Germans Love David Hasselhoff/Real Life/Food


 * Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits is extremely popular in Asia, Korea especially.
 * Before we go anywhere else with this, we might as well say that a good alternate title for this article would be Everybody Loves Pizza. Seriously. Pizza these days is an incredibly international dish, and has spread to the proverbial four corners of the Earth. And it's been popular in pretty much every country that it arrived in; the United States was really just the start. It seems that the combination of cheese, bread, tomato sauce, and toppings is just appealing to human beings, even if none of these things are traditional in the country (observe Japan).
 * Kit-Kats are so popular in Japan that they've spawned a variety of Japan-exclusive flavors because of the similarity to the Japanese phrase "kitto katsu", which translates to "surely win". Naturally, sales skyrocket during exams.
 * 80+ flavors of Kit-Kats, high-class Pabst Blue Ribbon, and more from Cracked.com.
 * Instant coffee is more popular in Europe than in the United States, where it was developed. Incidentally, instant coffee was invented by a Japanese scientist working in Chicago; naturally, tea-crazy Japan won't touch the stuff, either.
 * Fosters is a brand of Australian lager that has declined in recent decades in its home country, but it is popular in the UK, and enjoyed a bump in American sales in the 1990s.
 * Corona is a fairly minor beer brand in Mexico (or was for a very long time, it's rather popular now); it is the top-selling imported beer in the US and the UK.
 * Clamato (a mixture of tomato and clam juice) is very popular in Canada and Mexico as a drink mixer for either beer or vodka. In the United States, its country of origin, not so much (although it's made inroads among immigrant communities to the point where Anheuser-Busch offers a Budweiser/Clamato premixed beverage).
 * Actually, while Clamato is mixed primarily with beer in the States and Mexico, its popularity in Canada is for our own national cocktail, the Bloody Caesar, virtually unknown and largely reviled elsewhere. (Most people seem to have a problem with clams in their vodka. Weirdos.)
 * Skittles candy was invented by a British company in the 1970s, and wasn't all-too popular until they started to sell it in the States.
 * The top-selling lager in the UK is Stella Artois, a Belgian beer. The Belgians themselves regard it as one of their worst beers (which it is, considering how good Belgian beer is).
 * Scotch whisky is very big business in India and Japan, to the point where local distilleries in both countries attempt to market their own malt whiskies, often with Scottish imagery such as tartan on the label.
 * Somewhat subverted in India, in that much of what gets sold as whisky there is distilled from molasses and is therefore actually rum.
 * Japanese, being masters of Serious Business after all, have been quite able to make Scotch on par with Scotland.
 * Four Roses Kentucky bourbon. It's one of the top brands in Europe and Asia. It wasn't even sold in the US for a fifty-year period.
 * Potatoes. Indigneous to Peru, they're in almost every meal in Eastern Europe today, and at one point, Ireland (we all know how great that turned out). This is mostly because potatoes thrive almost anywhere, so they're basically a noxious weed. A delicious, noxious weed.
 * Not to mention, Jewish people traditionally eat Potato pancakes fried in oil around Hanukkah.
 * Tomatoes were introduced to Europe from South America 500 years ago but are such an important part of so many cultures' cuisines you'd think they'd been there for thousands of years.
 * A particularly extreme example is the Eastern Mediterranean, which only got tomatoes 200-250 years ago (via Europe, and highly delayed). Ask a Turk or Lebanese or Egyptian or Iraqi (and particularly an Egyptian) to imagine their cuisine without tomatoes...they will have a very hard time indeed.
 * Speaking of Egyptians, the country has developed a peculiar taste for ketchup, even putting it on things that Americans won't (pizza?) as well as many things Americans have never even heard of (like fitir, a traditional Egyptian filled pastry, somewhat similar to pizza).
 * Curry, a spicy dish from India, has a lot of Japanese consumers.
 * That's because the British navy introduced the Japanese to curry a long time ago. Japanese curry is different than authentic curry in India--it is more of a tumeric-flavoured stew of onions, carrots, and some meat.
 * Many Japanese people will swear blind that curry was invented in Japan.
 * Curry is popular in many parts of Asia (with a lot of different styles). Japan happened to be late to the party.
 * On a similar vein, Indian food is extremely popular in the U.K.,perhaps due to significant British-Indian population and the influence on that has had on British culture. The U.K's favorite dish is apprantly Chicken Tikka Masala, which is a British-Indian dish.
 * Oy! Chilis! Most any hot & spicy in the world uses Chilis these days - a relatively recent import from the Americas (the Caribbean), Imagine all you hotheads without your spice fix via Chilis?
 * Venezuela loves it some Scotch. Even if the country makes one of the best rum in the Caribbeans, whiskey was first a luxury good, but now it's very popular specially for Christmas and New Year parties.
 * Sushi seems to be specially prone to this. Mexicans love it, for instance, and it's seen as a elegant-ish food there. The fun part comes when the new culture localyzes the food. Guacamole california rolls and chipotle dressing for your oniri hmm-hmmm.
 * Roast Beef. While beef is certainly not unknown to asians, roast beef is mostly a western idea, and Asians appear to love this idea - especially at ordering a roast beef sandwich at a Subway.
 * Historical example: Peppercorns. It used to be an exotic spice and a sign of wealth, and Europeans loved it. While it's nowhere near as popular today, it's more or less part of western cuisine, although not quite as much as salt.
 * Inspeaking of salt, A lot of europeans state that American food is overly-salty sometimes, because Americans just love salt.
 * Lutefisk seems to be more popular in the United States (particularly Minnesota) and Canada than its origin in the Nordic countries. Mainly for special occasions during the late month holidays.
 * In-N-Out Burger is a popular West Coast burger chain, however it is only on the West Coast, frustrating many around the country. There was even an April Fools' Day joke about In-N-Out opening a location in New York City.
 * In-N-Out is simply one among many American regional hamburger chains with cult followings: White Castle in the northeast, Krystal in the southeast, Whataburger in the southwest, so on and so forth.
 * The Irish (or Europeans in general?) seem to really love Mountain Dew for some reason.
 * Spam. It's not very popular in the mainland United States, where it originated, yet considered a delicacy in foreign countries and some non-continental parts of the US. This seems to originate from the fact that, outside of wartime, "normal" meat is (relatively) cheap in the United States so cheaper, lower standard "meat" has never been popular. Thanks to American soldiers trading their despised Spam rations for local fresh food and US food aid containing Spam however it has been introduced to places that simply never had the surplus of land needed for fresh meat to be a common dish.