American Food

Our sojourn in Thailand has left us with a few dietary peculiarities. We are used to a much less contaminated food supply. The prime example is eggs. Commercial eggs make both of us sick, but free-range eggs from a local farmer do not. No hormones, no antibiotics, and no salmonella contamination. We gladly pay twice or three times the price of supermarket eggs for eggs that won't make us sick. Even the eggs sold as "natural" in the supermarket make us sick.

Supermarket chicken - Perdue or Tyson - smells like ammonia or bleach and tastes half-spoiled. We got used to SPF (Specific Pathogen Free) chicken in Thailand. No salmonella, no listeria, no campylobacter, no hormones, no antibiotics. Now the only kind that actually tastes right is the expensive organic chicken. I buy the whole bird and use the back, neck, and wings to make chicken broth. We'd really prefer to be buying packs of leg quarters, as we both like dark meat, but it looks like our foreseeable future holds overpriced whole chickens. White meat makes delicious chicken pot pie, though.

Supermarket pork is slimy and smells "off" the day I buy it. As with the chicken, we got used to S-Pure pork, which was hormone and antibiotic free, while being free of trichinosis and other pathogens as well. Pork was our standard meat in Thailand. I used ground pork freely as a ground beef alternative, in chili, lasagne, and tacos. We ate pork tenderloin regularly, along with pork chops once they started cutting actual pork rib chops instead of just random hunks of pork. The ribs came already individually cut for fast and easy cooking. I have a local source of pork, from which we buy all our bacon and sausage. I may need to start buying all our pork there.

Decent beef was imported in Thailand so it was very expensive. The local beef was all but inedible. When you can count every rib on the cow, there aren't going to be any "USDA Choice" cuts of meat within. We have adjusted well to eating more beef. We don't seem to have any problems with the beef, other than our fear of BSE.

And then there is milk. I avoided any issues there by going straight for hormone and antibiotic free milk from a small local dairy. I get my milk, cottage cheese, butter, buttermilk, and half and half from the food coop, which carries the products from that local dairy.

To sum it all up, we have experienced as many digestive upsets in our few months back here in the US as we did in our 3-plus years in Thailand. There are the previously mentioned eggs. Also affecting us badly is Mc Donald's, although it may just have been the egg in my Egg McMuffin. Pizza seems to be an issue, no matter where we get it. In fact, eating out in general seems to be a bad choice.

It's a good thing I like to cook.