Why (some) food tastes better abroad

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We've lost flavor.

I wanted it to blow my mind and it did.

It's super buttery.

It's it's very, very smooth.

I'm John Glenn Hill, and this is Explain It To Me from Fox.

You know that hotline that we tell you to call at the end of every show?

Well, one of you called recently with a question of your own.

Why does food seem to taste so much better outside the U.S.?

When I was in Japan recently, the produce and meat were amazing.

Friends say the same thing about food in Europe, right?

The dairy, the bread, the yogurt just tastes better.

So is food actually higher quality elsewhere, or do we just think it is?

And if it is, what would it take for the U.S.

to have food that tastes and feels like this?

Okay, I get what Kate is talking about.

Whenever I've left the country, I've had food experiences that I would describe as transcendent.

The best tacos I've ever had, amazing oysters, and once I had squid ink quizoto that made me want to be a better person.

So what's the deal?

Is this all in our heads, or is the food we tend to buy and eat here in the US actually subpar?

To find out, we're going to have to take a little trip.

Today, we're going to retrace Kate's steps from Japan to Europe and tell you about three foods.

Foods that are different in other countries.

And for fascinating and really revealing reasons.

First up, meat, specifically beef.

And we start in Idaho.

I'm Phil Bass.

I'm an associate professor in the Animal Veterinary Food Sciences Department at the University of Idaho.

I am a meat scientist.

How'd you get into meat?

How much time do you have, I guess?

So I grew up in a very Italian family.

I know my last name's not Italian, but very very Italian family.

And

we always raised our own animals, cut our own meat, made our own salami, sausage, and all that stuff.

And it's always just been a big part of my life.

I want to talk about how we judge the quality of meat.

Is there specific criteria to judging meat quality?

Yeah, so

there's what we call the meat grades.

And so in the United States, the three that are most commonly talked about are prime, choice, and select.

And so prime being the top level.

And it's all mostly dependent upon something called marbling.

So, that's the little flex of fat, the tiny little flex of fat that you see inside the meat.

And what that does is it enhances the flavor, the tenderness, the juiciness of the meat.

It's not everything,

but it's a big contributing factor.

So, where in the world does the beef at the top of this scale come from?

Okay, if you want to go to what a lot of folks consider the

top of the top

in beef quality, it's well beyond what we consider prime here in the United States.

It's in extreme abundance, and that's our Wagyu cattle in Japan.

Wagyu is a breed, and those animals over many, many generations have been focused on for extremely high levels of marbling.

Some of our top beef in the United States will have 10 to 12 percent fat in the muscle.

The wagyu can have upwards of 40 to 50 fat.

So it's extremely high amounts.

The taste is phenomenal.

If you like the flavor of finished beef fat, then it's super buttery.

It's very, very smooth.

The texture is usually extremely tender.

And that's because the fat does, it is less dense than the muscle surrounding it.

It makes it easier to bite through.

Is it a superior eating experience?

You know, a lot of folks that's used to U.S.

beef or North American American beef, it's almost too much fat.

It's almost too rich of an experience.

And so it's consumed in usually really small amounts because it is so rich and satiating.

How much of it is the cow itself and how much is it how they're raised?

Like, do we feed these cows differently?

Like, what's the deal?

In short, they're not really fed all that much different other than they don't spend a lot of time out on out on pasture, out on range like we do here in the United States.

The majority of

the life cycle of cattle in the United States, they'll spend a lot more time out on pasture out on range.

So much of it has to do with just the breed and genetics of the animal.

That's super important.

And that's where the Wagyu really excel because of how many generations over time that they've been focused on for very high levels of marbling.

The breed in particular, the Wagyu breed in particular, is

definitely a different type of animal compared to some of our cattle raised in the United States.

The way that they're raised is on very small operations.

In Japan, there's very little agricultural land available.

And so to have large farms or ranches like we have in the United States, it's just not an option.

Is it possible for us to raise our own wagyu beef here in the U.S.?

Like, can we do that flavor affordably and domestically?

Yeah, you know, it's really starting to become a movement here in the United States.

It was very much just kind of a little niche dabbling of Wagyu cattle.

And over a very short period of time, we've really developed a lot of the Wagyu genetics to become, I would say, almost comparable to that that's found traditionally in Japan.

The Japanese sourced is still considered the very top of the heap, but cattle producers here in the United States have really come a long way and have produced some pretty phenomenal beef that's all American raised.

Okay, so Kate was on to something about the meat she had in Japan.

Wagyu is different than the beef you typically have, it's a delicacy.

And I should say that even in Japan, Wagyu is a treat.

But it's not just genetics that make Wagyu good, there's also a difference in how the meat is prepared and eaten.

And to hear about that, we need to talk to a butcher.

So we called up Kim Kato.

He comes from a family of butchers in Kyoto.

So

about

120 years ago, my grandfather and great-grandfather brought Wagyu calf to the rice farmer for cultivate their land.

Talking about Wagyu,

I try to start talking about food culture.

In Japan, we mainly eat rice.

So basically, for Wagyu beef, we produce to eat rice.

That's a kind of big difference between

the US or European countries because where we eat steak in the US we eat steak.

I'm about to bite 72 ounces in just 60 minutes.

This might be one of the biggest steaks that I've eaten.

But very unique preparation in Japan for Wagyu is we have like a paper thin slice.

If we don't slice that thing, it might be too much fat.

But the good preparation for Wagyu is the dry aging, which is my specialty.

Because Wagyu has kind of unique aroma and umami.

If you do not aging,

you cannot taste that potential.

And that's one reason why people start using Wagyu genetics for their own country's bread.

The Wagyu is spreading everywhere in the world today.

So wherever you go,

you will be able to eat or taste different tastes of the Vagyu.

It's difficult to explain in just sound because even you see it, still you cannot taste it.

So until you actually taste Vagyu,

you cannot actually

understand

how good

match or pairing with rice.

And if you put a little bit of soy sauce on it, it creates a totally different world.

Phenomenal Wagyu.

Maybe coming to a city near you soon?

Could a lesson in the meantime maybe be less is more?

Thanks to our meat experts, Phil and Kin.

Up next, a vegetarian option.

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Okay, we went to Japan to hear about meat.

So how about another food on Kate's list?

Bread.

To investigate, I called up Eric Pallant.

I am the author of a book called Sourdough Culture, a history of bread making from ancient to modern bakers.

If we want to talk elite bread, there's one country we got to focus on.

It's the place where they have more than 30,000 independent bakeries or boulangeries, and the bread is kind of required by law to hit a certain level of quality.

You are the expert, so I gotta ask.

People will come back from France, especially, and be like, Oh my gosh, the bread was so good.

Like, I can't get it like that here.

I'm never touching American bread again.

Wee wee wee, ham haw.

Did the bread in France actually taste better, or is this vacation brain hitting us all?

No, it tastes better,

it really is better bread.

But there's a caveat:

you can buy shit bread in France too, go to a supermarket, and you can buy industrial bread in France just as easily as here.

But

go to a Boulangerie and that bread will be fresh and taste of wheat and leavening and

love and time and patience.

I would argue nothing you can buy in a colorful plastic bag will ever match.

Essentially by law in France, a law passed in 1993

that said, if you're buying bread in a Boulangerie, it must be made with four ingredients, essentially.

Flour, water, a leavening agent, yeast or sourdough, and some salt.

They have to be made on the premise where they're sold, and they can only be made.

Wait, so they like they have a law on the books where it's like, hey, your bread has to be fresh and it has to be made with these things.

Yes.

Now, I don't know who gets arrested if you don't, if you don't follow the law, right?

If there are a bread police in France that goes after with it.

6 a.m., the street of Paris.

I bite the baguette, but it tastes not so fresh.

Alert the precincts.

What makes the country say we got to have a law that standardizes our bread?

Well, the best I can tell is by the 1980s, pre-made breads are starting to take over the market, and that's un-French.

And so, we're going to pass a law that says our sort of national patrimony, what we consider to be, you know, that French baguette that you see in the movies.

Oh, symphony of crackle.

That's us in France.

And

by law, if you're going to sell it in in a Boulangerie, it's got to meet these criteria.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., you know, I can walk into the grocery store right now and I will find so many bagged loaves.

What's the story behind the type of bread that's more common here in American grocery stores?

Yeah, so for 6,000 years we're making bread.

Nobody knew what made bread rise.

It was just magic.

You put this glop called sourdough starter into a dough and like magic,

it rises.

By the 1870s, 1880s, Louis Pasteur discovers that yeast are living things.

They consume the starches, really the sugars in bread, exhale carbon dioxide.

The carbon dioxide makes the bread rise.

And once we know that yeast is a thing, you can make bread much faster than with sourdough.

Sourdough takes two days.

But from a capitalist's perspective, and here's where America excels, it makes sense if you're a baker to bake a lot of bread very, very quickly.

And as the 1920s, 1930s roll around...

Wonder bread fresh at your groceries today.

Because Wonder Soft Whipped Bread is made from batter, not dough.

It has no holes.

Picture this.

The dough is mixed in a machine that can hold 1500 to 2,000 pounds of flour and water.

There are blades on the inside that will mix that flour and water in about three minutes.

And

to keep the dough, to modify the dough so it can withstand that kind of intensity, you need to add dough stretchers, dough elasticizers, dough conditioners, dough

D stickers that keep it from sticking.

So we have modified food production to be bread chemistry.

So from beginning to end, you could have dough on one side and a bread in a bag in the other in under four hours.

We're all about speed and convenience in America.

And

there's really a fifth ingredient that's in sourdough bread, and I would argue

the bread in your French blouangerie.

Thyme.

Time is during that fermentation process.

If it's slow and methodical, flavors develop, aromas develop, you just need your nose to know this has flavors that speedy bread doesn't have.

Do we have any laws in the U.S.

on the books about bread?

I mean, this food quality was so important to France that they're like, all right, let's regulate this.

Do we have anything similar that we're regulating?

Oh, this is fascinating.

If you look, the first ingredient on your loaf of bread is called enriched white flour, right?

And enriched white flour has five things added:

thiamine, niacin, riboflavin, iron, and folic acid.

Here's why.

In the 1920s, 1930s, we were making the transition from whole wheat flour, heavy dense breads, to white bread, which has the germ and all the dark parts removed, which contain the vitamins that the plants provided.

Always buy wonder bread.

Wonder bread.

By 1942, in the middle of World War II, the U.S.

Army was seeing so many potential recruits who were suffering from vitamin deficiencies that they had pellagra and beriberity and anemia.

So in 1942, the Army says all of the flour we buy to feed all of our soldiers who are going to go fight for us in World War II has to be enriched.

Here's the kicker.

By law, countries all around the world require their flour to be enriched.

The law in the U.S.

says if your label says that your bread flour is enriched, it must be enriched.

It's a label law, not a flour law.

It seems more like a law that's about truth and advertising than it is about the actual bread itself.

Worse than that, it's every public health official will tell you that you need to have enriched flour if you're going to have a healthy population.

Homemade sourdough bread really has hit the zeitgeist, I think, especially during the pandemic.

Is there a bread renaissance on the horizon?

Inside the sourdough world, what's circulating like crazy is that Taylor Swift has become sourdough obsessed.

Sourdough bread.

So I've made you some bread this week.

You made me some bread.

Every time she appears on a late night talk show, she brings the sourdough.

Everybody's excited about the bread.

The bread.

She made a loaf that was good enough to show up in one of her videos.

This one I've been workshopping for the girls because they love everything rainbow.

Fun fetti sourdough.

Oh my gosh.

But then commercial bread has taken over.

They've filled shelves with something called fun fetti bread.

Wow, capitalism sure does jump in, doesn't it?

So fast, right?

So fast.

Do you think people will ever rave about the bread in America the way they do about France?

Oh, that's a tough one.

It's going to take a revolution of sorts, and I'm a big believer that food and bread is the place to start

in reshaping and rethinking our cultural attitudes to who we are and what we prioritize.

We would be different people if we took

time and put it back into the ingredient list of our foods.

Up next, you know those uniquely American priorities that have given us less than stellar bread?

Well, they're also part of the reason why you may not actually know what a tomato tastes like.

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Okay, you guys, I have a confession to make.

There's nothing ickier to me than a raw tomato.

It's always been that way.

They're mushy, the flavor is not good.

They're beautiful on a plate, but I just really do not get the appeal.

But after hearing Kate's question, I started to wonder if maybe I'm not the problem here.

Maybe the tomato is the problem.

It turns out that kind of is the case, at least according to Mark Schatzker.

I am the writer in residence at the Modern Diet and Physiology Research Center, which is based at McGill University.

And I'm the author of three books, Steak, The Dorito Effect, and The End of Craving.

Tell us a little bit about...

our tomatoes.

You know, we have, they're big, they're red, they're juicy.

That's what we get at American grocery stores.

How far is this from its original ancestor, the tomato?

It's It's very far.

The original tomatoes are from South America.

They're small.

I've read they're the size of a pea, maybe a little bit larger.

They can come in various colors, and I've never experienced tasting them, but what I've read is that the taste is very intense, can be bitter, can be very vegetal, not as sweet as our tomatoes.

That said, the big, beautiful red tomato that we all think of is also a very bland tomato.

So it's kind of, you can think of this arc, we probably reached peak flavor a few decades ago, and then it's been a bit of a degradation since then

supermarket tomatoes suck all i want to like is a sliced tomato because they're so healthy and good for you and apparently so refreshing but i hate them tomatoes are renowned for looking delicious but not tasting delicious and that's because industry keeps selecting traits that what they call the agronomic traits.

These are things like yield, you know, how much does the plant produce, disease resistance, shelf life.

These are all the things that make you money.

We don't buy tomatoes by flavor generally.

That's changing a little bit, but it tends to be, you know, per pound.

It's not something breeders or farmers get paid for.

It's essentially reverse evolutionary pressure.

Tomatoes have lost flavors for the same reason we don't have tails anymore, because if you don't select a trait, you're going to lose it.

So over generations of breeding tomatoes for those money-making traits, we've lost the one thing that we most value in tomatoes, which is the flavor.

Do you think any of that is out of necessity?

You know, America's a big old country with a lot of people to feed.

Is that a factor in why we're so obsessed with shelf stability here?

I think part of it could be that it's an industrialized food economy.

And if you're growing tomatoes in places like Florida and California and sending them other places, there's really not much of a connection possible between the consumer and the farmer.

It's just such a stretched out kind of a relationship.

And it could just have something to do with our culture that we just don't seem to value flavor the way perhaps the French or the Italians do.

How do the French and the Italians do it?

How do they do their tomatoes?

Generally, when you go there and the reports you find from people who visit these revelatory, you know, epiphanies of, oh my God, I had the most incredible tomatoes.

This tomato from a farm in the middle of Tuscany and I'm eating it like fruit.

It is so good.

I don't like tomatoes in the U.S.

This is incredible.

In depth of flavor, you can smell it a half a mile away or at least three feet.

Often they're traveling in the summer.

If you're in Italy, you know, that's further south.

So some of it's going to be climate.

But I think these are also cultures that have maintained a stronger connection, you know, that kind of farm to plate connection.

I know a tomato researcher at the University of Florida, and his name is Harry Klee.

He crossbred some of his best performing heirlooms, the heirlooms that people said, wow, these just have amazing flavor with some of the best performing industrial tomatoes that are just, you know, yield powerhouses and disease resistant and great shelf life.

And he didn't really get something in between.

He got the best of both worlds.

He's had real difficulty getting anybody here interested, but he sent it to an Italian seed company, and I think they ordered something like 15,000 seeds.

So there is a cultural difference.

It's just not something we're particularly oriented towards.

I wonder if this is more than just a tomato problem.

Like, are we running into the same issues of flavor in other fruits and veggies?

I think tomatoes are a great example.

Strawberries are another great example of it, looks red and delicious.

It so often just does not taste that way.

I think chicken's another great example.

We tend to say something's bland.

We say it tastes like chicken, but there was a time when chicken had its very own distinctive, wonderful flavor.

But again, it's been these agronomic traits, just yield, bringing down the price.

And there's good, you know, there's good aspects to that.

There literally is a chicken in every pot, but we've lost so much in the way of flavor.

Oh my gosh, now I want to try a true strawberry and a true piece of chicken.

Like, okay, for those of us in the U.S.

who can't travel, what's your advice on where we can get the most flavorful, affordable produce?

Because I want the good stuff.

I think farmers markets are a great place to go.

I think supermarkets that, especially independents, if they've got kind of a connection to local growers or more local distribution networks, anytime you can find out a little bit more information, who grew it, that kind of a thing, I think there's more of an opportunity for quality to make its way into the mix.

How does it feel to know that there are all these true flavor profiles of things we could be having, and so many of us will never experience them?

I actually think it's a tragedy.

You know, we talk about alter-processed foods and how addictive they are and how they kind of overwhelm us with pleasure.

I think we don't quite get that right.

I think they overwhelm our urges.

We know that when you start to eat Doritos, you can't stop.

But when you look at countries like France and Italy and Japan, they tend to have much lower rates of obesity and the food is much better.

So I think our relationship with food is broken.

We're afraid of pleasure.

We think there's something,

it's some kind of a trap.

And I think that's totally wrong.

I think the true flavor of wholesome, good food is one of life's great pleasures.

Okay, so there's lots of reasons food in other countries can taste different.

The way it's prepared, laws about quality, variations in what we value.

But I also think there's one more factor to consider here on the question of whether food tastes better on vacation.

And that's the fact that you're on vacation, taking the time to really enjoy and savor the food we're eating.

Taking the time to relax.

And maybe that's one thing we can bring to our eating experiences here at home.

Savor the moment, if not the tomato.

And maybe your meal will taste just a little bit better.

Thanks to Kate for the voicemail that sent us down this fun rabbit hole.

We're putting together a show about tech scams soon.

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Just go to Vox.com slash members and the deal is all yours.

This episode was produced by Denise Guerra and Peter Balinon-Rosen.

It was edited by Megan Canan with help from Ginny Lawton and Miranda Kennedy.

Miranda is also our executive producer.

It was fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch and Adrian Lilly engineered it.

Thanks for listening.

Talk to you soon.

Bye!

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