I remember once stopping for a bite to eat at a roadside joint in Kentucky.
I asked for a cheese sandwich. Specifically just a cheese sandwich because I was getting fed up of sandwiches coming on a plate piled up with all sorts of extraneous crap I didn't want.
Sure enough it came with fries, slaw, gherkin AND a bowl of soup with crackers.
When I asked the waitress why she said it was company policy that they had to serve up everything even if the diner didn't want it and anything not eaten went straight in the pigswill.
This was 20 years ago and I figured then that Americans had a problem with too much food on their plate.