Have you ever gone on a trip to another country and thought, “Why does the food here taste so much better than the food in America?”

That’s the question Kate called in recently to Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “When I was in Japan recently, the produce and the meat were amazing,” she told Vox. “Same thing about food in Europe: the bread, the yogurt just tastes better. Is food actually higher quality elsewhere, or do we just think it is? And if it is, what would it take for the US to have food that tastes and feels that good?”

Yes, the fact that you’re in a new and exciting environment is a factor. But you also aren’t imagining things: other countries have different ways of preparing and producing food that factor into what you’re tasting as well. Take the French baguette: that iconic bread that brings to mind berets and bicycling along the famous Champs-Élysées avenue as accordion music plays in the background. According to Eric Pallant, the author of Sourdough Culture: A History of Bread Making from Ancient to Modern Bakers, that image is no accident; France is so invested in its bread that the country made a law protecting it from the encroaching mass-produced bread market. “By the 1980s, premade breads, breads that have a dozen or more ingredients in them, were starting to take over the market, and that’s un-French,” Pallant said. And so they said, “If you’re going to sell it in a boulangerie — and there are thousands of them in France — it has to meet criteria.”

So what is that criteria? And why are America’s standards so different? Pallant tells us on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Pallant, edited for length and........

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