Last panel gets it wrong, though.
Rest of the world totally thinks that there is such a thing as original American food:
High-caloric, hyper-processed junk containing no significant nutritional value but much too much fat, fructose sirup and carcinogenic substances.
That, and watery beer.The watery beer thing hasn’t been true in 30 years, and generally US beats the entire world for beer these days. Asian beer sucks in general, and Europe can usually only do a couple different styles well.
Comment was not about what is, but what the rest of the world thinks it to be.
And that is not fancy West Coast craft beer or so, but Bud Light and Coors, I am afraid…Don’t all countries have mass produced shitty light lagers or pilsners that don’t taste like much? As far as I know all European countries have giant corporations producing shitty beer. The ones I’ve had personally include Amstel, Kronenbourg, Bitburger, Stella, Urquell, etc, and they’re all universally one note with a light taste on the same level as Budweiser.
I wasn’t around to be drinking back when the “US beer is pisswater” stereotype was around, so I’m not sure why the US got singled out. Maybe the Bud and Coors types were all there was so there were no smaller brands to point to as a sign of quality. But if that stereotype is still around it’s from people who’ve been living under a rock for literal decades.
I had bread that tasted like a cake, and the Pop-Tarts made my teeth jump out of my mouth due to the amount of sugar they were able to concentrate in it. Can’t recommend.
Both 100% American.
The people were very nice though, so that was something.
Fusion, mostly. Latino coworker from Texas told me Burritos are neither Mexican nor American, but a beautiful Texas border food fusion. Anecdotal, but the guys son is a professional chef.
All food is some kind of fusion. Humans have been cooking for hundreds of thousands of years, and very few communities have been truly isolated in human history. People going on about “true” this, and “authentic” that, just don’t know shit about cooking or culture.
Migration and transplanting of cultures has massively increased in the last 100 years though… Shit changed a lot slower in the past.
If you went back to the time of Leonardo DaVinci you wouldn’t find tomatoes anywhere in Italy. Tomatoes are indigenous to Central America yet today it seems almost impossible to imagine Italian food without tomatoes! The introduction of tomatoes to Italian cooking might’ve been more gradual but the transformation was far greater than anything we see now.
I think people today vastly underestimate how much people moved around in the past. Not just from mass migrations, but also individuals just ending up in places. An army was basically a moving city making it’s way around for years if not decades. New trade routes opening often meant people moving across the world to either end just to handle logistics. A fad started by one individual eventually turns into a staple, a tradition, a culture.
Cali has amazing not quite Mexican food too.
Yeah, I mean when you have a European power colonize a native area, then the locals take over for a while before the noisy neighbor to the north re-colonizes it, then rebuilds on the labor of people that were already there (Surprise! You’re Americans now!), there’s going to be some back-and-forth culinary Frankensteining going on. For example; the California burrito.
What’s in the California burrito that the natives wouldn’t have made? Potatoes are from Peru.
Hamburgers, meatloaf, gumbo, and all sorts of southern food is American.
*Edit. Some of you think hamburgers weren’t an American creation. Y’all are incorrect. The humburg meat was never put between bread. The sandwich hamburger is a US creation.
Hamburger were invited in Athens Texas. Just go ask that city they advertise that it was a man from that town at the World Fair in the 1930’s.
I have to think of a lot of fish dishes too. Since we only have them here. I don’t think Walleye is from anywhere else. Maybe I’m wrong.
Walleye isn’t a preparation, it’s an animal.
Preparing pineapple or mango isn’t native either and included in these comparisons.
I didn’t say anything about nativeness. Also seems like you forgot to finish your sentence, I’m really not sure what you are trying to say here.
Literary all of those dishes have origins outside of the US lol
So does all human society, this is a stupid argument.
I find it fascinating that almost half of the world has their own dumpling (ie. a small ball of a cheap source of protein and fat held together by a wrapping of flour dough; a peasant dish that’s most often boiled).
I bet if you they would all dispute the origin of that food item.
My point is that US people tend to claim ownership to a lot of things that were not invented there. I’m all for sharing culture and food and transforming them to something new, but don’t claim they are your invention.
Like as american as apple pie is an expression for a dish from Germany and the Netherlands.
My point is that nationalism is poisoning society and destroying the ecosystem, and this discussion isn’t helping.
That I completely agree with and concede the point.
Nah, I as an naturalized American citizen I do not want stuff I create to be called “Chinese”, its xenophobic. I mean, you can say “Chinese-American” to refer to me but not “Chinese”. Cuz why is a white US Citizen creating stuff labeled as “American” while stuff I make is not “American”? Double standards.
If I come up with a new food receipe, its American food. If I make a painting, that’s made by an American artist. If I publish a book, that’s written by an American writer. Don’t fucking try to “other” me.
We invented the chocolate chip cookie, man. That pretty much means we won. Lol
Haha, can’t argue with that logic. And cookie dough ice cream!
Meanwhile, German Chocolate Cake has nothing to do with Germany!
It was created by a guy with the last name of German…
The chocolate was made by a man named Samuel German in the 1850s, but recipe for the cake that uses the chocolate was made by a Mrs. George Clay, who sent her recipe into the Dallas Morning News in 1957.
That’s hilarious. I never heard of German chocolate cake. Black forest though is dope!
You’re literally wrong. A hamburger as a sandwich is a US creation. So is gumbo. Literally do a 2 minute search about it before “thinking” you know what you’re talking about. Lol
Dude, Hamburgers are literally named after the non-US city they originally came from…
But I have to admit that the refinement to its delicious present day form is an American achievement!That’s a Hamburg steak. Not a hamburger, since there’s no bun
Na, buddy. You’re wrong. The Hamburg thing is just about a mashed up piece of meat. Not the hamburger. Putting the meat in the bun to make a sandwich is 100% US like 125 years ago.
That’s quite disputed.
One of the more likely theories states that the bun idea together with the ground meat steak originated in Hamburg, where it was a variant of the common “Rundstück warm”, which has been around since 200 years ago or so.It’s less disputed than most food origins. I looked up your rundstuck warm food. Dunno why you’re trying to make that argument, because because that sure looks nothing like a hamburger, nor does it get eaten like one. That it didn’t use ground beef aside, it being covered in gravy is a dead giveaway.
The original hamburger was more like a meatloaf. It was a hamburg steak, meant to be eaten with a fork and knife just like a modern meatloaf. The modern hamburger is 100% an American invention, because America was the place that first turned it into a sandwich.
I don’t think people really realize how much food has changed in the past few centuries. I was talking with this Pakistani dude and he was telling me about this traditional dish. Like half the ingredients were from the Columbian exchange.
The amount and variety of spices we have is just crazy in a historical context. For most humans for most of human history, meals consisted of grains in a pot, whatever veggies you could scrounge up (which looked very little like they do today), and a little meat if you were lucky.
Same with Italian food. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century.
Leonardo da Vinci lived his whole life never knowing what a tomato was.
Same thing in Italy. We act like our traditional dishes are something we’ve been eating for centuries while almost all of them became a thing after WWII, during the economic boom, when a lot of people became able to afford a larger variety of ingredients, the cold chain became efficient, and we started to import recipes and food from foreign countries, and anyway the original and popular version of some classics was completely different from what we eat today and consider traditional. It is still true that many dishes are peculiar of our traditional cousine, but the way we act about it is just patriotic nonsense. Pasta itself might be historically considered more of an us italian-american thing than an italian dish
Well at least our Finnish national dish is still traditional. Take cubed beef and pork. Put them in water. Add salt. Put on heat for a sufficient amount of time.
That’s it.
Fancy modern versions have peppers and whatnot but traditionally it’s just salt.
Salt. Don’t forget the SALT
Doh!
Partner (UK) and I (US) talk about this a lot. I felt this way, but she pointed out to me that the US is astonishingly good at taking dishes from other countries and putting a spin on them, such as changes in texture or combinations. Once I started to pay attention I agreed.
We fry it, add fat, carbs, and/or add sugar.
Done.
It’s also about fusing different cuisines together, to make something new. America is the big melting pot, and that means you end up getting flavor palettes that otherwise wouldn’t have been brought together.
Traditional Mexican food isn’t anywhere near as spicy or as cheesy as Tex-mex, for instance. That’s because Texans took the traditional Mexican cuisine, combined it with American peppers and English+North American aged orange cheeses, and created Tex-mex. Tex-mex also tends to rely on flour instead of corn, because Mexico had red/yellow/white maize (and later, modern yellow corn) while American settlers had wheat.
And then California Mexican food is an entirely different third type of food.
Hell, my favorite local pizza joint sells a chicken tikka masala pizza that is fucking wonderful. We have a really big North Indian population in my area, so lots of the local restaurants have veggie options (India is largely vegetarian) and/or Indian spice blends incorporated into some of their menu items.
Yes! Great demonstrations of what she talks about. The biggest complaint she has is that we will go to a place, let’s say it’s a Vietnamese place, and it will be really good but not at all authentic. She wishes those were called what they are, Vietnamese American Fusion. Like, take pride in this thing you created.
Kimchichimichangas is the best thing about the US and I will fight you on this.
Only two of those four are unhealthy.
But also, I know a fellow southerner when I see one.
Same with the argument of “we need to deport them to preserve our culture”. America has always been mix up of cultures and has a vastly different culture from state to state and city to city. New york wouldn’t have been the world renowned city it is if it didn’t have its diversity.
Isn’t chicken Parmesan technically a New York dish?
TIL the chicken parmie is from NY. Although we Aussies have it served with hot chips, salad, and lager, instead of with pasta.
Do you throw some shrimp on the parmie?
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help myself.
Haha nice one mate. That’s basically a poor man’s surf and turf, right?
My favorite will always be wartime foods. Shit on a shingle and spam on rice are fucking amazing.
What about post wartime foods? After WWII in Japan there was a hotel that had a ton of surplus ketchup, so one chef decided that putting it on pasta wouldn’t be a crime against humanity. Despite the fact that he was wrong, it still persists as a popular dish to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naporitan
That’s unholy and should be cleansed with fire and chanting.
I tried to get into ketchup spaghetti. I tried
Why would you do that to yourself? I was tricked into eating it because I saw red sauce on spaghetti and decided that of course it was pasta sauce. Why would anyone ever not put pasta sauce on pasta? I had to stop myself from spitting it out when the weird sweet sensation that was supposed to be savory hit me.
Had the same reaction when I tried to find tomato/vegetable juice and it was similarly disgustingly sweet. Who puts sugar in vegetable juice? Just drink a smoothie with fruit ffs.
Ketchup is the default pasta sauce. Felix ketchup is the one to swear by, can’t stand Heinz.
Ketchup is the key ingredients in swedish mest sauce.
I’m guessing that’s why no one talks about Sweden when talking pasta sauce
Your loss 🤷
Naporitan is my favourite Japanese food
Seriously. I love Korean army stew.
Peasant food, because peasants knew how to feed a family with cheap hearty ingredients, which keep you full. Whenever you imagine a cozy “I’m ready for a nap after eating” meal, it is almost always peasant food that you’re imagining.
Beans on toast is prime 🤌 Toast with butter and marmite. Glug of Worcestershire. Grate some parmesan. Cracked pepper.
It especially hits on a cold snowy day
American food is whatever I eat in America 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Mexico has breakfast tacos at home, they’re called Tacos de Canasta
What about pumkin pie?
Native American: I am a joke to you?
I hope this is just american whining about cultural appropriation again. Food evolved based on which culture cook it and that country’s flavour, and chance is, some of your favorite food that you think is originated from one place is actually a fusion of another food. As a chinese that isn’t originated from china(and not from the west), the chinese food i loved the most is actually just fusion made using local ingredients for local tastebud, not because some people decided to ruin someone else culture.
I recommend watching this video from Jennifer Lee: https://youtu.be/U6MhV5Rn63M
It talks about the history of Chinese food in America it’s great. Echoes some of the flavours you’ve experienced with some fun context.
Italia is missing out on Chicago Style Pan Pizza and Italian Beef sandwiches. Thank you Italian immigrants for adapting and creating the delicious food.
Chicago Style Pan Pizza
That’s a casserole.
Italian Beef sandwiches
That’s a sandwich with beef in a panini.
Please don’t misuse European countries names as adjectives, that’s offensive.
Pizza Americana. Torta Americana. Amerikan Salatasi. Cool American Doritos.
Torta Americana
Thats a Nestle product name. Nestle is USA company.
Same with Cool American Doritos, it’s USa company naming it.
No idea what Salatsi is, sounds Turkish. Turkey is not European.
“Pizza Americana” is a Pizza Hut invention as far as I can tell.
Try again.
Nestle is Swiss. The Doritos are called that because Euro countries call our “ranch” dressing “American” dressing. Turkiye is on the Eurasian border with parts in both continents. I can’t easily find where the pizza was first marketed but that’s not even relevant to the point: the rest of the world is using our country’s name as an adjective for food so fuck you we’re doing it too.
Nestle is Swiss
Fuck me with a rusty rake. You’re right. It is Swiss.
The Doritos are called that because Euro countries call our “ranch” dressing “American” dressing
Literally we don’t eat ranch dressing here, it is only in chips and mcdonalds and shiet. And that is for sure USA owned.
Turkiye is on the Eurasian border with parts in both continents.
Turkey is not European, whenever it might lie.
the rest of the world is using our country’s name as an adjective for food so fuck you we’re doing it too.
No, it is your style - see “french fries”. In Europe it’s “fries”.
Um, people eat tacos for breakfast all over Mexico.
*Temu versions of our food.
Just like their knock-off version of rugby.
