Today thousands are following in Raleigh’s apocryphal footsteps as they journey west for the World Cup. About 65,000 Brits are expected to enter the US for the tournament, with the Tartan Army terrorizing Boston and Miami and the English shamefully yelling grim sexist chants in Dallas bars. Along the way they are encountering the delights of American consumer culture — the land of UHT milk and high-fructose corn syrup honey — and posting relentlessly about how supersized, sugary and surreal the American diet can be. They are agog, nay aghast, at the offerings in Walmart and Costco, polluting X and TikTok with wide-eyed content that may as well be from the queue of the first McDonald’s in Moscow. You’d think they’d never seen a side of fries before.

Football is an apt context for this culinary “cultural exchange” to be playing out in. The European game defines itself against American sports by imagining itself to be anti-commercial; equivalent basketball or NFL leagues in the US are unabashedly the opposite, often being entirely designed around ad breaks. The congressman Jack Kemp told the House in 1983 that while American football was about “democratic capitalism”, “soccer” was “socialist”. Plus ça change: the furor over the frequency of “hydration breaks” in this year’s tournament is partly about the sly insertion of extra ads and the showing-off of branded sports beverages — but it strikes me that a sport which has already been transformed by acquisition by broadcasters, sponsorships, gambling companies and sovereign wealth seems unlikely to be ruined by a 20-second Tostitos slot. Football’s delusions about itself seem particularly ready to be punctured over the course of an American away-day, where tickets come at eye-watering price points and stadia are structured to upsell you on refreshments. In England, sports often involve warm cans on the train, then inedible pies; in the US, it has jumbotrons, fan zones, fireworks and half-time entertainment. The jury’s out on which is more “real”; are we yet ready to admit which is more enjoyable?

More from this author

Why everyone’s reading the Worst Boyfriend Ever

By Poppy Sowerby

About football, I am indifferent. Food is a different matter. I have lived in America for 13 months now, and I get it. In the first five, I must have gained a stone. But what first shocks is a different kind of scale: here, soft drinks come in 48-ounce vats. Then there’s the dizzying variety of American supermarket fare: the wall of powdered and boxed macaroni; the squirty cheese in aerosol cans; the cereal aisle with the dimensions of a municipal library. Here they sell pickles in buckets as if for army bivouacs; white bread flavored like “birthday cake”; 500-calorie hot dog sausages condemned to rotate under a 7-Eleven heat lamp until gobbled down the gorge of a 500lb teaching assistant. It can be scary, all this abundance. But what really unsettles us latter-day settlers isn’t the size, the processing, or even the mysterious abstraction in food marketing itself — what is a glacier-flavored Gatorade supposed to taste like? — it’s the sense of meanness it confers on us.

The austerity of continental Europe has for a long time been flatteringly repackaged as good taste. How many British holidaymakers have let “refreshingly easygoing locals” off for malfunctioning lifts, or wafted away the criminal lack of air conditioning as civilized? Shops that shut at lunchtime are humane; outrageously rude waiters are authentic. In reality, this is the infrastructure, and these are the holidays, that we can afford. To pretend that smallness, inconvenience and froideur are in fact born of sustainability, civility or character is absurd; really, these things relate to expense and enshittification. 

I can see how tempting it must be for the sniffy German or the pouting Hollander to frame American consumer habits as vulgar or decadent, but that steering-wheel-sized pretzel must taste awfully bitter in the mealy mouth of a hypocrite. Having coffee with 12 pumps of caramel syrup is hardly ascetic, but neither is it a moral failing. In the Fifties, indulgence, scale and convenience were understood as signs of American confidence and success, and these things remain largely true — even if Ozempic has tamped down pop culture’s ability to stomach fatness.

When these principles collide with culinary culture, the result may not be ideal: values like seasonality and regionalism are trounced by a megatruck infrastructure designed around a country 2,800 miles wide. This fact is difficult for Old Worlders to get our coiffed heads around: American dining was optimized for a different civilization entirely, one of long drives, huge supply chains and workaholism. Charming terms like terroir wither on the vine here. Needless to say, some American food is exceptional — but that’s beside the point. The lie we tell ourselves is that we’re huffing about obesity and low-quality food by posting videos of Dunkin’ Donuts drinks the size of babies; really, our objection is that America is our coarse, corpulent cousin and we envy him anyway. The inconvenient truth is that while you are sipping Hobgoblin and tutting at the ad breaks, he is slinging back Bud Lights and cheese balls, enjoying the Hollywood-quality commercials. He is happier. And Bud Light is actually fine.

If all the intrepid fans making their way to the home of the brave have to cling on to is some garbled conception approaching “scarcity chic”, then we are in a sorry state indeed. My social-media feeds are plagued by videos in which wide-eyed Italians hold oversized drinks and exclaim, verbatim: “I ask medium size! Che medium! Madonna! My entire family can drink from here for one month!” seemingly ventriloquizing Fawlty Towers’s Manuel. But Americans experience this excess not as decadence but hospitality. Free refills, ultra-attentive waiting staff (motivated by tipping culture) and the normalization of “to-go” boxes are little civic sacraments. They may seem disturbing to those of us used to being ignored by the often poisonous service workers of Western Europe, but after a little time living here I began to accept the kindness of staff without suspicion. 

For other European nationals in America, this country’s supersized culinary confidence offends some vestigial sense of refinement; for Brits, it’s about shared shame. In gastronomic transgressions we recognize ourselves. After all, who has been more criticized for their food than the land of cheese, tuna and beans? It’s worth remembering that as in the World Cup, in a competition of cuisine we are unlikely to come out on top; perhaps our desire to broadcast horror at our transatlantic brethren is about family embarrassment. It’s also a surefire way of sticking the knife into a nation which seems always to be telling us that British society is going down the tubes; relentless interventions by JD Vance have rattled our sense of identity over the course of this second Trump presidency. I understand the appetite to get the Yanks where it hurts: the improbable size of their hoagies.

Those tall tales about Raleigh’s servants not realizing the potential of the potato seem beautifully resonant for my intrepid compatriots taking in the New World for the first time. Then, the cooks on his estate may have inspected that tuber with narrowed eyes; now, we venture back to its home to eat them swamped in cheese sauce with bacon bits, or deep-fried as tater tots, or cushioning quarter-pounders as potato rolls. Then, as now, the arc of Anglo-American civilization bends towards the French fry. It may be occasionally grotesque, but don’t pretend that’s the problem here: enough with your snarky TikToks. We know you’re stuffing your face with Taquitos as you write your captions.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, its last President, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed on to do an advert for Pizza Hut, in which a family gathering of Russians debate whether the introduction of fast-food chains like Pizza Hut was truly worth the fall of the USSR. Unsurprisingly, the pro-Pizza Hut faction win. And though that particular advert is somewhat on the nose, it wasn’t a great leap from the post-Soviet reality. When the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow in 1990, hundreds queued to get a chance to taste American fast food.

Today, however, the “McDonald’s era” in Russia has come to a close, as all of the franchise’s restaurants have been sold off. Most of them are still being operated, but they carry new names. The elusive “magic” that those Big Macs held in the Nineties in the eyes of Russians as harbingers of modernity, symbols of a new, global market society, is now well and truly gone.

But American fast food was never only important for the ways it could dazzle the Russian proletariat, or anyone else in what is now called the Global South. It has become part of the American self-conception, at the lowest and uppermost reaches of society. Pictures of Burger King lorries being unloaded from US military cargo planes in bases across Afghanistan and Iraq were a powerful symbol of American power; the now-abandoned US military base at Kandahar, for example, once boasted a Burger King, a Pizza Hut and a TGI Fridays serving alcohol-free margaritas. Like the Roman legionaries before them, wherever American soldiers and marines deployed in force, they brought their own culture and preferences with them. Far from being a white elephant and a pointless waste of resources, that McDonald’s or Burger King inside the Green Zone was a little piece of America, one that soldiers — often worn down from their long deployments into the sandbox — genuinely appreciative. For them, it really was a little slice of home.

The Kandahar Burger King closed down a long time ago; ordering Pizza Hut at Bagram air base in Afghanistan is likewise a distant memory, as the US military slowly cuts back and retreats from the world. But even on the home front, inside the continental United States, fast food isn’t what it used to be. The industry is now locked in a genuine affordability crisis, and it is unclear when — or even if — things will ever improve. The famous McDonald’s dollar menu has been renamed to the “$1, $2, $3 Dollar Menu”, and an increasing amount of items on it — even the chicken nuggets — now cost upwards of $4.

In the early years of the post-Cold War era, the ridiculous affordability of American fast food was a point of pride, waved in the faces of the snobs of Europe. Michelin chefs be damned: in the US, mass prosperity and mass culture were the order of the day. The average American could be proud of the fact that he could eat more calories and afford more stuff than the average citizen of any other country in the world (even if nothing else).

But this is no longer the case, as massive cost increases, coupled with shrinkflation, have eaten away at this central aspect of American living standards. Those same supermarkets that Boris Yeltsin salivated over are putting locks on the displays. Once, Russians queued up in droves to get a taste of Pizza Hut or Burger King; now, Americans marvel on social media at just how cheap the hamburgers in Moscow seem to be compared to their own. But though many things are becoming increasingly unaffordable for ordinary Westerners these days, the rising price of hamburgers comes with its own poignant cultural significance. And this new reality is the source of a new type of dissatisfaction on social media.

More from this author

After MAGA, a new Trump rises

By Malcolm Kyeyune

One of the internet’s most popular content creators, John Jurasek — commonly nicknamed “Reviewbrah” — posted a cri de coeur on the topic several months ago, in which he described how the fast food he reviewed had skyrocketed in price and nosedived in quality over the last few years. After listing his own experiences and complaints, Jurasek opened up the floor to people to report their own experiences in the comments section. More than 10,000 comments later, the picture painted was overwhelmingly clear: the fast-food industry inside America seemed to be in a state of near-collapse.

In response, some might be tempted to ask: so what? Fast food is bad for your health; why would the unaffordability of a greasy pizza or a cardboard box of processed chicken nuggets even be a problem? These complaints are reasonable on one level, but they ignore the broader social, economic and political reality that this affordability crisis speaks to. The United States is possibly the only country in the world where the term “food desert” is in semi-regular use, denoting areas within the country where there is little or no access to supermarkets selling fresh vegetables and the like. In this nutritional frontier country, fast food is the only game in town. Though the extent and severity of this problem shouldn’t be overstated, it is an issue, and some Americans are, for various reasons, at least partly dependent on cheap fast food in the way that the citizens of ancient Rome were dependent on cura annonae: the provision of state-subsidised bread and grain.

On another level, however, tutting at Americans who resent that their burgers are now twice as expensive and increasingly filled with sawdust is just the Western equivalent of tutting at Soviet citizens for coveting American blue jeans. The USSR collapsed in part due to its citizens being disillusioned with the promises of socialist prosperity that had been made to them. Looking at their own shabby reality, blue jeans and hamburgers became symbols of something greater. America, by contrast, is now a consumerist society where the ability to actually be a happy consumer is rapidly collapsing. Just like the Soviet Union before it, the once-alluring story of American society is now being seen as an increasingly shabby fraud by a growing segment of its own citizenry. The same feelings of anomie and cynicism that once animated Soviet political jokes are now spreading to more and more Americans, forced to contrast the newspaper headline stories of economic growth and prosperity for all with their experiences of food inflation and wage stagnation.

A very stark illustration of this fact came recently, as the American journalist and cable TV profile, Tucker Carlson, travelled to Russia. The official goal was to interview Vladimir Putin, but there’s a fair chance their meeting was the least culturally impactful moment of the trip. It’s what Tucker decided to do afterwards that has now really stirred up consternation and controversy on social media: in an ironic repeat of Yeltsin’s visit to that American grocery store, Tucker decided to visit a Russian grocery store in Moscow, ride the Moscow subway, and then visit a Vkushno i tochka — Russian for “Tasty, that’s it”, the new hamburger chain that has taken over where McDonald’s left off.

In Tucker’s own words, his visits to Moscow “radicalised” him, in a sort of mirror image of how citizens of the USSR were once equally radicalised by seeing how the other side lived. Moscow simply wasn’t that bad: the groceries were cheap, the store selection was wide, nothing was locked down to prevent theft — which is becoming extremely common in many parts of the West — and the streets were free of drug addicts and homeless people. The burgers were far cheaper than in the United States, and they were indeed tasty.

Given that Russia is, according to the official narrative in the West, a backwards tyranny, run by an incompetent, brutal kleptocracy, ridden with crime and lacking in basic services, things in Moscow reasonably shouldn’t be quite so, well, normal. Why can’t we in the West, with all the natural, inherent superiority our societies supposedly possess, manage to have clean public transit, cheap fast food, or stores where you don’t have to ask an employee to unlock the deodorant shelf?

History might not repeat, but it sure does rhyme: after Tucker posted these videos from Moscow to social media, a massive firestorm broke out, as people tried their best to debunk the very idea of Russians enjoying anything close to a decent living standard or a functional society. Statistics, often decades old, pointing to Americans spending only some 8-10% of their total income on groceries (compared to Russians who supposedly spent almost 50%) made the rounds, but it is hard not to get the sense that it is all, in a very real way, a futile effort at this point.

The problem isn’t that people suddenly love Russia — it’s that they remember when the West had affordable fast food, and when stores didn’t put half their wares under lock and key. They remember living in functioning societies, and now they increasingly feel that they don’t, anymore. What Tucker — like Boris Yeltsin before him — inadvertently did is simple: he revealed that the belief in the grand narrative of his own society has withered away and died. It doesn’t matter how many statistics and graphs are posted about PPP and GDP growth and how America is richer today than it has ever been before: people don’t feel richer. They see the decay around them and they now feel they are being lied to, and that the system is broken. And not least when it comes to their hamburgers.

Almost a freak accident of history, the hamburger has been pressed into service as a grand symbol for the past half century. In 1990, it was a symbol of American cultural and economic dominance, as Muscovites waited in line for their taste of the future. In 2004, as airlifted Burger King trucks rolled off the tarmac at Bagram air base, it became a symbol not just of cultural and economic dominance but of military power too. A mere 20 years later, the hamburger is now coming to symbolise very real feelings of political and economic decline, as people take to social media to bicker over whose fault it is that they’re no longer affordable.

Anger over expensive burgers won’t bring down America, just as the lack of blue jeans didn’t cause the collapse of the USSR. But they point to exactly the same thing: a shared vision of the future, once commonly held, is now in the process of dying. And nobody knows how to repair that vision, or what to replace it with when it’s gone.

The Bible declares that those who do not work shall not eat, and our secular society clings onto that idea: the harder you work, the greater your reward ought to be. There is a glut of articles, for instance, expressing outrage at how many junior doctors are paid less than fast-food workers. If you’re being compared to a McDonald’s employee, you know it’s bad.

I worked in McDonald’s for a few years, and it’s true: the wages set the lowest bar. If junior doctors are earning so little, that is a scandal. But drawing attention to the paltry pay of working-class people just so you can make a point about the treatment of overwhelmingly middle-class public servants isn’t exactly progressive.

Fast-food work is derided because it’s an “unskilled” job that supposedly any fool can do. It was my first job, and the same was true for many of the people I worked with. Three quarters of McDonald’s employees are under the age of 25. The workforce at my store was young and diverse, many coming from immigrant backgrounds, very few of us university educated. The sort of people ignored by society.

Around 100 current and recent McDonald’s staff have recently testified, in a BBC report, to enduring a toxic culture of sexual harassment, bullying and racism. Female workers as young as 16 described experiences of groping and intimidation, from both customers and staff members. Managers were accused of turning a “blind eye”.

Though I can’t testify to personally witnessing any sexual harassment while I worked at McDonald’s, I did hear about it. When I first started, a male crew member who was notorious for hitting on female colleagues was suspended for making inappropriate sexual comments. He left soon afterwards. There was also a 16-year-old worker was hit on by a middle-aged, lecherous dad, while he was overseeing his own 11-year-old daughter’s birthday party.

Suggested reading

Why the Left eat junk

By Mary Harrington

To some extent, such objectification is true of any workplace. In History and Class Consciousness, the Marxist György Lukács developed the concept of “reification”, which describes how, in a capitalist society, human relations are treated as relations between things. Human themselves are treated as objects, while abstract ideas like “capital” or “the market” become active subjects that determine human activity. In other words, humans are controlled by capital, rather than vice-versa.

Being a fast-food worker is perhaps the most extreme example of this condition. It is a job that allows no room for autonomy. For a good portion of my day, I was a piece of equipment that the bosses had paid for, and they wanted to get their money’s worth. Orders were issued from on high, the managers enforced them, and I was supposed to obey them without question, on pain of sanctions such as getting fired or denied decent hours. We were all overworked, because the store was understaffed — unless it was a Friday or Saturday night. Management needed to keep labour costs as low as they could get away with, to maintain profitability. There were busy shifts when I would be dumped on fries, to cook them and box them by myself, hour after hour. On summer days, it was excruciating.

Because the job is so monotonous and automatic, I felt like I was more robot than person. Working in McDonald’s made me feel what Marx meant by his theory of “alienation”, as opposed to just understanding it as an abstract intellectual concept. Alienation, for Marx, was how workers became estranged from the product of their labour, never reaping the benefits of production. It’s something that is impossible to complain about, when you feel like you’re just another cog in a machine, disposable and easily replaceable. When your work is seen as near-worthless, it’s hard to protest that you are being underpaid for what you help produce shift after shift.

More from this author

How the Dutch invented our world

By Ralph Leonard

Customers often reinforce this feeling. There is a general belief that people working in the food industry are servants and, therefore, lesser beings. Places such as McDonald’s cater to the masses; in their own work stations, its customers will often experience the same anxiety, alienation and precariousness. But McDonald’s is one of the few spaces where someone, downtrodden by their own boss, can feel like they have power — where they, as the customer, are king.

Those who exploit this transaction know that the power relations are lopsided in their favour. If they become aggressive and hurl abuse at a fast-food worker, for mostly minor infractions, the worker can’t defend themselves. They must maintain their composure, respond politely and just take the abuse on the chin. Otherwise, they may be damaging the company’s reputation for providing quality customer service, and even risking their job. I know of someone who was “written up” for getting angry at a customer who was swearing at him while complaining about cold fries. Usually if you have three write-ups, your contract will be terminated.

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous presence of CCTV cameras reminded us that we were always being watched. Indeed, McDonald’s must have recorded so many incidents of sexual harassment and bullying against workers. Yet footage is seldom used to bring about justice. One of the workers who testified in the BBC story said that, even though her sexual harassment was caught on camera, she had to carry on working with the perpetrator.

The harassment and bullying that goes on within McDonald’s isn’t simply a problem of gross lechers, then; it is a symptom of structural tendency in these workplaces to objectify human beings. It is a symptom, too, of the precarity of the job market for young people. Many of those I worked with had second jobs, often similarly low-waged, just to bolster their paltry income.

Suggested reading

Who are the strikers fooling?

By Terry Eagleton

Perhaps part of why fast-food work is devalued is because the food served is seen as a vulgar indulgence, unlike junior doctors. But in this respect, how is it different from other source of pleasure? People want to eat fast food, and someone has to serve them. Those servers work long, hard hours. Beyond deserving basic respect, they should be able to earn a living, afford decent housing and a social life, raise a family.

But McDonald’s won’t give them these things, unless pressed. “Capital,” as Marx rightly stated, “is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.” Fast-food restaurants have got away with treating their workers badly simply because they can; but they have been enabled by a tacit view, among the public, that these workers are somehow unworthy. It’s tempting to see the unionisation drives and strikes that have occurred in the past few years as the beginning of a fairer era. But it’s also hard to imagine a future in which fast-food workers aren’t the benchmark for bad wages, offered in exchange for their humanity.