This will be the last thing I post before sleep, but man, food preparation is drastically different when you cross the country. It's the mild things, but it makes a huge difference.
My family is originally from Wisconsin and Ohio. My ex-girlfriend, whom I met in Texas, introduced me to what, y'know, food tastes like. I'd survived for so long on pasta, potatos, and corn that I'd never tried delicious Southern cooking, the kind of cooking you can call Suvvern, because you've lived next to Louisiana for 15 years and know that humidity makes everything more delicious.
In my home town, Beaumont, TX, the Chinese restaurants are owned by mostly Vietnamese Americans, the Mexican restaurants are run by soul-food-raised black families, and every fast food value menu has at least one entry with the words "Hot 'n' Spicy." Sure, the Italian sucks, but everything else is so bursting with flavor that you can manage to gain weight despite it being six thousand degrees outside. If you're ever in Port Arthur, TX, and find this little place called the China Inn, order the mushu pork.
Now, I've come to Atlanta for college, and while we have a lot of Hispanics, the Mexican food is terribly bland, uninspired. . . . Put simply, there's no spiciness. I've found that the only new foods are sushi and curry, of which I can only enjoy the first when heavily jolted with Wasabi, and the later when I've got lots of soda to wash out the flavor.
If you go further north, don't expect to find great, flavorful foods. You have to switch your tastes to appreciate fatty foods that must be aged and left to change chemically before it's edible. Cheese and beer, that's all you need. The Italian frankly still sucks, but the heartland food of meat, potatos, and corn can be quite gratifying. You eat midwestern food not for the flavor, really, but for the satisfying fullness that comes at the end of a meal.
I've never ventured much into the west, at least not in recent years when I've known how to appreciate food, nor to the northeast, but I have been in Georgia. Four years in Georgia. And I really can't stand peaches. They name everything here "Peachtree." There's a town called that, countless restaurants, and at least four streets in the city of Atlanta itself. I find the fruit is something between a lacking apple and an overtender banana, though I have a theory the root of my displeasure lies in Snapple. I honestly have no particular fondness for Georgian foods. Indeed, the only Georgian delicacy I know of is the paragon of homogeneity:
Coca-Cola.
