Why we're travelling to America - or rather not, thank you. Part 1

Lars Hoffmann
June
22
/ 2009

1:         Bread

So this was supposed to be the first of a series of blog entries describing from a personal point of view why Europeans love America as a destination. But then, a private conversation with our friend Jessie reminded me of one of the reasons why Europeans do not love America as a destination.  This is about bread or rather, the lack of it. The following conversation was forced upon me more than once:

 UNNAMED OTHER: “So why do you travel to America all the time? What’s so great there?”
ME: (lengthy explanation, omitted here in order not to bore the valued reader of this blog and pointless anyway judging from the expression on unnamed other’s face)
UNNAMED OTHER: “Me, I’ve been there once, in … (replace by either NYC or Florida) in 1983. But I won’t go there again, you know.”
ME: (mildly interested) “That so?”
UNNAMED OTHER: “Yeah. You know what I didn’t like there in particular?”
ME: “I really need to go”
UNNAMED OTHER: “You just can’t get any good German bread there. All they’ve got is that white bread stuff. Can you believe it?”

 Bread is a big thing for Germans. Sure, there are nations out there who are famous for their bread, Italians for example or the French, but I doubt any other people has elevated the matter of bread to a common decision-making factor in choosing travel destinations. There are a number of different TV shows on German TV accompanying people who have emigrated to some place on the globe and I swear there isn’t one single episode on one of them that hasn’t contained a lengthy complaint by the subject about how they miss German bread and how impossible it is to get it in Tanzania or Belize or Japan. 
You might wonder what it is that makes German bread so special (which probably in a lot of cases is made from dough produced in Poland or the Czech Republic) and I must honestly tell you that I don’t have a clue. All I know is it’s the reason why some people just won’t go to America anymore. They stay at home. And that’s probably a good thing, too.