my body can't switch back to this
American food has three flavors – super super sweet, extremely salty, and grease.
To your protests: I'm not talking about your mother's cooking. I'm talking about what you can buy for cheap on the street. Pizzas and cheap deli sandwiches. Salt and fat are the main culprits there. Sheet cake is a food I can no longer stomach. It's like fluff that has been saturated with oil with sugar added, coated in a substance with more artificial sweetener than any normal person can withstand.
It's like if you're trying to paint with flavors, but the only colors in your palate are hot pink, brat summer acid green, and the dark yellow of a grease-soaked burger wrapper. Add maybe a dull white to represent the flavorlessness of the pizza crust or hot dog bun that you balance out the saturation with.
No matter how you try to combine the flavors, you're going to have a very skewed picture. Vegetables are so wimpy here. Cucumbers with no discernible taste. In Bavaria, eating local cucumbers, I learned that they do actually have a flavor. When you let things stand on their own, without salting them into oblivion, the quality of the ingredients can come through. But we don't start with quality ingredients. Our produce is imported over thousands of miles by truck from Central America, picked while unripe — instead of being harvested locally, from farms that let tomatoes ripen on the vine before being sold.
Our gelato is overpriced sugar water. $7 for a "small" and it tastes disappointing, whereas in Europe you never pay more than 2 euros for a scoop, and it's always something delightful. I get sticker shock every time I want to buy food in DC. Today I bought an ice pop and wound up paying $4.75 for frozen watermelon juice. It was a poor decision.
I just miss food that had nutrition in it. Food that didn't feel like it was trying to poison you. Food that tasted like the ingredients it was made out of, instead of tasting only like what was added to it. Your mouth shouldn't hurt after eating the cured meat on a pizza because of the salt content. You shouldn't get a headache from too much sugar after eating half a slice of cake. In Germany, for the first time I can remember, I could finish an entire slice of cake and feel fine. We need to make food that actually provides nourishment, rather than just a carefully-engineered ratio of ingredients that will addict you to the product. Food shouldn't be yet another area where corporations cut quality and harm the consumer to make a buck. It should actually support your body.