst it own’t kill you outright it will shorten your Life Expectation by almost two decades compared to most Europeans.
I think a more accurate conclusion then, would be “the average American is too poor to afford good food”
The CAP in Europe subsidizes more traditional farming and farming produce, not corn + hormone beef.
Also there are all sorts of local legislation that limit the extent to which crap food can be passed as real food: a lot of what can be sold as “cheese” in America can’t be sold as “fromage” in France and similarly a “sausage” in Britain has a very strict definition of what can go into it (the crap stuff is called a “banger” since BY LAW it can’t be called a “sausage”).
A lot of the bad practices would be just as cost-saving to do in Europe as in the US, it’s just that the legislation is way tighter and to some level (depending on the country) consumers are much more demanding (plus also due to the legislation, producers can’t just name the fake stuff the same as the real stuff).
The impression I have from talking to Americans is that to eat good food in the US you need to really make an effort, whilst in Europe for most things comparativelly higher quality ingredients are widespread (often the default), easy to find it and there are quite a lot of restrictions on what producers can put in it (or how it’s farmed or raised).
No it’s not it’s specifically that companies can sell Americans the same food they sell in other countries but in those countries, the same food is made with much better ingredients.
Look at the difference between the ingredient list in a Heinz ketchup bottle in the EU vs in America.
In average American food is terrible.
No, not really compared to most of the rest of the world. I live in Europe, every time I go to the US there is a lot of food I enjoy. My partner was surprised when I showed him actually good tasting American food. In terms of produce quality, fruits are by far better in most of the US then where I live in Europe(Central Europe). A lot of Europe (Germany, UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, Czech Republic, etc) has pretty bland food for the most part.
For starters, you seem to be falling into the trap of comparing the food you eat when you visit a place and go to restaurants with the food you eat at home and have to cook from available ingredients.
Further, having lived in both the UK and Germany I have to disagree on your “blandness” assessment, unless you’re talking about the local culinary tradition alone, in which case that is true for the UK, but then again the US to doesn’t really have a local culinary tradition so a like to like comparison of local cuisine with it wouldn’t exactly put the US on top.
As for the rest, in my experience all large international cities in the West (at least the couple I lived in and the ones I visited) have lots of great and tasty cuisine in restaurants, because they all have available culinary traditions from just about anywhere - unlike what some seem to think, the US doesn’t have a monopoly on receiving immigrants from all over the World. (Even smaller places like Berlin, Amsterdam or Brussels have great variety of food in restaurants).
The point I’m making is about the “average” (hence why I actually used the word “average” in my post), not the way outside the average places which are the main cities and it’s about the food people normally eat, and that doesn’t mean the restaurant trade (unless you’re telling me most Americans eat the majority of their meals at restaurants) which tends to be great pretty much in any large city of the World in any nation rich enough to attract people from all over the place.
The US has lower rates of food contamination from e.g. Salmonella or E coli, which I think is what that study is measuring. However, I think food in the EU generally has superior, better tasting, ingredients. There are two reasons I believe this to be the case. The first one probably has a smaller impact than the second.
The first reason that in the US an ingredient must be proven to be harmful before the FDA is allowed to ban it. In the EU an ingredient must be proven to be safe before it is allowed in commercial products.
The second reason is that while both the US and EU have farming subsidies, the way these subsidies are structured means that in the US they tend to incentivize the use of high fructose corn syrup and the production of highly processed foods while in the EU highly processed foods tend to be more expensive and “whole foods” tend to be cheaper.
As a result people in the EU tend to eat less processed food as a percentage of their caloric intake:
You’re just talking about the pre made shit you get at the grocery store in the frozen foods isle.
The US has the most varied and some of the best foods in the world, because there’s no other nation on earth that has such a merltings pot worth of cultures, heritages, and people. Our BBQ and smoked meats are the best. Chicago’s take on pizza is better that traditional Italian pizza. Our “chinese food” isn’t really Chinese cuisine. It’s a hybrid version and mainly was created in the US. Hamburgers are American creations. Key lime pie. Jambalaya! I mean, we made chocolate chip cookies. The Reuben sandwich that everyone assumes came from like Germany? Nope. USA. American made Chili is also great.
You can have your handful of French cuisine. The US has everyone’s menu.
You’re confusing eating out with what people normally eat in their day to day.
In my experience every large city in a prosperous enough nation has restaurants from the best culinary traditions, and that was also my experience when visiting the US.
However what’s available for people to prepare food at home and what people normally eat, is a whole different story.
Why are you being downvoted? Your comment is true, accurate, and unbiased. 🤷🏽
accurate, and unbiased.
Lol
US ranks 3rd in “food quality and safety”, beat only by Denmark and Canada
It’s mostly that the percentage of water aloud in butter in America is higher than most
It’s true, but not as much as people seem to believe. US regulations require a minimum of 80% butterfat, and EU regulations require 82%.
That French guy was just trying to butter them up.
