As an Europan I can tell you, that the food in de US often tasted sweet to me. It’s like people in the US lost their taste buds for bitter and sour. There is no need to add sugar to every dish, especially bread. The other thing was the amount of fat in nearly everything. Salad? With a creamy sauce or tons of oil. Of course you have to add 400g meat AND a high calories cheese to it. Served with some sweet bread and it’s basically a burger in disguise. We were told that California was the healthy and rich state. If that was the healthy food, I’m starting to believe all those images on social media of fat dripping dishes.
In the end we cooked ourselves most of the time and payed the horrific price.