[testfrequency]

Most foreigners I know are incredibly skeptical or opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in America, as it has a pretty bad global reputation for not being good quality and/or safe.

I’m sure fans of BBQ will argue this, but I’d say the average person who is travelling just for BBQ is not really a standard foreigner.

I’ve even had co-workers visit from Ireland and Germany who only trust McDonald’s while they visit, or a local pub.

[_zoltan_]

I don't know who are these foreigners you speak of. I'm looking forward to eating some of the best steaks in the US.

The beef in Switzerland is mediocre at best.

[defrost]

> I'm looking forward to eating some of the best steaks in the US.

Some of the ~150,000 metric tonnes of beef recently imported from Australia?

[lostlogin]

After tariffing all the meat exporting nations, the US steak will be the greatest steak in American.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Except that "America" is a continent, so you'd have to compare U.S. steak with all South American and North American steaks.

[mlrtime]

Yeah, all 2% of it. What is your message supposed to mean as a reply?

Is it some kind of gotcha if I eat Japanese A5 in the USA, but still say that USDA Prime is amazing?

[defrost]

Just a general note on quality and herd practices really.

US beef has only just reached Australian health & safety standards* after being banned for import into Australia for two decades.

* perhaps it's more the case that Australia has only just bowed to US tariff pressure to accept US meat that isn't up to Australian standards for herd health tracking.

* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-25/what-lifting-trade-re...

* https://aftinet.org.au/australia-lifts-ban-us-beef-imports

[fakedang]

I've had both and American beef is mediocre compared to Australian or NZ beef (which is usually grass fed).

If you want BBQ, go to the US. Else for just a normal steak, just source good ANZ beef and pay for it. Cheaper Indian beef (mostly buffalo - you can get cow meat but that's mostly tougher) can also be mostly grass-fed but it's harder to source.

[wk_end]

Grass-fed beef isn't necessarily better. It tends to be comparatively leaner than grain-fed, and a richly marbled rib eye is for a lot of people (myself included) just about as good as it gets.

Australian wagyu is, for my money, the best beef in the world (yes, better than Japanese wagyu, which really is too richly marbled), but American Prime is no slouch either.

[fakedang]

Yes, my bad. I think the correct term I should've used isn't grass-fed (a flimsy marketing term) but free range. ANZ cattle isn't generally cooped up in feedlots and factory farmed, although this is now changing rapidly for the worse.

Australian wagyu is actually the worst offender in this regard, since it means that cattle spend 1-2 years in a factory farm feedlot.

Western cooking tends to prefer having rich fat marbling on the beef and let it cook in its own fats, but in Asia, we tend to prefer leaner cuts for our cooking, mostly because beef isn't usually eaten on its own as a steak.

[tw04]

You can get US grass fed beef at literally any grocery store or butcher shop in the US. So your statement still doesn’t make any sense.

[fakedang]

GP is in Switzerland, where I live, not in the US.

[testfrequency]

My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say American cattle are superior in really any other way, and are not the best cuts globally either.

Switzerland I cannot speak to, but having had meats from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Japan - a lot of places around the world have great and superior quality meats.

Poultry isn’t even in the conversation here, American poultry is off putting by nearly any person you ask who didn’t grow up with it.

[ExoticPearTree]

Japanese and Australian beef are on a different level than anything else I have ever eaten in terms of beef steaks.

[FireBeyond]

> My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally.

I remember a conversation in a Dallas hotel bar with an increasingly crestfallen cowboy as we talked about how the King Ranch "wasn't a particularly large ranch, all things considered". Initially, confusion. "What do you mean, it's the largest ranch in the world?" No, the US.

And then we talked about Australian cattle ranches, where Anna Station is over seven times bigger than King Ranch, bigger than Israel, and that if King Ranch was in Australia it'd be only be, at best, the 70th largest ranch in the country (and more likely only just scraping into the top 100).

Everything is not always bigger in Texas.

I despise American poultry - factory farming, copious saline injection, bleh.

[eqvinox]

I'm one of these foreigners spoken of. Congratulations, now you know.

(Honestly, what's the point of your post? You don't happen to know someone in a group, so the group doesn't exist? Weird.)

[matwood]

> Most foreigners I know are incredibly skeptical or opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in America

Odd. I live in the EU at the moment and all my friends here talk excitedly about all the meat options in the US.

[vasco]

Every single person I know here in europe that is a meat lover is always including either some Texas BBQ or some large tomahawk steaks in their visit and the size and quality of US meat is perceived highly. And it's not like people will go to the US to have a steak or BBQ but definitely nobody who isn't a vegan is "opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in america", that's ridiculous.

[Freedom2]

That's interesting, every single person I know in Europe that is a meat lover is opposed to some Texas BBQ and against large portion American-style steaks in general, where the quality of US meat is perceived quite poorly.

[simonsarris]

I'm sorry but you live in a bubble that is beyond imagination. I don't think even 0.5% of tourists to the USA think this.

[laughing_man]

And yet Americans are the victim of food-borne illnesses at no greater rate than Europeans. I wonder how much of that is farm lobbies trying to keep out imports. US growers do the same thing when the don't want to compete with South American imports.

[expedition32]

Animal welfare is a big thing in some Euro countries. Which let's face it nobody in the US or Argentina cares about.

And then there are concerns about human rights, rain forests, genociding Amazonian tribes, corruption and dictators. Now I will admit it is all hypocritical everyone of us happily buys stuff from AliExpress but that is the condition of man.