Non-Americans who have been to the US.. What is the weirdest thing about America that Americans don't realize is weird?

it turns out, I wanted "4% milk"

As a lifelong American, I don't think we have 4% milk (reliably). Growing up we had Skim, 2% and Whole. Looking it up Whole is defined as 3.5%

I did look up a local store online and I was able to find it, but not universally at every store.

I'll try to address some of this, as I'm able. 🙂

1. Yes, many many milks, we can't agree on what is best. Personally I like a quality almond milk, for its nutrients & no sugars and huge bonus it's shelf stable. Great for emergencies.

2. I think the dearth of fresh produce is related to Americans not doing a lot of cooking. Most Americans have a simpler diet, and the stores need to concentrate on a number of things they know will sell. Baby carrots are actually awesome, you're going to appreciate this -- IIRC baby carrots are an innovative way to reduce food waste, sell crop. A farmer had ugly, misshapen, perhaps slightly molded or otherwise undesirable carrots. But most of it was good! So they cut off the bad parts & whittle it down to a nice, uniform, attractive shape & size. Baby carrots were born! Kids like them, they're 'snackable'...idk, I like them & I like the green effort.

3. Yes, food dyes are thrown into everything. RFK recently did a little rant about the yellow dye, some coal runoff chemical. He's absolutely right, it's not cool. I always say you go back 200 years & some people were starving, food of any kind was great. Now we throw red dye into ketchup solely because the ketchup isn't red enough. Disgusting.

4. Natural eggs have some waxy layer on it, a protective layer. So your eggs look dirtier but are actually healthier, can withstand low/no refrigeration. IIRC. Our eggs have that layer removed, they're required by law to be 'washed'. Yes, I also think it's bullshit.

5. It is definitely the sugar & preservatives.

6. As our bellies have grown, so has everything else. If you find old houses with old cabinets & old plates, you'll find the dinner plates are much smaller than we have today! We have been programmed to consume. Search 'dinner plates have gotten bigger' and read for yourself.

7. Yes, our police forces get down to counties. Towns. Idk, I would say that this should provide a more personal & immediate presence. Also in the American spirit, keeping these matters fractured & separate (but also working together, and deferring to increasing levels of authority as needed) allows for the most freedom. You don't like how things are run in this town? Well move to another one. Same with the states. I see people moving towns because they want a better school for their kids. It allows for choice.

8. Yeah, pretty much. TBF, though, our brains can only process so much. And what can we do about the European stuff, anyway?? We've got our jobs, maybe our families, our homes, 334M fucking people of our own with various beliefs scattered across 50 diverse states, heavy taxation without representation (hint, hint), our own problems...then somebody comes up to you..."Did you hear what happened in Fuckistan this morning? 🥺" NO! 😂🙃

Thankfully, with the internet, we can look into any world events we want to & educate ourselves that way. I do, I am politically more involved than most. But no, I cannot name current ministers, chancellors, presidents... I hear their position & that's enough for me. Not my monkeys, not my circus, you handle yours & I'll handle mine.

12 . Thanks! I think at heart we're very cordial people generally speaking. But onto that second, contradictory part: I absolutely agree. I live in a generally good area, but I also see a lot of...other...people. There's a saying, people were a lot more polite & considerate when duelling was legal. Looking around, I think things have become far too 'civilized', the people too soft & dumb, our food as you've pointed out is poisoned, mental & physical illnesses abound, the people haven't seen real hard times, there is no clear & present danger to unite & fight so they make up stupid things to get offended by & fight each other, they're protected from the natural consequences of their actions...I see it. Often. This & more culminates in disrespect & disconnects. Unlike other nations, partly because of our freedoms & partially because our legal system lacks balls, we tolerate a lot of bullshit behavior. As they say, if you tolerate something, expect more of it.

In fairness for number 11, many Americans can't even name their own government officials, expecting to know about other countries is a tall order.

We’re not neighbors with 43 countries, so we don’t have as much immediate exposure to everything going on around those countries. For one, because it’s not going on around us, like it is for you. That said, I thought I had you with the Prime Minister comment. Of course it’s Boris Johnson. Doh! It seems you’ve had 4 prime ministers in 2 years? What’s going on with that? Like I said, we don’t really get exposure to what is happening over there, so unless we specifically go looking for it, I guess we’re out of the loop. We know what’s going on in Mexico and Canada though.

Money. You have this weird unconscious pecking order thing in your culture where you value people more based on their bank balance. You show a weird unconscious level of respect to someone who is rich. And similarly, unconsciously look down on someone poorer than you. Not in a mean way - just as a “I’m better than this person” way that is hard to quantify. You are aware at some level roughly how rich everyone you deal with is. I see this trait far less in people under 20. I hope there’s a cultural shift on this one, because money on its own is a weird way to measure someone’s worth.

Others have written on this far more eloquently than I have, and so I will use their words to help explain this.

‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

• Kin Hubbard

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

8. Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.

This might be dependent on state but any place I've ever lived has had 3 kinds, state police, county "sherrifs department" police and town/city police. To hear theres a part of the US with sherrifs department police is odd to me, usually the state police would take that role in rural areas without their own police department in my experience.

Adjectives. You can’t just have a thing. It has to have an adjective. For example: Milk. I wanted to buy milk. I get to the milk section, and there’s no such thing. There’s x milk and y milk and about a dozen other variants. Where is the basic milk (it turns out, I wanted “4% milk”) in this damned place?

you guys are out there buying NULL milk??

Your cheese is radioactive yellow. Cheese is not supposed to be that colour - but you seem expect it to be for some reason, so your producers add yellow colouring to their cheese.

american cheese or cheese more generically? I assume more generically but i've seen this mentioned a few times and not specified lol.

They need to be refrigerated and last a fraction of the time they’d last if you just left them alone and sold them as they are laid.

"So what's the deal with washing and refrigeration? Soon after eggs pop out of the chicken, American producers put them straight to a machine that shampoos them with soap and hot water. The steamy shower leaves the shells squeaky clean. But it also compromises them, by washing away a barely visible sheen that naturally envelops each egg."

huh, basically just seems like a different approach to solving the problem. Prevention of disease and what not.

Your police are run by the local counties. I think your schools also? I know you have state and federal police also, but most places only have police and schools at those levels.

schools are run locally, though they all adhere to state standards. Sometimes it depends on the schools, some of them are run by the state directly, with a local school board, others are private.

I’ll mostly stay clear of health, because you know your health system is weird. But I will say that it’s weird that very few of your hospitals are run by government. They’re mostly run for profit. Health is meant to be a government service.

is this true? there are a lot of non profit hospitals, i can't think of any "for profit" hospitals off the top of my head though. https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

i did find this stat, which appears to show that there are more non profit hospitals.

Outside a few cities, you barely have public transport of any sort. LA is a mega metropolis, and it’s train network is a joke for that level of population - something like 100 stations for 18 million people?

the obvious answer here is that it's not for 18 million people. Public transit is almost never intended to get 100% of society from one place to another. It's just to relocate mass traffic from the roads to something more efficient.

You have no idea what’s going on. Most of you couldn’t name the UK Prime Minister (this one has been hard to keep track of, in fairness), the German Chancellor or any of the G20 leaders aside from USA and maybe Canada/China. You don’t know about geopolitics beyond whatever you guys are doing. Your world news is literally stuff USA is involved in.

in our defense, Britain is basically the size of a small state... So with local politics alone we're basically dealing with the entirety of the EU, and probably more. Also, we don't really live next to anywhere exciting, so world news isn't really super relevant to us. We have canada up north, they exist, we're friendly. Mexico to the south, we're relatively friendly too, but they have an organized crime problem, and beyond that it's sort of just outside of our bounds.

Canada and mexico are considered "domestic" policy for us lol.

#8: Police

State police enforce state level laws, and Federal agencies enforce federal laws.

The whole semi-autonomous thing. If a state and the Feds both have their own laws against something they could each try to arrest somebody, but there could also be a situation where one might not have a law while the other one does. For example , weed is still illegal under Federal law. The Federal government has mostly chosen not to enforce these laws, but it could. Many states have legalized weed to varying degrees.

So there could be a situation where somebody is smoking weed in a state that has legalized it. The state police have no power to arrest that person, but the Feds do.

I'm sure this has all made it more confusing.