Let me preface all of this by saying that I'm not a food Nazi. If it were good for you, I'd happily exist on a steady diet of frozen pizza, Pop-Tarts and RingDings. I do tend to buy organic, largely because of my son's multiple food allergies. And heaven knows there's nothing quite so depressing as opening your fridge when you've come to the end of your organic box, only to discover that one lone stump of celariac. But as with my positive observations regarding customer service, civic engagement and the unsung virtues of superstores in America, when you're away from things for awhile, you do take note.

And so it was with fast food. Granted, it was perhaps a mistake to eat three meals in succession at TGIF, IHOP and Friendly's. That's a whole lotta jumbo-shrimp platters coming your way in 24 hours.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the absurd amount of choices available on American fast food menus. There is nothing -- nothing -- even remotely like this in all of Europe. At Friendly's, they actually gave me two different menus -- one for the specials and one for the regular meals. Each was something like 10 pages thick. And because this is America, where it's all about customization, you could of course cross-fertilize between the two. Hey, I've racked up a fancy degree or two along the way in life. But I was having trouble even finding a tuna melt, much less figuring out how to order one. Do we really need that many choices?

And what is up with this newfound zeal for telling you the calories on any given dish? I'm feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle here, in that I move to London for three years and come back to find that we now display calories on menus in New York. I'm sure this was part of some very well-intentioned bill to fend off obesity. But let's be honest. As you dive into your Coffee Fribble (yeah, I still drink those), do you really want to know that it has 630 calories? In a word: buzzkill.

There's something quintessentially American in this schizophrenic attitude toward food, so beautifully captured in the Friendly's menu. The message seems to be "We entreat you to consume a whole load of garbage, but remember, it's bad for you!" Over at Salon, Laura Miller touches on this point in a recent book review about American consumer habits: "Our conception of how to live is in constant oscillation between unsustainable license and impossible rectitude. We're Jerry Lee Lewis, coming to Jesus one day and drunkenly pounding out honky-tonk piano riffs and marrying 13-year-olds the next."

But perhaps most distressing of all in my rapid-fire tour through our Fast Food Nation is that even organic food has begun to lose its luster. This summer, the CEO of Whole Foods -- John Mackey -- admitted that his store sells "a lot of junk." (This was right around the time that he also aired his views on health care reform, prompting a mass exodus of his high-paying, liberal-minded customers. With all due respect, dude, who is doing your P.R.?)

Then there was that report by the Food Standards Agency in Great Britain questioning whether organic food offers any real nutritional benefits over conventional food. Bummer.

So where does this leave us, the confused, bi-polar, Fribble-consuming but health-conscious masses? I'm not sure. All I do know is that the next time I go on a road trip in America, I'm bringing a blindfold.