Americans’ obsession with customisation and convenience is killing them, says Lewis Liu

A few months ago, I went partying with a bunch of Gen Z Silicon Valley tech bros. This was perhaps not the best idea for a nearly 40-year-old dad, but my 10-year-younger brother was back in New York from Stanford for a few days, and I thought it would be interesting to see how “kids these days” played.

Interestingly, at some point around 2am in a rooftop bar somewhere in NoMad, we got into a heated argument about milk and eggs.

This all goes back to when my family moved back to the US three years ago. My wife “rediscovered” American produce and food. What shocked her was that “organic milk” and “organic eggs” in the US take months to expire, while they go bad after only a few days in the UK. Go down the American produce rabbit hole, and you’ll discover that American foods are filled with chemicals – everything from baby formulas to gummy bears to meat contains additives to make food look brighter and last longer on shelves.

Even McDonald’s fries tell the story: in the US, they contain more than 10 ingredients, including potatoes, vegetable oil, natural beef flavor (whatever that means!), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (I have a PhD in Physics and had to look that one up) and salt. In Europe, there are four: potatoes, salt, sugar, oil.

But I’m not here to talk about the problems with the American food supply; that’s a major issue for another day. Rather, I want to explore the........

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