That's definitely not true. McDonald's and Burger King were both markedly worse in my experience. A shame in-n-out isn't abroad, and haven't found a Taco Bell or Wendy's yet. Not that I would really go out of my way to eat fast food overseas now that I'm an adult... I don't even eat these things in the US.

There's wide variability within the US anyway. I've noticed that affluent suburbs tend to have great fast food, while urban and rural environments have awful fast food.

I mean, where are you comparing to? Anecdotally, in Sweden, I have a friend who used to work for a huge slaughterhouse/meat distributor (pardon me if there is a better term). According to him, the beef that was sold to McDonalds was only high quality. This was around ten years ago, mind you.

depends where you were abroad, i would rank most above USA and a few slightly below.

I should have said almost.

A&W Rootbeer is much better in Canada - I think they use sugar instead of corn syrup - something - it's really good there

Strangely enough A&W in Canada is now a completely different company than A&W in the US. Their logos are even slightly different.

EDIT: I mean the restaurant chain, I'm not sure of the root beer itself.

A&W restaurants was/is a completely different company than the drink company. I worked for Yum! Brands when they bought the A&W brand and we all thought we would get some good root beer out of the deal. Nope, the soda didn't come with the restaurant.

I agree this is generally true, but it definitely depends on the country you're talking about.

Many other first-world countries (thinking of EU, etc.) have much stricter rules about food additives, etc. So the bread, for example, tastes significantly less cardboard-ey.