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One more thing about my vacation: I ate a lot of lame food. My sister had her kids (9 year old Martin was only interested in onion rings, and only in the Burger King style) so we mostly ate at mid-priced "family" restaurants, which my Dad, who's pretty much given up cooking, also frequents. You always hear how overweight Americans are, but in NY you don't see it so much, at least not in our fashionable Manhattan haunts. The Midwest is making up for us. Everything was overdone and overblown. I call it big food, sort of like big hair: everything seems inflated; larger than life. It turns out that there is nothing that cannot be fried, not to mention covered with melted cheese. What really got to me, though, was the incredible amount of food that was wasted. Between the kids and the seniors, it seemed like most of the food went uneaten, and it wasn't like there were more sensible menu options. They kept offering us doggy bags, but it generally seemed like a bad idea. They would only be thrown out a week later, after the grease had eaten through the Styrofoam containers. There was already enough of that going on in the refrigerator. Maybe it's worse that a lot of people actually do finish those enormous portions, hamburgers the sized of grapefruits, french fries the size (and nutritional equivalent) of sticks of butter. No wonder people get mad if they have to park more than 10 feet from the restaurant door. It made me appreciate the range and quality of food available here, not to mention the talents of some of the amateur chefs among us.