The French eat snails and frog legs, Italians have a cheese with live maggots, while the folks in the land down under chomp on kangaroo steak. But somehow, the rest of the world saves its loudest opinions for American cuisine. Not all of it, of course—burgers, barbecue, and fried chicken get a pass. It’s the other stuff —the foods that feel uniquely, unapologetically American —that end up on the global chopping block. Here are the 10 American foods that foreigners find baffling, according to non-Americans on Reddit.
Root Beer
Listen, any drink that calls itself beer but turns out to be soda deserves to be dragged. Expectations, people! However, root beer is one of those things that really is an acquired taste, akin to Vegemite for the Brits and Aussies. To most Americans, it tastes like childhood — floats with vanilla ice cream — but to the non-American palate, it tastes like toothpaste, cough syrup, and any gross medicine of your choosing.
The drink comes from Indigenous peoples, who brewed sassafras root for its analgesic and antiseptic properties. It was mildly alcoholic, but colonists later sweetened it up, took out the alcohol, and by the late 19th century, it had been turned into the carbonated version we know today. Modern root beer is almost always made with artificial flavoring, but that wintergreen punch lingers — and that’s the flavor note that triggers the “gag” response from anyone not raised on it.
In 2018, it was inaugurated into the Swedish Museum of Disgusting Food — officially disgraced on an institutional level.
Biscuits and Gravy
Semantics play a significant role in the hate for this Southern comfort staple. Biscuits in British English are cookies, typically paired with tea. In America, biscuits are pastries — delicious ones, if one might add — paired with anything you want, including gravy.
Mostly, that’s why non-Americans, especially the good people of Great Britain, come out of the woodwork to bash the dish. Across the pond, biscuits are something you dunk in tea, and gravy is the sauce you put on roast, and the two shall never meet. However, in America, biscuits are akin to savory scones, and gravy is a creamy white sauce made with sausage fat, flour, and milk, which is a match made in heaven. So don’t hate the dish, hate the nomenclature.
Cheez Whiz
If there’s a dish that even the most red, white, and blue American would have a hard time defending, it’s Cheez Whiz. It’s cheese in a can that you spray on things. What more can you say about it? Well, according to everyone who’s never tried a Ritz cracker with this peak convenience invention from Kraft, plenty, like “it tastes like plastic and cancer,” according to one Redditor.
In all its processed, plasticky glory, Cheez Whiz isn’t really a reflection of American eating habits—it’s more of a guilty pleasure, the kind of thing you mock in public and sneak in private. In fact, according to a retired Kraft food scientist, Cheez Whiz was designed to mimic the rich fondue sauce of Welsh rarebit, an old-school dish popular in Wales and the United Kingdom. So, it seems this one actually originates across the pond.
Chicken & Waffles
The concept of sweet and savory is more accepted in the States than almost anywhere else. That’s why chicken and waffles can coexist on the same plate just fine in America—especially below the Mason-Dixon line, where it’s more of a spiritual experience than a meal. In the rest of the world, though, combining something so distinctly savory with something so distinctly sweet is usually frowned upon.
“I honestly thought it was a weird inside joke the first few times I saw it. It’s in the top 10 of the most unfitting combinations of food I’ve ever seen. How did this even happen?” a baffled, obviously non-American Redditor dared to ask.
Fruit Salads
There is an expectation from non-Americans that anything called a salad should involve seasonal fruits and nothing else. Certainly not marshmallows, Jell-O, or Cool Whip. Weird people, these foreigners.
But in the American Midwest, “fruit salad” means something entirely different. These dishes emerged from the mid-20th-century craze for convenience foods, when Jell-O, canned fruit, and whipped toppings were marketed as time-saving miracles for the modern housewife. Still, none of that makes sense to the foreign palate. As one baffled outsider put it: “I have a high tolerance for American food, but I cannot handle these, or even comprehend why and how they exist.”
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Grits
Grits are divisive even within the U.S.—beloved in the South, tolerated in some regions, and despised in others. So you can imagine how foreign palates react to a bowl of what looks like beige wallpaper paste.
Grits are made from ground dried corn (hominy) that’s boiled into a porridge. Depending on the cook, they can be served plain with butter, loaded with cheese, or topped with shrimp in the Lowcountry tradition. To Southerners, it’s comfort food; to outsiders, it’s mush.
Hershey’s Chocolate
You’ll often hear non-Americans describe Hershey’s chocolate as tasting like vomit. And for the sake of the precise foreign palate, they kind of have a point, as the very American chocolate contains butyric acid, which is used by Hershey’s for its long shelf life, and which is a compound found in rancid butter and, yes, actual vomit.
Corn Dog
Before jumping on the “America eats crappy food” train, it’s worth pointing out a special category of cuisine that’s over-the-top by design: fair food. American fairs have birthed some legendary abominations — fried butter, fried Oreos, even fried Coke — and the corn dog is one of the originals.
While it isn’t something your regular Joe eats for lunch every day, it’s a fair food that expands beyond the fairgrounds, and you can find it in the frozen aisle in many grocery stores and at Hot Dog on a Stick, a fast-food chain devoted to the concept. It’s a hot dog speared on a stick, dipped in cornmeal batter, and deep-fried until golden.
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Twizzlers
Licorice is already divisive, but Twizzlers take the heat to a new level. To Americans, they’re a movie-theater staple—plastic-red ropes you chew through absentmindedly while watching explosions on screen. To foreigners, they’re rubbery, flavorless tubes that somehow got mislabeled as candy.
“It was one of the first candies I ever tried when I went there,” one Redditor confessed. “Man, it just tasted like chewing rubber. Left me confused for a whole week.”
Sweet Potato Casserole
There’s something about Americans’ love for marshmallows that really steps on foreigners’ toes. Sweet potato casserole, exhibit A. Non-Americans look at it and wonder: why would you throw candy on top of a dish that’s already sweet on its own?
The dish itself is essentially mashed sweet potatoes baked under a gooey blanket of marshmallows, sometimes with brown sugar or pecans added for good measure. It shows up at Thanksgiving tables as a “side,” even though it eats like dessert.
It’s safe to say that outsiders have trouble digesting this. “Sweet potatoes with marshmallows is something that will never pass between my lips, you goddamn psychopaths” one Redditor explicitly declared.
More Stories About American Food From Cheapism
- 19 Foods That Are Banned in America — Learn more about foods you could never find, foods under stringent regulations, and foods you may hope never to see.
- The True Origins of 18 Classic ‘American’ Foods — Many of the foods “invented” in America are actually reinterpretations and hybrids imported from cultures around the world, reflecting our rich history of immigration.
- The Top 10 Most Popular Cuisines in America — A recent study reveals which cuisines Americans love
