Happy: Requisite post about food and life in Europe vs. America.

There’s a diner chain in Sofia, Bulgaria, called Happy. There are roughly one trillion Happy restaurants and the country is splattered with ads for Happy. You see ads for Happy when you land at the airport. I suspect the overlords of Happy run the country.

The waiters and waitresses at Happy are trained to be American-style friendly, rather than Bulgarian-style surly. They are young and attractive. You can tell, from their accents, that Happy plucked them from the provinces and gave them a chance to come to Sofia and they seem (I won’t do it) excited and grateful to be here.

The ubiquity of a chain restaurant should be annoying. Anthony Bourdain would not have liked Happy. When my Mom first suggested we eat at a Happy, I was like, “GAWD Mom! I’m not eating at Bulgarian Denny’s!! 🙄” (Yes like everyone I turn into a whiny teenager when I spend a lot of time with my mother).

Like Denny’s, at Happy, there are 10 million items on the menu. You can get traditional Bulgarian food or pasta or sushi. But the portion sizes are smaller. The ingredients are fresh. They have tons and tons of salads, the vegetables so bright and crisp they look like they’ve just been plucked.

Here’s what my aunt, me and my Mom had for lunch yesterday:

You’re likely suspicious of Bulgarian Denny’s sushi. I get it. But the overlords of Happy, in their bid to take over the world, have brought in sushi chefs from Japan. The fish comes fresh from the Mediterranean and Norway. And it all costs like a quarter of what a Denny’s Grand Slam does.

A caveat: I don’t want to be a snob and rag on Denny’s. There are many people for whom eating at any restaurant is a rare treat. I was one of them when I was little. And it’s not a crime to feed kids fast food. Kids’ metabolisms are crazy; they crave high-calorie food. When we first came to the US I was 7, and you couldn’t pry the McDonald’s from my cold, dead hands, even though we lived with my great-grandmother, whose cooking I’d kill to have now. The problem, in the US, is the lack of other options and the normalization of non-food.

For example, yesterday my mom and I planned to make pasta for dinner and my Mom bought store sauce. “GAWD Mommmmm I don’t eat pasta sauce from the jaaaaaaaar!” I whined. To be fair, in this I have point: I can’t eat sugar, it fucks me up. When I look for jarred pasta sauce in the U.S. I have to read labels on a ton of jars, even on bourgie brands like the Paul Newman sauces, to make sure that sugar or high-fructose corn syrup is not the second ingredient after tomatoes.

This is not a psycho diet thing, I promise, I just get sick to my stomach if I have sugar. And there is sugar in the strangest places in processed U.S. food: pasta sauce, soup, for heavens sake. There’s nothing wrong with having ice cream or cookies. But when your freaking marinara is stuffed with sugar, it violates your consent to sugar. Anyway, I tried the sauce my Mom got. It was crisp and tart, without a hint of sugar.

The journalist Chris Arnade has been going to different countries, and just walking, and writing about it. Recently he decided to revisit the U.S. and published “A Stalled American Dream.” It’s a great and depressing account, but I’ll focus on his observation about food culture, which he concludes is as sad and dangerous as the opioid crisis.

America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.

There is still a few remaining culinary bright spots amongst the franchised wasteland, with some vestiges of the communal and authentic still lingering in family run Mexican restaurants, but even they’ve become to feel formulaic, and given over to pushing the most calories, the most grease, the most cheese, and the most fat, because that’s what most people seemingly want.

Chris cut his trip short because of how gross and unhealthy and depressed he felt, since he couldn’t walk anywhere in un-walkable places and he had no access to decent food and also everyone he met laughed in his face when he asked them if they believed in the American Dream.

***

A few years ago I took some German friends on a road trip through the U.S. South. They’d come to the States for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, naturally (is Taylor Swift in league with Happy?!?!?). But, also, they wanted to see “real America.” I took them to a Virginia Walmart. We smirked and joked about the space-ship sized tubs of chips and candy and other crap.

But then one woman, extremely obese and maybe only 10 years older than us, rolled by in an electric wheelchair. Then another. We got sad and shut our dumb, snotty mouths.

When we left the store, my friends scanned the strip mall filled with Wendy’s and Jack-in-the-Boxes and gas station hot dogs or whatever and nothing else and they were sad.

“It’s really unfair that that’s all there is,” my friend Gina somberly said. “It’s not people’s fault if they’re in bad health. What can they do?”

And here comes the tiresome point about how much healthier the lifestyle is in other places, even in poorer places like Bulgaria, without one having to have superhuman self-control.

There are fruit and vegetable stands everywhere.

The cities are walkable. You could be the laziest person on earth, but that still means taking the subway, which means walking including up and down stairs. A lot of people have cars, it’s a symbol of Western affluence. But it’s still a European city, with crooked narrow streets and no parking space, so it’s always easier to take a train or bus or walk. The trains and buses are clean and air-conditioned and never late. The city has invested in them because everyone uses them, regardless of class.

Which brings up another tiresomely obvious point, this time, about income inequality.

Not to brag, but this pool complex near where I am staying? It has one large pool, pictured below; a second Olympic sized pool; and a third pool for high-diving. To hang out for an entire day, it costs ………… wait for it ….

…. $10.

It’s Bulgaria, so horrifying techno blasts all day, but it’s spotless. It’s so nice that rich people go, rather than cloister themselves in some expensive, private club. Today I watched a scary looking Mafioso teach his adorable grand-daughter how to swim (she did great!)

Yet, it’s cheap enough that people without means can also use it. The first time I went I met a raucous crew of young Syrian refugees who’d saved up to go to the pool.

In a place like New York a rich Mafioso would have a private pool or go to an exclusive club. As for the peasants, one crappy pool at the top of a hotel in Williamsburg cost, last time I checked five years ago, $100 for the day.

When a running injury made me switch to swimming, I joined the YMCA in my neighborhood. As far as YMCA’s go, it was nice, but it was still kind of gross. I tried not to be a diva and made do with stepping on clumps of damp hair and the steamy human smells in the locker room.

But then after about a month, whatever the fuck was in the water gave me a disgusting, itchy, painful rash over my entire body. I looked like a leper. I went to a dermatologist. He was cute. “Oh, you’re crusty,” the cute dermatologist said, poking at my leprous scalp. He was excited in the way doctors are when a medical mystery presents itself.

I was cleared to start swimming again once my rash went away, after an exciting, great-smelling array of antibiotic creams. But, I was not exactly enthusiastic, and trailed off going.

***

Given the food, the walking, and access to exercise spaces, it’s not surprising that almost all Bulgarians under 60 are lithe. There are variations in body type, of course—as there should be and as is healthy. And many people over, say, 60, are very heavy.

Yesterday at the pool, an older, very heavy woman who wore a bikini, which, good for her, smoked a cigarette, lowered herself into the pool, and methodically and precisely swam laps. She doesn’t look like Bella Hadid, sure, but she would not need an electric wheelchair to traverse a Walmart.

This is supposed to be a politics blog, not a blog about me bragging about going to the pool, so here’s what. I’m too old and grumpy to get Coconut-pilled, as I was “Hope and Change” pilled in 2008. But Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are nailing it (except for on Gaza). Like all investigative journalists, I am highly skeptical that Walz, who’s travelled internationally including to China, doesn’t know what spices are, but whatever, their ‘90s sit-com comedy bit is cute and calibrated for Boomer Brain like a heat-guided missile. Good for them. I wonder though; they are a pretty unlikely pair of politicians (even though she’s a cop, GRRR, and also so far they suck about Gaza—especially since Walz literally studied and wrote and taught about genocide).

Wouldn’t it be great to explore policies that would make forgotten places — and also, unforgotten places, like New York—more livable? Day to day? The way many other places seamlessly are? OK you know how there are a ton of asylum seekers streaming in, just trying to find work? How about instead of villifying them and promising to crack down, we do a WPA style program where we put people, immigrant and native-born, to work, making US infrastructure and life more liveable?

This has been a paid advertisement for Happy LLC.