To remind you, we were discussing food. Let's take a coffee break. Many Israelis claim that American coffee is bad. I can't tell because I don't drink coffee. Paul Erdos once said that a mathematician is a machine that transforms coffee to mathematical formulas. This convinced me that I am not a mathematician. I tried coffee once and mathematical formulas didn't come out. At least I can transform pizza to code lines. Whereas the distance to pizza in downtown Toronto is two minutes, the distance to a place serving coffee is half. Coffee is a serious business. The amounts Americans spend on coffee are enough to sustain coffee republics. Coffee drinkers belong to camps: Starbucks (the peoples' coffee), Second Cup (the second, the alternative) and Tim Hortons (the Canadian way). Needless to say, they all look the same to me, but not to the Canadians. Many clients will never be seen at a different coffee shop. Holding a cup of coffee with the logo of these chains is a personal statement. Sometimes in the winter the lines are long, continuing outside the shop, and take five minutes to get in. After people purchase the cup, they will usually not drink it immediately. You can see people marching for miles carrying coffee cups in their hands to their offices. In the winter a cup of coffee is not merely a drink or a personal statement, but also a hands-heating device.
Despite the fact there is so much food around, Canadians are thin. I gathered some stereotypical explanations which are not mutually exclusive and definitely not scientific.
The environment explanation: Canadians are thin because they burn calories during the winter. Walking in snow is much harder, and snow shoveling is a national physical exercise. They won't eat much ice-cream most of the year. Also, here laundry cannot be dried outside in the wind, but has to be dried in a drier. As a result cloths shrink a lot, and people have to fit into them.
The biological explanation: Canadians are thin because of their French / Chinese genes. They grow taller instead of wider.
In that respect, I think they are more similar to Europeans than to people in the US.
The social explanation: Canadians are thin because they don't eat lunch. A sandwich or even an apple is considered as legitimate lunch, and they are tired to prepare food in the evening. They can't sue McDonalds for the amounts possible in the US. When everybody around you is thin, you would better be too.
By now you probably wonder what Canadians eat at home. I'll focus on one of the notable contributions of America to gastronomy: cereals. After the movie "The Matrix", there is now a cereal called "Vector". Linear algebra for kids. Alas, it doesn't have the shape of a vector. Marketing people are running out of names, and nowadays they have MBAs. Why not harness the creative naming of the coffee transformers? I guess next will be the movie "the tensor space invaders". Back to earth. So, what do Canadians eat at home? Frozen food, of course, with ice.
