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I do a lot of traveling, am just about as serious an ‘amateur’ chef as you’ll find, and maintain that anyone on a remotely reasonable budget who visits Italy or France (especially Paris, especially Rome) “for the food” is better off staying home.

You’re worried about olive oil? Worry about the fact European producers have been mixing it with Sunflower and even petroleum oil for decades. Stay away from Italian olive oil unless you know exactly where it’s from (or your vendor does.) I buy Israeli olive oil.

I totally agree with you that the cuisine of Europe is vastly overrated. Now it might have been true 20-30 years ago that the Europeans had it over us in the culinary department. But we've made huge strides since then.

The quantity, quality and affordability of fine cuisine has literally exploded here in America over the past quarter century and I'm not even talking about the casual dining super-chains like Olive Garden, Longhorn and TGIs, that have popped up in our suburban sprawl areas like fire ant hills. Though even those places represent an overall improvement what existed on the American landscape before the 1980s as now even low-income people can take their families to a decent sit-down meal now and then without golden arches and creepy clown mascots being involved.

Many of our cities, including New York, Houston, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, have so many fine-dining establishments that people that live in those cities can go out to eat every night of their lives and never see the same restaurant twice.

Las Vegas, yes, Las Vegas is now the fine-dining capital of the world. Paris, Rome and Tokyo don't even come close to Las Vegas. Forget about London, might as well put a dome over that entire city and just call it a Ground Round.

Most of the world's fine wines now hail from the Americas (sorry France and Italy) and California all by itself will provide sommeliers with a lifetime of discovery.

And if you get sick of going to restaurants, our supermarkets and specialty markets here in America have an an astonishing array of quality foods that you can prepare at home.

The Spanish olive industry was nearly floored by the Great Obama Recession. More recently it's made a comeback through the simple expedient of individual presses accepting foreign partners who pay for the labor directly. No idea how widespread that is, but there's this EVOO vended under the Conquistidore label that' pretty good for cooking ~ and it's not blended with Algerian oil as used to be the case.

It's about $11 for a 2 litre bottle ~ which is about as cheap as it gets ~ EVER!

Should I worry?