Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly.
You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA.
Seriously, for someone from Europe, some food in the USA is just disgusting (and it’s not due the quality of the ingredients, as those are usually very good) but due to the stuff they add on top.
All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.
Take bread for example. Sure there will be some crappy sliced white bread on the shelf. But there will also be organic sprouted 7-grain high fiber next to it. In fact, there will probably be more healthy varieties available than just about any other country.
The options are there, but it can be exhausting to actually find them.
There are far too many products that try to position themselves as "healthy", but are closer to the rest of the crap on the shelves than actual "healthy" food. Even more frustrating is the insane amount of food now using sugar replacements to masquerade as a healthy option.
I personally, find it exhausting to shop at new stores because it can take looking at 2 to 5 items to find one that's actually made healthy.
French food having sugary sauces has nothing to do with American food having too much sugar though, and I'd wager 99% of the US has never heard of steak au poivre. We may know of pepper steak, but that doesn't always have sauce.
> In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance.
Were you eating sweet bread meant for coffee or desserts and thinking it was for making a sandwich? Most breads use just enough sugar to rise the yeast.
> You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat.
Were you eating barbecue, where the sauce is whole point? There is plenty of unsauced meat in the US. Any steakhouse will give you as much meat as you want without any sauce unless you pour it on yourself.
> America hides sugar in everything. Plain old white sandwich bread often has loads of added sugar.
It's not hidden, it's on the label, and expected. I just don't buy garbage bread.
> Sugar isn’t necessary for bread making. Yeast can break down the starch. That’s what it evolved to do. Flour, water, yeast, salt, done.
That usually means that malt is added to the flour (most bread flour). You can get breads without added sugar or malt, but you're going to have to go to a bakery that makes their own dough and buys flour without additives, which is getting rarer and rarer.
