Ich besuche meine Familie nächste Woche, und ich will kleine Geschenke mitbringen.
I know American chocolate is inferior, but I assume it’s still a novelty. Some kind of candies probably, too. What else? Many years ago they loved to get boxed breakfast cereal and paper napkins, which seems quaint now.
It’s been years since I’ve seen them, and I’m sure everyone there can buy whatever they want on the Internet, but it will still be fun to bring something.
Any suggestions for an Ausländer?
Don’t bring chocolate. I have heard from many people, that the American is so vastly inferior to European chocolate, that some described it as tasting like shit.
Have you never tried it? It’s definitely worse, though I’d say it’s more wax like. Like everything else here, it’s made of mostly corn syrup.
There’s another additive used by Hershey and other manufactorers in the US: butyric acid. It ads a sour taste and unfortunately it reminds people of vomit.
Haha, that was unexpected and yet, completely unsurprising. TIL
We pay significant subsidies for corn farmers, but then we have to figure out what to do with way too much corn! The reason everything has corn syrup in it is because it’s cheaper than sugar. That’s also why ethanol is quite common in gasoline here even though it’s bad for fuel economy, power, and engine health.
An entirely separate issue is that we consider corn to be a vegetable, when it’s really a grain. Carbohydrates are almost all they have!
It’s definitely waxier in consistency, especially Hershey’s, the best known American chocolate. Not sure of the truth, but the story goes: Hershey’s sent chocolate to the military members overseas in WW2. In the summer it would melt so they changed the formula to make it more stable, which made it waxy. When troops came home they wanted what they were used to, so that became the norm. Then they switched to corn syrup, which also made it worse. There are good American chocolates, but they aren’t coming from Hershey’s or Mars.
The development of processed foods in the U.S. is closely tied to the military. They funded research into more shelf-stable foods like “cheese product” and preservative laden bread. Manufacturers appreciate their products expiring more slowly as it helps out their logistics. It’s not really anyone’s goal to feed us all stabilizers and preservative, but because it’s cheaper for big companies it’s what we get. There’s not much in the way of consumer protection in this area.
Certainly there’s good chocolate, but price is a major factor at the grocery store. A big Hershey bar (the size of your hand) is $2 and a similarly-sized bar from a better manufacturer is at least $5.