I was born in 1978, and I was still raised in a culture of blasting my meat until all the pink is gone, and boiling my vegetables until all flavor was gone. My influential-grandparents were both raised on a farm, which influenced what my parents ate. (To this day, neither of my parents will even consider trying sushi, because it's raw fish. That's it. That ends the argument for them. You Don't Eat Raw Meat. You don't even eat slightly pink meat.) While this may have produced generations of people with low standards, it was caused by trying to make dubious food safe-to-eat. Even today, many of our official government standards still source from this heritage, being rather excessively conservative and recommending cooking meat as if it's still full of parasites, just to be safe.
So, it's not that "Americans" don't know what food is "supposed" to taste like anymore... many of us have never known what food is "supposed" to taste like, for many generations. This isn't a situation created by "Big Food", it's a pre-existing situation that allowed Big Food to drop in, and offer Americans food that tasted better than what they were used to. That it turns out to itself have been quite mediocre is a measure of just how bad what came before it is!
The trend in the US is quite clearly upwards; I think perhaps if you aren't at least 30 right now that might not be obvious, but believe me, it's getting better, not worse. Yeah, you can still buy Doritos, which haven't hardly changed in 30 years, but the produce sections! Holy shit the produce sections. If you were presented with a produce section from 1985 you'd reach to clean your glasses, if you have them. Absolutely night and day. And the other selections too; I can't go back in time but I wonder if my mom could even have bought any sort of extra-virgin olive oil back then, to take just one example, let alone have 10 different selections.
In the cheaper British supermarkets (e.g. Asda) or the normal range of the middle ones (Tesco, Sainsbury's) you could play billiards with the tomatoes, and they taste of nothing. They've been grown under glass in the Netherlands or (less often) England, and are bred and harvested for ease of transport, uniform appearance and shelf life.
In the more expensive supermarkets (Waitrose), or choosing the 'luxury' version in Tesco/Sainsbury's, they actually taste like tomatoes, but cost double.
Yet last time I went to Germany, I bought tomatoes from one of the ultra-budget shops and they were at least as good as Waitrose.
(Last time I went to the USA, I couldn't actually find fresh produce for sale…)
How can the Matrix know how Tastee Wheat really tastes? /s
That's the problem with our capitalism focused approach to food: fill it with sugar and kids will eat it, and still eat it when they're grown up and weigh >100kg and suffer from diabetes. Also, you can hide a lot of sub-par ingredients (like old meat or meat of e.g. horses) with the right amount of seasoning.
Big Food gets the profit and society gets the bill for diabetes treatment. Privatize profit, socialize risks.
Personally, I keep my garden with only heirloom varieties, and they are far better than grocery stores (and even better than most of my friends that aren't as picky about their seeds).
They really do seem to take food more seriously in France.
Mexicans, Italians, and even Germans know how to cook. French people don't.
See how that works? You're assuming that your personal food prejudices and "what food is supposed to taste like" are identical.
They aren't.
I note that McDonalds sells billions of euros of burgers in France. They aren't all being eaten by American tourists.
Again, it's not misplaced patriotism. It's just story telling : I went there, I tried that, I talked to these people, and this is what I got.
It's not a misplaced patriotism, it's just that I fear a lot of americans really don't know what food is supposed to taste like anymore. Which is very scary.
The same thing is happening here in Europe, but at a much slower rate. Not sure if it's reassuring though.