Additional Coverage:
- 10 Worst American Foods, According to Non-Americans (cheapism.com)
While France boasts its escargot and Italy offers a cheese with a little extra zing (live maggots, anyone?), it seems the world reserves its most passionate critiques for American cuisine. Of course, beloved classics like burgers, barbecue, and fried chicken usually get a pass. It’s the dishes that feel distinctly, unapologetically American that often end up on the global hot seat.
So, what exactly has the rest of the world scratching its head? We scoured comments from non-Americans on Reddit to bring you 10 American foods that foreigners find utterly baffling.
Root Beer
Let’s be honest, any drink that calls itself “beer” but turns out to be a soda sets itself up for some serious scrutiny. Expectations, people!
Root beer is definitely an acquired taste, much like Vegemite for our friends in the UK and Australia. For many Americans, it’s the taste of childhood – think creamy floats with vanilla ice cream.
But for the uninitiated international palate, it often conjures up flavors of toothpaste, cough syrup, or just about any unpleasant medicine you can imagine.
Historically, Indigenous peoples brewed sassafras root for its medicinal qualities. Colonists later sweetened it and removed the alcohol, evolving it into the carbonated beverage we know today.
While modern root beer largely relies on artificial flavoring, that distinctive wintergreen note often triggers a “gag” response from those not raised on it. Its controversial status was cemented in 2018 when it was inducted into the Swedish Museum of Disgusting Food – quite the institutional disgrace!
Biscuits and Gravy
A significant chunk of the confusion surrounding this Southern comfort classic comes down to semantics. In British English, “biscuits” are cookies, typically enjoyed with tea. In America, however, biscuits are fluffy, savory pastries, delicious with just about anything – including, yes, gravy.
This linguistic divide often fuels the ire of non-Americans, particularly our British counterparts. Across the pond, biscuits are for dunking in tea, and gravy is a rich sauce for roast dinners; never the twain shall meet.
Here in the States, though, our biscuits are more akin to savory scones, and the gravy is a creamy, peppery white sauce made with sausage fat, flour, and milk. To us, it’s a match made in breakfast heaven.
Perhaps we should blame the vocabulary, not the dish!
Cheez Whiz
If there’s one dish that might even make the most patriotic American squirm, it’s Cheez Whiz. It’s cheese in a can, designed to be sprayed on, well, anything.
What more can you say? Plenty, according to those who haven’t grown up with this “peak convenience” invention from Kraft.
One Redditor bluntly described it as tasting “like plastic and cancer.”
In all its processed glory, Cheez Whiz isn’t necessarily a staple of American eating habits; it’s more of a guilty pleasure, the kind of thing you might mock publicly but secretly stash in your pantry. Interestingly, a retired Kraft food scientist once revealed that Cheez Whiz was initially designed to emulate Welsh rarebit, an old-school fondue-like dish popular in the UK. So, it seems this particular “American” oddity might actually trace its roots across the pond!
Chicken & Waffles
The sweet and savory combination is far more embraced in the U.S. than in many other parts of the world. This helps explain why chicken and waffles coexist so harmoniously on a plate here, particularly below the Mason-Dixon line, where it’s often considered a spiritual experience more than just a meal. Elsewhere, however, pairing something so distinctly savory with something so distinctly sweet is often met with a raised eyebrow.
“I honestly thought it was a weird inside joke the first few times I saw it,” confessed one baffled, non-American Redditor. “It’s in the top 10 of the most unfitting combinations of food I’ve ever seen. How did this even happen?”
Fruit Salads
Non-Americans generally expect anything labeled “fruit salad” to consist of, well, seasonal fruits and nothing else. Definitely no marshmallows, Jell-O, or Cool Whip. Foreigners, bless their hearts, just don’t understand.
But in the American Midwest, “fruit salad” takes on an entirely different meaning. These dishes often emerged from the mid-20th-century craze for convenience foods, when Jell-O, canned fruit, and whipped toppings were marketed as time-saving wonders for the modern homemaker.
Still, this historical context does little to appease the foreign palate. As one outsider put it, “I have a high tolerance for American food, but I cannot handle these, or even comprehend why and how they exist.”
Grits
Grits are divisive even within the United States – beloved in the South, tolerated in some regions, and utterly despised in others. So, you can only imagine the reactions of foreign palates encountering a bowl of what often resembles beige wallpaper paste.
Made from ground dried corn (hominy) boiled into a porridge, grits can be served simply with butter, loaded with cheese, or topped with shrimp in the Lowcountry tradition. To Southerners, it’s the ultimate comfort food; to outsiders, it’s just… mush.
Hershey’s Chocolate
You’ll frequently hear non-Americans describe Hershey’s chocolate as tasting like vomit. And for the sake of their precise foreign palates, they actually have a point.
This distinctly American chocolate contains butyric acid, a compound used by Hershey’s for its extended shelf life. Unfortunately, it’s also a component found in rancid butter and, yes, actual vomit.
Not exactly a selling point for those accustomed to European chocolate’s smoother, less tangy profile.
Corn Dog
Before we hop on the “America eats crappy food” bandwagon, it’s worth noting a special category of cuisine designed to be over-the-top: fair food. American fairs have given birth to some truly legendary (and sometimes horrifying) creations – fried butter, fried Oreos, even fried Coke. The humble corn dog is one of the originals.
While not an everyday lunch for your average American, this fairground staple has expanded beyond the carnival circuit. You can find them in the frozen aisle of most grocery stores and at dedicated fast-food chains like Hot Dog on a Stick.
Essentially, it’s a hot dog skewered on a stick, dipped in cornmeal batter, and deep-fried until golden. Simple, yet profoundly baffling to many.
Twizzlers
Licorice is already a polarizing candy, but Twizzlers manage to take the debate to a whole new level. For Americans, they’re a quintessential movie-theater snack – those plastic-red ropes you mindlessly chew while explosions light up the screen. For foreigners, however, they’re often described as rubbery, flavorless tubes that somehow got mislabeled as candy.
“It was one of the first candies I ever tried when I went there,” one Redditor confessed. “Man, it just tasted like chewing rubber. Left me confused for a whole week.”
Sweet Potato Casserole
There’s something about Americans’ unwavering affection for marshmallows that truly gets under foreigners’ skin. Sweet potato casserole is Exhibit A. Non-Americans gaze upon it and wonder: why would you pile candy on top of a dish that’s already sweet on its own?
This Thanksgiving staple is essentially mashed sweet potatoes baked under a gooey blanket of marshmallows, often enhanced with brown sugar or pecans. It typically appears at the dinner table as a “side dish,” despite tasting exactly like dessert.
It’s safe to say that outsiders have a hard time digesting this particular tradition. “Sweet potatoes with marshmallows is something that will never pass between my lips, you goddamn psychopaths,” one Redditor explicitly declared.
Read More About This Story:
- 10 Worst American Foods, According to Non-Americans (cheapism.com)