In France, art school are free. Wait... The costs are paid by the state! The costs for education that you mention are sick. It would cost Americans less to relocate to Europe and they could eat good cheese.
Food in America has gone through a revolution in the last 20 or so years. American beer used to be considered awful and now is considered the best, most innovative and most complex by many people around the world. Our wines used to be considered awful until the 1980's and now many of them are respected and globally accepted as great.
New American Cuisine and it's offsprings have eclipsed French cooking in many respects. Although it owes so much to French cooking to be fair.
Yes, university is disgustingly expensive here, however.
My experience is dating a bit, but in 2009 I spent 3 months crossing the US as a tourist. My experience with the food was that you could get crap for next to nothing, or really good food at a premium. There seemed to be no middle ground; 'normal' food at a 'normal' price.
My first interaction with American food was on landing in LA - on arriving at the place I was staying, I started making a sandwich with some "healthy (check mark) wholemeal bread". I put a slice in my mouth while I was making the sandwich (I was that hungry and couldn't wait), and it was like biting into a slice of cake, flavour-wise. There was so much sugar in this 'healthy wholemeal' slice...
After WW2 the USA figured out how to industrialize and process food. We took the model used to feed soldiers and converted it into something for everyday people in the home. The advertising to support this painted the kitchen as a bleak, difficult place where failure was imminent. Instead of being a place of joy and culture it was a disaster waiting to happen. The new alternative was to buy these processed foods as they were guaranteed to work and were convenient. In the 1950's it did in fact probably seem really innovative and novel.
This model was highly successful as it brought down prices, increased profits and liberated women from the kitchen. As more and more people didn't have the time to shop for good food and cook it this processed food industry got larger and larger until it became the dominant food culture in the country. Think of an America food store today and the entire middle of it is all processed foods in boxes, cans, refrigerated and any other form.
In the 1970's it became even simpler with the promise of "we'll cook it for you" and the fast food restaurant was born. These restaurants use the same processing techniques but also have the ability to have some industrial kitchen equipment to make the food taste less "TV Dinner" like.
The problem with all of this is these foods are not only filled with tons of chemicals and other agents but they're packed with salt and sugar. The foods also aren't prepared right.
To you point of bread: Bread was industrialized and processed. If you look at a loaf of bread and read the ingredients you'll see 25 or more things in it! They even were able to breed yeast which could make the bread rise faster which actually is bad as the gluten doesn't develop correctly this way. This isn't bread - it's like you described and it is awful. Using a sour dough culture and making real bread was replaced with this.
It's no wonder we have so many people who claim to have a gluten allergy today. This never happened before and it's because of the way the food made and what is in it. It's no wonder we have kids with type 2 diabetes. It's no wonder people have digestive and heart issues at a rate much higher than ever before.
So yeah to get away from that there's a "slow food" movement and "organic" and all the other labels. What's funny is this is what the rest of the world called "cooking" for thousands of years. We are only now discovering this at large levels here. But lets face it, it isn't like industrialized food is going away. In fact it's growing. We've outsourced cooking and this is the result. And the cost of ingredients has risen where as fast food has gotten cheaper over the last 30 years, adjusted for inflation. And there's the gap you're talking about.
But this is creeping across the world. Europe has had a big taste of this and it's growing quickly. Places like India now are changing this way too. What's in those boxes will just be adapted to local pallets.
I just come back from California, were I found the food very good, especially vegetables, fruits and beer in comparison with French products. Didn't know about the cheeses though.
