"Having said that though, I feel that the situation is slowly changing in recent years"
You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth. (Put aside the question of how well for a moment, please.) For instance, it turns out that the US did not have uniquely bad dietary habits around flour and sugar, it's just that the US was the first to discover people really like to eat that crap and could afford the infrastructure to deploy it; now the bad diets and the consequences are spreading like wildfire as the requisite level of wealth is spreading. (dhughes says Canada is there too, certainly they have that level of wealth too.)
Correspondingly, it is hard to know whether the rest of the world cooks their own meals and don't eat out much because of some sort of intrinsic betterness or culture, or because they simply can't afford it yet. Once people can afford it in more places they may be more inclined to eat out. And if they do, they'll start losing the ability to cook overall. Culture may induce some lag but there's no particularly compelling reason to think that more countries won't follow along.
You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth.
Yeah, that's the wrong stat to use. The US has had a healthy middle industrial-age middle class for longer than anyone else, and even if it is ailing today (which is debatable and subject to rapid change with notice in either direction), my points still stand. It also has a higher average income level than most if not all, along with a higher median and a generally larger "social wealth", even if, again, we may be letting some of that slip.
A well-distributed wealth of $15K a year will not show you how that country will necessarily behave when it has a spotty-but-$42K-average wealth.
I suggested strongly that the point not be missed, I guess I should have just cut straight to spelling it out even if it would have broken the flow. You point is not relevant to my point at all.
His point is relevant, I think. But it does not make your point invalid. The us can be considered exceptionally wealthy due to it's per capita gpa, consumption, size, and stored wealth in terms of infrastructure, resources, education, and stability.
That definitively plays a role I think. Though that does not explain why the "bad food" seems to have won. It is easy enough to make great tasting food with high quality ingredients. Granted, that would not be cheap - but then again, we don't buy iPhones because they're cheap either.
You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth. (Put aside the question of how well for a moment, please.) For instance, it turns out that the US did not have uniquely bad dietary habits around flour and sugar, it's just that the US was the first to discover people really like to eat that crap and could afford the infrastructure to deploy it; now the bad diets and the consequences are spreading like wildfire as the requisite level of wealth is spreading. (dhughes says Canada is there too, certainly they have that level of wealth too.)
Correspondingly, it is hard to know whether the rest of the world cooks their own meals and don't eat out much because of some sort of intrinsic betterness or culture, or because they simply can't afford it yet. Once people can afford it in more places they may be more inclined to eat out. And if they do, they'll start losing the ability to cook overall. Culture may induce some lag but there's no particularly compelling reason to think that more countries won't follow along.