Had tacos for dinner tonight.

[conuly]

These are, of course, the tacos in the hard shell.

There is a really pesky contingent of people on the internet - and, I presume, in real life as well - who is proud to vocally proclaim that Americans just have no native food culture. Most of these people have never been to the US, of course.

Italians are the worst for this, in my experience, and their usual arguments follow two illogical pathways.

The first runs "Americans can't make $FOOD correctly, because their version of $FOOD is totally different from the version my grandma makes."

I say "fuck this shit". American spaghetti, American tacos, American Swedish meatballs, American beef pepper steak - all this might be very different from whatever the ancestral foods were that were brought here by immigrants, but when those selfsame immigrants looked around and saw that they couldn't get all the same things as at home, they did what immigrants have always done and they adapted. They picked up new ideas from their neighbors with different customs and foodways as well. And yeah, some of the foods they came up with were different from the ones their own grandparents ate, but guess what? Unless you're reading from 1875 cookbooks, your recipes have changed a little too. This idea that Americans changed it but people back home didn't is ludicrous.

The second is even more inane, and it runs "Apples are from Europe and so is wheat and so is butter, so apple pie isn't American and neither are all sorts of food".

First, none of those things are from Europe, and neither are the spices. Apples are from Asia, wheat is from the Fertile Crescent, and... idk who first invented cattle herding, much less butter, and I don't want to google it, but whatever. Secondly, whoever-it-is probably eats potatoes, or tomatoes, or peppers, and considers food made with those things integral to their own culture and guess what?

This argument is ridiculous no matter how it's made, and it drives me up the freaking wall. My breakfast bialy is no less authentic just because they technically make it differently in Bialystok. It's an authentic New York bialy.

Comments

[nicki]

Tomatoes are from the Americas, therefore like half of Italian food is really American food. :P

[kengr]

And Marco Polo brought noodles from China so there goes the rest of Italian food :-)

[calimac]

"American spaghetti, American tacos ..." As long as they're labeled as such: then they may be seen as what they properly are, a different dish inspired by the original. We get that kind of terminology built in with some things, like Tex-Mex. New Yorkers get very annoyed at Chicago deep-dish pizza, but they shouldn't: it's always called that, and can't possibly be confused with what New Yorkers call pizza.

[conuly]

But what is "the original"? Is it what's being made today in Wherever? I don't think so. Their recipes are not the same as six generations ago any more than the American recipes are.

[calimac]

Six generations ago is about when the American versions split off.

[conuly]

Six generations ago is six generations ago. Neither in the US nor in Wherever are people cooking *exactly* like they were back then.

It's not that "the American versions split off and the back home versions are still authentic", it's that both versions are different because it's been several generations.

[calimac]

I figure it's like biological evolution. Biologists are at pains to say that humans aren't descended from apes, but that both are descended from a common ancestor. But if you had a live example of that common ancestor here to look at, you'd say it was an ape.

[conuly]

Yeah, except that I'd also say that a human is an ape. Because we are apes. All humans are hominids, all hominids are apes, all apes are primates, all primates are mammals.

[calimac]

No, that's not proper terminology. The third term you're looking for in your series of five is "hominoid" (as distinct from hominid). Apes are one subset of hominoid, humans are another.

But it doesn't matter, as long as you take the point that the analogy was intended to make: that in these cases, of two descendants one remaining in the environment of the ancestor retains more of its character than the other.

[conuly]

One, I don't take that point and two, if the Smithsonian says we're apes, I'm gonna run with that: https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics

[greghousesgf]

I'm from New York and I love Chicago deep dish pizza, it's just different.

[foliedemars]

I agree, it’s pretty insufferable! Italians are the absolute worst on social media in regards to food, but I’ve also seen a lot of drama coming from Mexico and the Middle East. People need to accept that THEIR culture isn’t the only “right” way to eat something, but I sure won’t hold my breath. I’ll just stay out of comment sections. lol

[chez_jae]

I can't imagine anyone making such a fuss over something so inane. As for "authentic American food", the first thing that pops into my mind is a good TX BBQ or a Louisiana gumbo.

:)

[conuly]

Mmmhm. American regional food cultures are nothing to sneer at.

(Relatedly, Tex-Mex is not a failure to make Mexican food.)

[minoanmiss]

/*cheers loudly*

[ioplokon]

I dunno, I think there is some understandable resentment when you feel like mainstream culture has cashed in on like 'your thing' (see, that bit in Sopranos where the dude is pissed about Starbucks like "wtf, we're Italian, how did we not make money on this") but that's much more something you see within the hyphenated-American communities vs people from the Old Country talking about how we're Doing It Wrong (and us being like, dude, if I could access twelve different types of paprika, I absolutely would be doing that but. that is not an option!).

Also, my grandparents were fucking broke and had never eaten a fresh vegetable so like, I'm okay with some dietary innovation.

[conuly]

dude, if I could access twelve different types of paprika, I absolutely would be doing that but. that is not an option!

With the internet I think we can now, but honestly....

[bitterlawngnome]

Thing is, those same (Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Iranians, you name it) are also dismissive of each other’s cooking. My god the arguments between my next door neighbours, both Genovese, over the “genuine” way to make pesto. Or my Portuguese neighbours having a friendly screaming match about what REAL grilled sardines should look like. Or my grandmother talking trash about her best friend’s cabbage rolls - she’s Slavic you know, they can’t cook at all. Etc. It’s just part of many cultures, don’t feel singled out :)

[swingandswirl]

Honestly, it's just snobbery in a different skin. There are some American foods I wouldn't touch with a barge pole - deep-fried Twinkies come to mind - but that doesn't mean there is no native food culture (if nothing else, it's complete erasing Native Americans to say that.)

(Have you listened to the podcast Gastropod? They talk about food with an angle of historical/cultural analysis, and it's REALLY good.)

[conuly]

Yeah, I don't even touch the did you forget Native Americans argument when dealing with these people.

[chelseagirl]

I'm reading a book called 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement which is fascinating. Follows various waves of immigrants sequentially, and their foodways: German, Irish, German Jewish, East European Jewish, Italian.

[conuly]

Is that the one put out by the Tenement Museum?

[chelseagirl]

Yes! They have a few books about 97 Orchard -- I also have one that's more about the building itself -- but this one is delightful so far!

[wenchpixie]

I wonder how much of that is due to it being so broad, rather than more regional? Like, I'd say Scottish, rather than British, food, and quite a lot of it's much more peculiarly local than that?

I'm definitely with you on the local adaptations of ancestral recipies thing - people have been adapting what they have have available to them make a "taste of home" for themselves forever and it's always been different because the same ingredients aren't available to them (and if you do that for a generation or two, it becomes the new tradional cuisine, repeat ad infinatum)

[shadowkat]

Applauds you, and seconds the post above.

Pesky Europeans want to take credit for everything. Eh, no. A lot of European foods were actually borrowed from others. The British stole a lot from the French and Asian cultures. Tea originated from Asia not Britain. The others stole from each other, Asia, Africa, etc. This nationalistic desire to take ownership of foods is kind of silly in a way (although admittedly we're both kind of doing that. ;-) )

And I miss tacos. I'm going to have to buy some corn taco shells at some point.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I think you may be missing a couple of points here.

First, yes, the American version of a dish may well be a perfectly good dish. But if you're going to refer to, say goulash, and ask for advice on making it, everyone on the Internet (except for a few insular and ignorant Americans) will assume you mean goulash. If you actually mean "American goulash", you need to say so, because it's a totally different dish.

Second, the phrase that confuses is "as American as apple pie". What is supposed to be American about apple pie? Everyone has apple pie. They're all pretty much the same, and have been for long before Europeans visited America, much less founded a country there. The pastry details have changed a little over the years, but they settled down in the late 1600s. (Don't try the 1450 recipes for pastry. They're not nice.)

[conuly]

A quick glance at google suggests that even in Hungary there are multiple wildly different versions of goulash, none of which are the same as the ancestral version which, of course, did not have paprika or potatoes. (And the tomatoes in some versions are extremely recent, as in, 20th century.)

There are also long-standing goulash recipes (quite different from the Hungarian ones) in Austria, Italy, Ethiopia (with fish!)... do you think all the people eating goulash there know that their goulash isn't the 'correct' goulash?

Why is it that when Ethiopians eat fish goulash and don't say "Now, now, this is not real Hungarian food", that's their food culture, but when Americans eat American goulash and don't say that as they eat it's "ignorant"?