We have good food, but you won't find it on "The Easy Path."

The Easy Path is that gentle encouragement to hit up Chipotle for lunch, because it's "right there."

The Easy Path says dinner's hard and you've had a long day, so get something simple, like take-out or microwave.

The Easy Path is entropy. The Easy Path is self-care over struggle. The Easy Path is simple carbs shown on prominent display in store shelves. The Easy Path is advertising.

Hitting the gym isn't on The Easy Path, but forgetting to cancel your gym membership is.

These days, big food companies love "The Easy Path" because it's so easy to commoditize, it's the "Path that Americans are Expected to Take." For financial stewards, being on The Easy Path turns lack of willpower into your ally.

On the other hand, getting good food in the US requires passing the marshmallow test: you have to meal prep, or you have to shop around the sides, or you have to get something on the salad menu. You have to say no to advertising. You have to expend willpower, the most limited of resources to the average American. You have to Go Hungry or Suffer, or have An Upset Stomach. You frequently have to spend more money or time.

Semaglutides are not currently on The Easy Path. Maybe they will be someday. I personally doubt that, because putting GLP-1 on The Easy Path would require big food companies to rethink their entire portfolio.

But you're not wrong in that they could be Easy Path-ajdacent. The dialectic would shift: food companies would shift around to be Organic and Nutritious and Less Calories and find other ways to stay on The Easy Path. Sugar and fat's addictiveness is highly Easy Path-enabling, and that's a pretty big vacuum to fill.

The US is a huge country (9,833,520 square kilometers!), so I find it curious that such generalization can be made about the food available here, or even the eating habits of 334,914,895 humans. I could say that I visited Amsterdam 2 years ago and I was shocked with the quality of the food.

But I would never do that, since I mostly ate at the Red Light District, and I couldn't possibly generalize the country eating habits with stores in a major tourist area.

> but how do you even go about this?

Maybe I'm too European to understand why not, but seems to me that regulations around food and what companies are allowed to put into it is really helpful in avoiding companies from just stuffing whatever down people's throat.

There's plenty of high quality food, you just have to know where to look. For example, come to the Bay Area and check out Whole Foods and any number of high-end restaurants.

> Being from Europe

Why is the quality of food in Europe so much worse than southeast Asia?

Because you guys are way, way, way fatter than e.g. the Japanese.

Back on topic -- we have excellent food in the US, but regulations allow for highly processed crap to be sold too. Pretty sure most of the crappy processed foods are easily available in Europe, too.

The first thing that would help is actually having a realistic discourse about food, and not the idiotic - "You shouldn't be eating processed food, its not good for you".

Like most of the food that we eat is not really that bad. Its not optimal for sure, especially for sedentary lifestyles, but a lot of the health problems are not directly tied into the actual food, rather the over-consumption of it, and passing down of bad genetics (for example, children of obese people are more likely to be obese).

European obesity tripled in the last 40 years as well, despite higher quality of food.