#37 Anyone for tea? (Part II: The funny part)

America would be a much better place if they drank tea. I realise this is an obvious argument for a Brit living in America to make, but hear me out.

In Britain - indeed, over much of the world - tea serves a crucial social function. You immediately offer it to visitors, and not just esteemed visitors - workmen and tax collectors.

You drink it at work, in a social way. People do tea runs. And you take your turn. If you don't, people notice."She always has a cup but never makes it." Just me? I've thought that at every British office I've ever worked in.

It is a complicated exercise in reciprocal altruism. Remembering who takes milk, and sugar, and how much, and in which mug - it is a small, but significant olive branch. It smooths office interaction. You notice that they notice that you notice that they like the purple spotty mug, a little bit of milk and one spoonful of Splenda. You both smile at your mutual noticing.

Not so with coffee. It's probably a frequency thing - you can't knock it back. People tend to drink it at very different rates. Some people - seriously, I've seen them - only have one cup all day. All day long. One cup. What the fuck do they look forward to in the afternoon?

So people make their own. Some people go out to buy it. In the latter case, they will offer to get one for you, but it isn't the same. Because they are going somewhere to buy it, there are no surprises - no secretly stashed biscuits, or unmentioned slices of birthday cake that suddenly appear to office-wide cheers. The situation is socially ambiguous, since they are spending real money - do I give them money beforehand? Do I pay them when they get back? Do I just buy their next one? But Sally has two extra shots and caramel syrup, hers costs $5! That's another thing - it's much more expensive. A tea bag I'm happy to write off, I would really care if someone didn't return a Double Chocamochachino-shaped favour.

Where Brits have social cohesion, Americans have social anxiety. Where Brits have hydration, Americans have one cup - all day long. Where Brits have their favourite mug, Americans have a disposable cardboard/plastic amalgam that insulates against heat. What the fuck is that about? I want to cradle my warm cup in my hands to get me through dreary winter days at the office. I don't want a lukewarm lump of cardboard held at arms-length. There is no emotional connection with that.

And here's the worst part: on occasion I go to Starbucks, or a similar establishment, to sit, and drink, and read. Maybe work. Probably just read. I've done this in England for years, especially during winter. I blame the sofas. Well, if you sit in Starbucks in America, they do not -repeat: DO NOT - give you a mug. You sit, cuddle up in your winter coat and scarf in an outsized purple armchair, thumbing through a Jane Austen novel. And you have to suffer the indignity of drinking out of a lukewarm lump of cardboard.

#16 Welcome to the stock pot.

Brits find it easy to mock (or 'take the piss out of', if you feel like bemusing our Transatlantic cousins) American food. Almost as easy as the rest of the world finds it to mock ours. The jokes are all already written. Great - herein lies an easy blog post.

The first thing to note is that my dining experience in New York is unquestionably esoteric. I eat as much Chinese, Italian, etc - made by actual sons of those countries, of course - as I do 'American'. The second point, to contradict myself, is that this is American food. It might be cheating, but America can lay justifiable claim to all kinds of variations on foreign foods - pizza pie, New York bagels, Tex-Mex, New York-style cheesecake, California rolls, and so on. Apple pie is no more American than deep dish pizza. Both are as American as tikka masala is British. Welcome to the stock pot.

Fast food? You betcha. But since 'Super Size Me' things have changed. McDonald's advertises mostly at the morning coffee crowd these days - 99¢ lattes are the new Big Macs. Their competitors are Dunkin' Donuts' same-price offering, and Starbucks' premium product. In New York, Starbucks' weird fetish-seamonster girl feels like a much more oppressive presence than the Golden Arches.


Supermarkets are plain weird. On the one hand there is the unquestionable brilliance of Whole Foods - sort of like Waitrose, but earthier: expensive enough to keep out the riff-raff, locally-sourced enough to keep the greens happy. They still sell Chiquita bananas, for shame. Being British, I thought I'd tell you how bloody brilliant the queueing system is. The Manhattan locations are horrifically busy, so queues are subdivided into colour-coded streams that feed to many different tills - one from the red line, one from the blue line, one from the yellow line - balancing fairness with throughput. You also get told that 'you are now entering the green line' in a quietly thrilling Twilight Zone homage.

Next up is Trader Joe's, complete with irritating nautical/Victorian/farmgirl theming, cheaper prices and a Queuing Disaster. The queue snakes around the entire store, so you have to plan out all of the things you want from where the queue runs and remember to get them as you queue. Indecision is not an option.

Finally you have the Waitroses and Targets - carbon copies of the larger outlets of our Tescos and Asdas.

I touched upon the weirdest thing about American supermarkets in an earlier post. They don't sell wine. They don't sell rum. Hell, they don't even sell strong ciders: a store must possess a 'liquor licence' to sell beverages with an ABV topping around 8%. A supermarket cannot possess such a licence. So if you want a bottle of wine with supper you have to go elsewhere. It's tedious, backwards and irritating.

One more thing: everything has corn in it. Everything. The average American gets 10% of his daily calories from corn syrup. But we'll touch upon that some other day.