The Chinese (and many other Asians) do not eat cheese. Fermented bean curds, yes, but not cheese.

One of the great ironies of diet is that the Chinese are the most lactose intolerant people on Earth (one in four) but produce the most milk of any country. What they do with it, I don't know, but cheese is an acquired taste which they have yet to acquire. It's easy to see why cheese might offend. Some cheeses are disgustingly runny, smelly and foul. Yet the Chinese eat many things just as smelly, runny, and foul. Duran fruit (a large brown nobbly melon-like fruit) is very popular in much of Asia. They are so foul that many cab companies won't allow them in their cabs.

The least lactose intolerant people on Earth are the Danish. Only five percent of Danes are lactose intolerant. Either you can become lactose tolerant by gradually building up a tolerance through eating small amounts of milk in baked goods and tiny bits of cheese until you can eat things like ice cream, or natural selection weeds out the lactose intolerant babies until milk-consuming nations are mostly able to digest lactose.

Denmark is a nation of dairy farmers, and dairy has been part of the diet for thousands of years. In time, Asians will probably come to tolerate milk (75% or more of them can now).

As a child, the thing that astonished me about American restaurants was the portion size. They were enormous. The English man is right--it was obscene then and has only become more obscene with the passing decades. I wondered then how anybody could finish them. That was a long time ago. My instinctive guess that large portions were the reason why Americans were fatter than Canadians even then proved to be correct because decades later, the portion sizes have continued to metastasize like a cancer and Americans have become fatter and fatter. By eight or ten I had realized that Americans were at risk of eating themselves to death and I hoped it would not catch on in Canada, but didn't hope very hard because I knew it was bound to be copied eventually, even if it took twenty years to reach us. The spread of fast food restaurants and eating out has made Canadians larger as well, but there is still a big gap between the two ostensibly similar nations.

There are many things which regional Americans eat that puzzle even Canadians or Mexicans, so it isn't surprising that people from other continents are amazed or disgusted.

Biscuits are great, but I can't imagine eating one tenth of the gravy (or mayonaise, or hot peppers) that Southerners consume. Also, my Mother's gravy has a lot less of everything in it, except meat drippings. A lot less cream, a lot less bacon, a lot less salt, sugar and starch. A lot less dietary POISON.

While reading an e-book by Bill Maher, collecting many of his best New New Rules, I was shocked this morning by the idea of tacos and spaghetti.

If you combine tacos and spaghetti (I assume they mean filling tacos with spaghetti) you might as well admit that you can't cook better than a drunk frat boy with nothing in the house but tacos and spaghetti, and give up cooking altogether.

Please, go to the nearest Arby's for a civilized meal. (Ha! ha! There is something that nobody ever said in the history of the world. First time in print. I stumped Google with it.)

This seems to be an American peculiarity: Americans feel the compulsive need not only for excess (if more is more, then way too much is even better) but combining things that do not need to be combined, ever, by anybody. It reaches its zenith in white trash cookery, where anything goes, and fast food cookery, where they try to "vary" the menu with new and stupid combinations of the ingredients they already have. This is usually an act of desperation when home cooks do it (I've done some pretty weird combos, myself). But why make a cause célèbre out of somebody like Paula Dean or McDonalds doing it?

American culinary invention is 99% recombination and 1% inspiration. The 99% freaks are nearly always duds, although they might be disgustingly unhealthy but tasty duds. The 1% has made America one of the great culinary nations of the world, but you'd never know it unless you can afford to dine in the dining establishments or folksy eateries of the, let's say, 1%-20% of the population who know how to dine rather than just browse like cattle. Regional cuisines have some great treasures but white trash cookery and fast food are all that people remember or know, especially outside of the country.

God save America from itself. Nobody else can, not even the immigrants who keep bringing their brilliant national cuisines and losing them in the national melting pot.

GrymRpr: FourBlackBars: Something that only American's drink?

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This is the thing that is missing from the list because we are about the only guys who drink it. If you think about the taste, its quite medicinal and syrupy at the same time. Either you were born on it or you realize it tastes like a patent medicine.

In 1960, the FDA turned root beer to crap & has not been the same since.

Now... A nice frosty Birch Beer:
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Gotta love pure cane sugar.
Soda Emporium.com: Avery's Birch Beer soda (new window)

Just how old are you that you remember soda from 1960?

TheXerox: Born, raised, and still live in Iowa, LOVE grits since being introduced to them as a little kid by my dad who spent some of his childhood in Florida before moving back to the Midwest. I only know one other guy here who eats grits and he's a Southern transplant, everybody else here is revolted by it and wonders how the hell I acquired a taste for them in the first place.

I just had grits for the very first time a couple days ago. I was always told they were an acquired taste, but I liked them right off the bat. I've been told cheesy grits are a real treat.

Inchoate: Ewww, beondegi. Had those once in Seoul. Went halvsies on a coup with an Aussie lady.

...Eating insects is okay by me, but beondegi smell like the devil's gym socks and don't taste much better. Eugh.

bwahahahahahahahahahhaa
my fiance and her evil friends tried to get me to eat those.,
bvwhahahahahahahah
me: "OK, but you have to eat one first"

hahahahahahahahaha
dodged that bullet.

/still ate dog

Broktun: I grew up in a town that had zero residents who did not have ancestors from Western Europe. . .mainly the UK.

No Asians
No African-Americans
No Eastern Europeans
No South Americans
No Mexicans

I was not exposed to many outside influences until I went to college. Now, what I try to do when out and about is eat something different.

I had this in Vegas:

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Mi Gan Bo, or beef tendon soup, AND IT WAS FABULOUS!!

I love to try new stuff

one of the best things that I miss from korea, SOUP SOUP and MORE SOUP