There’s a type of video young women like to post after returning home from a trip to Europe. They want to know why, when they’re in the U.S., eating wheat and dairy makes them bloated and tired, but in Europe, they can gorge on pasta loaded with cheese and feel “amazing” and even lose weight. “What is wrong with the food we’re eating in the United States?,” they’ll ask.
It’s not just study-abroad students who have become fixated on the superiority of European food. Joe Rogan has observed that while pizza, pasta, and breads “really wreck me” in the U.S., he can eat those same foods in Italy with “no problem at all.” Gwyneth Paltrow recently admitted that on a flight in Europe, she ate peanut M&Ms. “I would not do that in America,” she said. Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. loves to say Americans “have around 10,000 chemicals in our food, while Europe has only 400.” He recently invited Vani Hari — the activist known as Food Babe on Instagram — to the White House to present a comparison of the ingredients in Skittles and McDonald’s French fries in the U.S. and the U.K. “American companies are poisoning us with ingredients they don’t use in other countries,” she concluded.
