I have heard that Amish food is supposed to be good but I have yet to see it. It is quite possible that the Amish have kind of sold out to provide food better suited to the tastes of the local non-Amish. I gave a quick Yelp search for Amish restaurants within a hundred miles of me and saw that none of them exceed the 3.5 star range. Typical criticism is that the food is bland and tasteless and usually out of a can. Almost all of them seem to be using rehydrated potatoes for their mashed potatoes and factory purchased meat in a bag.
We have a large commercial Amish fruit orchard here that is highly regarded. I like their fruit, it is very good. But their pies are literally terrible. They remind me of the pies we made in boy scout summer camp out of canned filling. Tons and tons of gloppy syrup. Every single Amish seller at the local farmers market sells them this way and they cost about $14.
It is tempting to say that they are tailoring their tastes to the local market, however last week my in-laws (who are certainly not epicureans and are quite frugal) bought one and literally threw the whole thing away after two pieces because it had all the appeal of a large sized Hostess fruit pie. And yet the sell them by the hundreds.
I just don't get it. American tastes in food have become far more sophisticated in the last four decades in most places - but not here. So fine, is it fair for me to criticize people on their tastes? Well, yeah, kind of. When I see that about half of the people in my town are obese with half of them in the morbidly obese range, I can say that their food choices leave something to be desired.
That being said, many of the yelp reviews I have read imply that the restaurants in question used to be good but that they have sold out to large corporations that now operate them as "tourist traps". Except we don't get much tourism here and the crowds I see seem to be non-Amish locals who are wistful for the terrible foods of the 1970s. Shit, I remember this kind of crap in the city in the 1970s - it's the same thing - heavy reliance on processed food full of hydrogenated fats and full of sugar.
There is an Amish "deli" here. I assume that there is an entire network of them pimping the Amish products of a large local Amish company (which also operates a chain of the above described restaurants). The deli offers a lot of good things in the way of bulk staples but the meats are horrific and the cheese is totally uninspired and commercial. Rainbows belong in the sky, not on the cold cuts. The turkey is slimy, the beef is watery and tasteless and the salami has about triple the salt that it should - but they are doing gangbuster sales.
I like the Amish though despite my disappointment in the foods their businesses offer. I suspect that there is something going on at a corporate level. My in-law's neighbors are Amish and I buy from their farm regularly. They operate a very tight farm, really well managed. Their prices are excellent. I am perfectly willing to believe that they eat much better than anything they could get from any local Amish business. I think some of the Amish have learned American ways of business and are cashing in. They certainly give me every indication of being smart with their money.
A funny side note. A lot of people are doing Uber down here. I was surprised, it did not seem like Uber would be remotely lucrative. I met one of these Uber drivers in town recently. It turns out that their clientele are almost exclusively Amish. The guy told me that the first thing he learned was that you should not drive the Amish without a leather interior - "on account of the smell".
