Bit of an Oddity

I've been in the United States for two and a half weeks now, and I can't help but notice how different things are after my year in London. First, food tastes...different from what I remember. It's also massively larger. For example, all bread that I've eaten in America now has a distinctly sweet taste, whereas the bread I bought in London tasted like, well, bread. Sweet potatoes in America are at least 2 times as large as the ones I had in London, and they taste a bit like metallic plastic, if that makes any sense. Same goes with aubergines (eggplant): they're massive and taste a bit off.

In addition, food is extraordinarily more expensive in the US, at least where I've been doing my shopping: Stop & Shop. A tin of nuts at Stop & Shop goes for somewhere around $5, whereas the same amount of nuts at my local Tesco in London would have gone for anywhere from £0.80 to £2 (around $1.50 to $3.50). I've noticed this with just about every other food I've bought in Stop & Shop: Tesco wins out, even with the exchange rate.

I make it a habit to avoid the most common sweetener in just about every food in America, high fructose corn syrup, but even so, the strangely sweet taste is still there. It's disturbing, because it is a repulsive taste in bread, and I'm actually surprised that I was able to eat bread in America for so long without noticing the taste.

Is it psychosomatic? I admit that is a possibility, but at the same time, I still find the supposedly "fresh" vegetables I buy at S&S to be disgusting.