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I have spent the past 5 months traveling between the US Midwest, California, Japan and Thailand. I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand.
I. Food and Services
Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.
Why is Thailand so trendy compared to Japan or the US? Basically, it is too expensive to take risks in rich countries. Thailand is a poor country but their economy feels incredibly healthy. Their money converts to pennies outside the country, but inside money trades hands so easily that anything feels possible. Food delivery and rideshares are so cheap because housing is so affordable that they can afford to live on such little money. Cab rides in rich countries are very expensive, because we have to pay for insurance, the pensions of drivers, and so on.
The quality of hotels has declined drastically in the US. I typically stay at mid-range hotels and rarely do I find that maid service is provided more often than once every three days. Hotels that charge $20 a night in Thailand provide maid service every single day. Why can’t Americans afford to pay someone to clean a room?
Airbnbs in Japan, fraught with regulation, are so bad. The apartments are old and cramped and dark and expensive. I am currently paying about $50 a night for an old build in a random part of a random city, and while the host is very kind, talkative, and helpful, it is also twice as expensive as the luxury airbnb I stayed at in Bangkok a month ago with a chic pool, gym, library, and dirt cheap food within walking distance. By the way, airbnbs and hotels in the midwest are incredibly expensive lately- why is it cheaper to stay in a room in a literal castle in Europe than a crappy hotel room that smells like weed in Ohio?
II. Airline Flight
I hate the cramped cheap seats on long flights. This time I flew from California to Japan and upgraded to a full-flat seat on Zipair, a low cost Japanese airline owned by JAL (Japan Airlines.) This 11 hour flight cost me $1515. I am not really going to complain, because it was great to have the extra room and I managed to sleep a bit. But the amenities on Zipair are shockingly meager. I asked for water early in the flight and she told me I had to order a bottle from the in flight service on my phone which they didn’t make available for another hour or so. There was no food provided, your only option was to order a few packaged snacks like Pringles from your phone.
A month later I flew Tokyo to Bangkok on Thai Airways. This 7 hour flight cost me only $301. I sat in the cheap seats in the back, but it was an empty enough flight that I had an entire row to myself. They provided multiple delicious meals and snacks throughout the flight. It felt significantly less cheap than the Zipair experience.
By the way, I am concerned that the cost of international airline flight is far too cheap. The first time I traveled internationally was when I was in middle school around 2001. I believe my round trip flight between the US and London was about $1200 at that time. The inflation calculator I just checked said that’s the equivalent of $2190 today. I just checked google flights and the same round trip costs only around $491 today. The incredibly cheap barrier to entry of international flights seems like an obvious problem leading to more illegal immigration and erosion of local culture than I’ve ever seen anyone point out before.
III. Conclusion
You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.
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I have to add a caveat. Whenever I am in Thailand I can never quite shake the feeling I’m about to get sick or get in some terrible accident. I don’t feel unsafe: people are very kind, and it’s not the same kind of fear that I feel in, say, the ghettoes of the US, which are truly scary. But buildings in Thailand don’t seem up to code, food safety is sometimes lacking (at least enough to fuel a constant anxiety in me) and my experience with the health care system (after passing out in a northern Thai hospital a few years ago) makes me know I must acknowledge the downsides to the “healthy economy” I admire in Thailand and be somewhat grateful for the safety standards and tradeoffs we make in rich countries. But I can only imagine that as the rest of the world catches up, the decline of the post WWII rich economies will continue to progress.
What the heck is your definition of healthy????? Do you just think that being "trendy" means it's better in health and taste? Japanese food is amazing. You are probably the only person to visit Japan and say the food is shit. I mean it's not to everyone's personal tastes but how can you honestly call it bad?
Korean food is amazong too, but the korean food I know is cooled by grannys and old men in tiny restaraunts. I see nothing modern about that. And I also fail to see how it's any healthier than Japanese food.
I suspect OP is American and that this comment was specifically centered on the rarity and high cost of fresh fruits and vegetables, at least when compared to the US, Taiwan, Singapore, or any of the Southeast Asian countries.
I will go to my grave believing that US food quality is absolute trash tier to anyone who's ever eaten abroad. Asian cuisines in general do a much better job of incorporating vegetables into their dishes instead of relegating them into a bland, boiled mush to be tolerated rather than enjoyed. The only solution Americans seem to have found is to throw them raw into a bowl and coat them in syrup. The salad has thus become the central example of "healthy" food in the minds of Americans, because its competition is the grease soaked slop that comprises the bulk of the American diet.
There are other elements that go into a "healthy" meal, but if your definition is built on the common US conception of healthy = raw greens and fruits, that's not something you'll find in Japan. SE Asia will have more of that for climate/agricultural reasons and Koreans have a toxic culture of tripping over each other to be the first to chase after whatever could be the next trend (the constant boom-bust cycles of trendy specialty shops are a meme there; the movie Parasite had a reference to this with a character having lost money on a Taiwanese cake shop that likely went over a lot of heads abroad) so there are probably more "modern" and salad style shops there. Korean meals also tend to be served with an array of side dishes that often include raw vegetables.
I've eaten abroad, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Beijing, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, London, and quite a few other smaller cities in the respective countries listed. From home cooking to street vendors to Michelin-star restaurants, American food is great.
China was the big standout, with a very strange food culture. Every other restaurant has the exact same menu, and it was also the only place where I felt food quality was noticeably worse, especially the meat. Other than that, the big difference is that everyone else makes sugar-free desserts. I think the very light use of sugar in desserts and baking is probably the single biggest culinary divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
It is also always strange when I see discussions like this, because cuisine is so global now. It feels like something straight out of a time capsule from 30 years ago, and even then the person expressing it was visiting Illinois or something. That one restaurant that made up half the restaurants in Beijing, we have them here in the U.S. as well, and have for years. You might have to get a table at the back of an Asian market, but it is the exact same food, prepared the same way. And conversely, the best meat I had the whole time I was in China was at a Texan BBQ joint that was positively delicious.
While the above is mostly about restaurants, I stayed in all these places (except Taiwan) long enough to do a fair deal of grocery shopping and home cooking as well. H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world, and their produce is fantastic.
Eh. I agree you can mostly get great foreign food in the handful of comparatively cosmopolitan coastal cities in the US (with exceptions: nowhere I went was it possible to get half-decent Moroccan or Iranian food, nor is there anything that even beats the rock bottom tier of German bread in Germany), but compared to almost every other country there is still some strange probability, of maybe 20%, that you eat something that tastes perfectly average and leaves you feeling diffusely sick for the next day like someone force-fed you a liter of gutter oil. With "American cuisine" (burgers, fries, chicken wings), this probability goes up to something like 40%. The only exception seems to be the corner around New Orleans, which has a genuine homegrown cuisine that deserves the name. Away from the coasts, in my experience, it rapidly devolves to near-British conditions - I spent a few days in Chicago once, and was sort of astonished how highly-rated restaurants (I remember trying one each of Chinese, Japanese and Italian) consistently turned out to be dying mall food court tier.
Where in China did you go? I haven't been to Beijing, but at least in the general area of Shanghai every larger town would at least have instances of the different major Chinese cuisines, which are fairly disjoint. There is a thing where every generic "premium mediocre" restaurant will offer a bad version of squirrel fish or whatever, but that's no different from how every such restaurant in a Western country will have a rump steak option priced at ~2x the median main.
I lived in Beijing for a year. It could just be that my Chinese friends loved Sichuan, but outside of the foreign quarter I would constantly get taken to different Sichuan restaurants that all had basically the exact same menu. And for Breakfast I must have gone to twenty different places that all served zhou, Baozi and Youtiao.
Sichuanese has definitely taken off hard in the last decade or two, though having just been to Beijing I'd say there's a decent diversity available. Personally I just assume Hot Pot margins must be insane.
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