Bread

I think I just discovered a new weird cultural linguistic quirk of American English. If you go to a grocery store and ask “where are the peaches?”, you will get directed to the fresh produce section. There are probably also peaches in the canned fruit section and in the frozen fruit area, but by default “peaches” is understood to refer to fresh whole peaches. When looking for peaches, we typically use labels “peaches” (for fresh), “canned peaches” and “frozen peaches”. Similarly, if you ask “where is the chicken?” you get sent to the butcher area where there are refrigerated whole chickens. American English speakers do not consider frozen chicken nuggets, deli-sliced chicken, or cooked rotisserie chicken to be the default “chicken”. In general, if you ask the location of a food item in the grocery store, the default is to assume you are referring to the fresh/unprocessed/uncooked version of the item. The exception is bread. If you ask “where is the bread”, you do not get sent to the fresh bread in the bakery section, but to the bread aisle where the sliced shelf stable bread is. Rather than follow the rules of other food items, we have “bread” and “fresh bread” rather than “bread” and “sliced bread”. If an American English speaker wants bread from the bakery, we use terms like “French bread”, “baguette”, or even “crusty bread”.

I think this really pisses off Germans, since they seem to have the opposite default where das Brot is understood to be fresh sliced bread and Toastbrot is pre-sliced industrial bread.