On the food front, the country I'm from is pretty grim. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good restaurants but there's no real native food or food culture.
There is also too much Italian and pseudo-Italian food (particularly the latter). Italian food has usurped French food as the ultimate in cooking. I can only assume this is because people can make half-arsed pseudo-Italian food at home whereas French food is considered too complicated.
The same thing is happening with European wine vs. New World wine, where people are avoiding European wine in favour of New World because they want to know what grape type is used in a wine—as if they can tell anything much from grape type or it's somehow easier to understand than terroir.
Current debates in France about whether or not the French have lost it, French food outside of France is on the whole superior to Italian food outside of Italy. Most "Italian" food in Europe is just dull pasta dishes. Part of my family is of Italian (and Wallonian) extraction and I grew up eating a lot of Italian food. I am, I have to be honest, a bit bored with it but more than that I am sick of the middlebrow crap that is presented as Italian food in most of Europe.
Unfortunately, such is its culinary dominance that French restaurants are now confined mostly to the expensive and super-expensive end of the market and I can't afford that very often. In France you can get great food for very little money.
