Had tacos for dinner tonight.
Dec. 6th, 2020 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyThese 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2020-12-10 07:37 am (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2020-12-12 05:42 pm (UTC)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"?