Which countries would be willing to accept an English-speaking engineer who loves to do engineery things for enough pay to have a roof and healthy diet?
Very much depends on your speciality in engineering - US engineering in some fields is world-class,in some fields it's,well, developing world. Very much depends on your field, therefore.
Mhm. Hard. Due to the fact that engineering is split into subspecialties in most of Europe the "general purpose engineer" is often unknown. And for civil and fire protection work you would need a local degree to prove you know the codes. (Which tbh are vastly different).
But trying and failing is better than never trying + this is not my field and I just repeat what I gathered from friends in these fields.
Salaries outside the US aren’t gonna be as high, but the cost of living is also much much lower. As a Brazilian, I actually save more than 50% of my salary (while having a middle class lifestyle), and was able to buy an apartment without any debt at 30.
Also if you go anywhere in Latin America you’ll see the average diet is quite healthy.
Unfortunately, my life isn't so simple to have the freedom to nomadically uproot like that...my free and casual 20s are long gone (not that they were all that free at the time, due to an obligatory work contract). It'll take a lot of elbow grease and creative thinking to find a way to emigrate if it comes to that...but I'll open up Duo Lingo for Portuguese to try that one out :)
If I can offer any tip, it would be to find someone you can become a sort of pen pal in an app like Tandem from a different place you’re interested in and then you might automatically get a better perspective of that place.
A lot of people will be happy to tell you about their place, and you’d automatically have lots of people willing to talk to you just from being a native English speaker: as you probably know, there’s an endless list of people out there in the world who know English enough to sort of communicate, but they don’t have much chance to actually talk with a native in a chat where they won’t have to be embarrassed to make a few mistakes.