I hate Argentinian food

And I'm not ashamed to admit it. I haven't yet traveled outside Buenos Aires, where I hear things get more interesting -- stews in the northwest? King crabs in Patagonia? Lucky nobody's told the locals, or we might not get to eat steak 21 meals a week anymore! -- but I can say without any hesitation that the food in the capital is easily the worst of anywhere I've ever been.

It continually baffles me that Argentina is viewed as a food-lover's paradise, a gastronomic destination of the highest order. Many of the expats I've met here have told me they moved specifically for the food, and everybody I've met claims to love it. This adoration is due to one thing, and one thing alone: the beef. It turns out if you let cows roam free on the pampas and eat grass rather than keeping them penned and feeding them the entrails of their compatriots, they taste better. Who'dha thunk?

I'm not a big meat-eater -- I'd never ordered a steak in a restaurant before coming to Argentina -- but I will grant that Argentina has some decent steaks, if that's your thing. However, that's as far as it goes. In one of my English classes I asked my students to name their favorite foods, expecting to spark some sort of discussion. All eight immediately said asado, grilled meats. When I asked for other options, they became perplexed and eventually settled for naming the various cuts of meat. Beef, along with the odd (and uninspired) pizza or pasta, is literally the only game in town, along with the ubiquitous milanesa, a thin breaded veal or chicken cutlet that is, by law, completely indistinguishable from cardboard.

But there are empanadas!, you say. Yes, there are empanadas. I'm willing to bet any amount of money that nobody in the history of the world has ever claimed the empanada as their favorite food*.

Argentinian food is aggressively bland. I've met one woman who told me she didn't like McDonald's because the special sauce was too spicy. (She was possibly an outlier, as McDonald's here is more popular than in America, but in general the locals seem unable to tolerate anything with more spice than a marshmallow.) The three closest grocery stores to my apartment literally don't carry hot sauce, red pepper, or even black pepper. I've asked. I've now reached the two-month mark sans spicy food, and I've begun experiencing hallucinations and night sweats. Having gone out of my way to search out ethnic restaurants of various persuasions (the selection here is a little better than Cairo, worse than Europe, and far, far worse than anywhere in the United States), order the spiciest thing on the menu, and beg the waiter to have it made as spicy as possible, I've yet to find anything I'd rate as higher than a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, while I usually go for dishes in the 28-30 range.

If you love steak more than you love your children, don't like spicy food, don't like seafood, don't like ethnic food, and aren't a big fan of fruits or vegetables, than you'll probably be quite happy here. Otherwise, don't come for the food. Oh, and don't expect any street food, either -- except for choripan, which is surprisingly limited in it's availability, all you'll find is the most vile and inedible hot dogs and hamburgers you've ever tasted in your life. A popular brand of frozen hamburger patty here is called Barfy, and that's not an ironic name.

I'm not sure where the penchant for bland food comes from. There's certainly no similar aversion here to sweet or bitter tastes. Dulce de leche, which the IAEA recently began tracking as a fissionable material, is the most radioactively sweet substance ever invented. You can literally feel your teeth dissolving as you eat it. And the most popular method of preparing it -- several gooping tablespoons, spread between two cookies, then adding another layer of dulce de leche and another cookie for good measure, then covered in chocolate, then sprinkled with sugar crystals, doesn't help matters. Mate, an herbal infusion, and fernet, the national liquor, are, on the other hand, abrasively bitter.

A word on the ice cream, which everybody says is the best in the world: yeah, it's good. Especially the lighter fruit flavors, and sambayón. Probably better than Italy's. But it's nowhere near as good as Turkey's. Turkish ice cream is made by magical elves or something, and it hangs in large loops from wooden poles all day in the sun and never melts, is cut into cylindrical portions with a machete and best eaten with a knife and fork, and is really quite delicious. No, I don't expect you to believe me, but if you go to Istanbul, or, better, Sanliurfa, you'll be a convert too.

*Yes, I used their as a singular pronoun. If you complain about it, I'll smack you.