That "average available in the USA" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The USA is larger than Europe, but no one would credibly say that these things are all good across Europe. You can find plenty of terrible bread, meat, and seafood in Europe. To call it "vastly superior" is indefensible on its face.

Hence why I referenced the median. It wouldn't make sense to cherry-pick a US city like Seattle, which has amazing ingredient quality and diversity that few cities can compete with, and generalize it to the entire US. I've lived a lot of places and recognize the variance. The ingredient quality isn't even consistent within single European countries, having surprisingly high variance over -- by American standards -- relatively small geographic areas.

If you compare blue collar city against blue collar city, the US is definitely competitive in my experience. I think many people have an outdated view of the food available in flyover country. I split my time between Western Europe and the US, and get around both. I am having a difficult time finding these "vastly superior" ingredients in Europe that you speak of.

I agree that the diversity is higher in the median, but disagree that the quality is higher. I live in the UK, but have spent time in the US, and for day to day shopping in the 3 cities I've spent lots of time in (SF, LA and Raleigh NC) the quality at the highest end is good but everything else is a crapshoot. Even at that most of the actual high end ingredients are European ingredients (cheese and butter, cured meats, olives) and cost 4-5x what they do in Europe. Not only that, I don't actually trust when I'm buying DOP parmesan from a us grocery store, but I know what I'm buying here.

The quality of supermarket meat in your average Tesco, or Asda ranges from acceptable to good. The quality in a Target or Walmart ranges from very very poor to good in my experience. As a textbook example the fabled wooded chicken breast is for the most part not a problem here, but was something I experienced on more than one occasion during my last month long trip to SF.

Bread is way better in Europe than in the US. There's not even an argument to be had here. In most of Europe, you can buy bread on any street corner that is better (not to mention way cheaper) than what you get in expensive specialty bakeries in big American cities. Bread is just not something that most Americans care about, whereas it's an important part of the culture in most of Europe.

The US is geographically larger than Europe but way less diverse in terms of culture. And it matters a lot when talking about things such as food.

The US is immensely different in terms of culture. Europeans have language differences and they've got old historical stuff, but the difference between Masschusetts and Texas is huge. Including food. This is complicated by large liberal cities falling into pockets of similarity.

What I think is worst in the US markets is bread and cheese. They taste terrible, and bread is so bad they need to put something inside to have at least some taste. Fruits are terrible too, but they're not produced here, so that is understandable.

I sadly have a similar experience in Canada. Whilst I have found products here that are good in most categories, and produce is generally fine, I find I have to be more selective with meat, seafood and especially baked goods and cheese.