The first time I laid eyes on an American breakfast buffet was in the mid-90s at Disney World, Florida. I couldn’t believe how many Mickey Mouse pancakes were stacked on the plate in front of me. That childhood holiday redefined everything I knew about portion sizes and how much sugar it was acceptable to eat before lunchtime. The smell of syrup or fried bacon still instantly transports me back to that jungle-themed dining room.
Two decades later, in 2014, I moved to the US for work – first to Puerto Rico, and then Milwaukee, Wisconsin, near Chicago (yes it was very hot, and then very cold) – and once again my eyes were opened to the inner workings of the American diet. Like many Brits who emigrate to the States, I was pretty horrified – not least because I’d dreamt of those pancakes for years afterwards but now found myself longing for the food of home.
Now, as the Labour government engages in the latest round of trade talks with Trump’s White House, the question of whether American food standards will arrive on our shores has washed up again. Nigel Farage may be fine with the idea of chlorinated chicken, but YouGov polling from 2020 found 80 per cent of Brits were against the idea of accepting lower quality food imports – in exchange for a deal – from the US. And after living there for two years myself, I agree.
Franko-ingredients and hidden sugar
Our shared language and the “special” relationship that exists, or at least did exist, between the US and UK can often be interpreted to mean a shared culture or lifestyle. But on my first trip to the supermarket it couldn’t have felt more alien.
The way food is assembled in the US doesn’t always mirror British counterparts. Take a simple purchase, like a loaf of bread. At home, I might look for a sourdough or seeded loaf with few ingredients, but in the US it was a label-reading nightmare. Manufacturers use powders like potassium bromate, which is banned in the EU. (The International Agency for Research on Cancer says it is “possibly carcinogenic to humans”. It causes cancer in animals).
I became morbidly fascinated by foods like the (horrible sounding) Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies, a biscuit-type snack which seemed symbolic of the ingredient madness with 20-plus composite parts: bleached flour, polysorbate 60, sorbitan monostearate, Red 40 Lake, sodium stearoyl lactylate, and titanium dioxide (banned in the EU since 2022 because it might damage DNA). Reading the back of a packet was like doing a cryptic crossword.
Even foods without franken-ingredients weren’t always what they seemed. The breakfast cereal we ate, I quickly realised had so much more sugar in it than a similar-looking brand in the UK. A 2019 study by Cambridge University found median sugar content per serving was higher in US cereals than all other countries tested.
The portion sizes in America are infamous too – I never got used to it. At American Starbucks you can get a “trenta” serving – 30 fluid ounces (obscene), compared to the biggest 20 oz Venti at home. McDonald’s serves chicken nuggets in 40-piece boxes compared to 20 in Britain.
Then there were the items that seemed totally innocuous – a pint of milk, or a fillet of fish – that over time I suspected was maybe changing my body.
I developed acne, was constantly bloated, and put on weight even though we didn’t have a car and tried to walk wherever we could. I wondered if my skin was attributable to the presence of rBGH (a bovine growth hormone) used to boost milk production in the US, which is banned in the UK, but couldn’t of course prove it. In the end I gave up eating meat and milk to try and curb the effects. It worked, partially, but I never quite felt back to my old self (since returning to the UK I eat meat and feel fine).
Another friend, who lived in New York for seven years but returned in 2024, wonders if her diagnosis with pre-diabetes, despite being slim, is down to so much sugar added to the bread and other food in the US.
“The bread is pumped full of sugar. The fruit and veg looks amazing – huge and juicy and sprayed with water in the supermarket – but tastes of nothing. Tomatoes are completely flavourless,” she says. She also gave up eating chicken.
All this left me with a lingering suspicion of American food standards.
The US and UK food systems are “set up differently”, says Federica Amati, nutrition lead at Imperial College’s School of Medicine and head nutritionist at ZOE. “The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a different approach to the EU European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). In the US it is up to food manufacturers to report novel additives so a lot of things are untested compared to what is allowed by EFSA”. A loophole also allows ingredients generally recognised as safe, known as GRAS, to avoid official approval.
But, she says, it’s not just ingredients. “Things are grown differently, killed differently, cleaned differently”. A misconception about the chicken debate is that the bone of contention is simply the presence of chlorine. But it is more that the European Commission believes a chlorine wash points to unsanitary conditions in the animal’s life. Reports from 2018 found American livestock is dosed with five times as many antibiotics as UK counterparts.
Vegetables are higher in pesticides too: American grapes are allowed to contain 1,000 times the amount of the insecticide propargite as UK grapes, says Pesticide Action Network UK.
Amati herself lived in New York for a period and, like me, gave up meat because she felt like her gut was “constantly inflamed”. Her body unhappy. “My skin was bad. As soon as I stopped eating it, I felt better”.
‘Many foods are not what they seem’
Sophie Morris, a food writer, who spent a month in the US in 2024 says that when it comes to quality the problem in the US is that “many foods are not what they seem on the surface”.
“Take milk, for example. Most dairy cows are injected with growth hormones that are illegal in the EU. If you don’t want to drink this, you need to buy milk labelled hormone-free or organic, both of which might cost twice the price, or more. Peanut butter that looks just like peanuts often has added palm oil, or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a corn starch sweetener I’ve seen added to everything from maple syrup and honey to cereals.”
Morris also points to the problems that come with larger portions or hidden calories. “If you order a salad, it will probably come with something sweet mixed in, caramelised nuts or dried fruit; if you fancy a donut, you’ll end up buying six because the pricing makes it mad to buy just one.
“We’ve seen food inflation shoot up here, but good-quality food costs even more in the US. If you can’t grow your own, buying food that isn’t ultra-processed is something of a luxury pastime.”
The United States is the leading country in ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption with UPFs accounting for about 60 per cent of total daily caloric intake, according to studies. These numbers are even higher among consumers with lower income and education.
Amati also points to the higher sugar levels present in the American diet – particularly sugary beverages. “Everything is sweetened by default. If you order even a green tea you have to specify, ‘unsweetened’. These are the sugars that are insidious because people forget about them.”
“It’s much easier to find highly processed food at all price points, from out and proud junk to so-called “healthy” snacks,” says Felicity Cloake, food writer and author of Peach Street to Lobster Lane: Coast to Coast in Search of Real American Cuisine, who cycled across the USA to research food for her book. She says you “really have to seek out” freshly prepared foods.
“You’re ok if you have a farmers market locally, and can afford to shop in it, or a Mexican specialist, but otherwise, access to unadulterated produce seemed quite limited”. In 2017, the United States Department of Agriculture reported that 19m people in the US live in ‘food deserts’, which they define as places more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles in rural areas.
For Amati, the US suffers from a detachment between production and the food on their plates. “The US is worse than the UK for this – there is less exposure to small-scale farming and agriculture”. She says that advertising has done a good job of marketing industrialised products as homespun, for example, the Betty Crocker brand.
I really hope British food doesn’t become Americanised. These days, I still love going on holiday to the US, and indulging in that pancake stack, but I wouldn’t want it on our shelves.
