There is no American food

One hears all kinds of evidence of confusion and ignorance in Skypeland. A man from Poland told me confidently that there is no such thing as American food, or foods that are native to the US. I said there were American foods, and there that many dishes from other countries are altered in the US to suit American tastes, or because of what is easily available in the US. The Polish man was completely disdainful and very self-assured, self confident and pleased with himself when he told me over and over that there are no foods that originate in the US, and no styles of food that are distinctly American, even though he had never met an American or visited the US himself. Incredible...

I mentioned that Italian food in the US is not like Italian food one gets in Italy. I said that Mexican food in the US is quite different from Mexican food one can find in Mexico. For example, it is far more common to use hamburger meat than other forms of meat in "Mexican food" in the US. Indian and Mexican and Korean foods in the US are not near as spicey as they are in their native countries, because Americans favor less spicey dishes. Chinese food in the US is also quite different than Chinese food in China. Chop Suey and General Tsao's Chicken are uniquely American, and not at all Chinese. The hamburger and the hot dog, or frankfurter, are of course of German origin (as can be easily determined from their names), but who would say that a McDonald's Big Mac sandwich is not quintessentially American in presentation, even if its ancestry is back in Hamburg, Germany? (This phenomenon is not unique to the US. Dim Sim is an Australian dish that is only vaguely related to Chinese food, and should not be confused with Dim Sum, the Chinese meal.)

The man from Poland rejected all my statements. I noted that tomato ketchup was really popularized in the US and some claim it was invented in the US. He was completely disgusted at this suggestion, and but then I pointed out that tomatoes originate in the Americas, and were unknown in Europe before the discovery of the New World. At their first appearance, people were afraid to eat them and treated them like ornamental plants since they are a member of the nightshade family (the leaves and stems of tomato plants are indeed poisonous). He was completely bewildered to hear this, and found it hard to imagine.

I then mentioned some truly American foods like pemmican, crab apples, pawpaws, Coca-Cola, cold breakfast cereals like Corn Flakes, wild rice, corn (including popcorn), fajitas, cotton candy, shoefly pie, peanut butter and pumpkin pie. I also pointed out that some foods, like high-fructose corn syrup and magic shell, for good or for ill, originated in the US. Interestingly, he either had not ever heard of these foods (like crab apples, pemmican, pawpaws or wild rice), or was completely oblivious to the fact that they originated in the US, and wanted to argue about it, since he was sure they were not "American" foods. Truely a sign of American marketing prowess; many of the foods he did not even identify with the US he accepted as being from Europe or Poland.

I also noted that many local delicacies like Old Bay seasoning and Crab Cakes and Berger cookies and fry bread and different local variants of clam chowder and funnel cake and salt water taffy and cranberry sauce and frozen custard are just popular in some restricted part of the US, and not even well known outside a small area. Of course someone in another country will be unlikely to have even heard of them. And of course, he had heard of none of them. But nevertheless, he remained convinced that the US had no native foods and had contributed nothing to world cuisine (arguably true, depending on your definitions). However, this is as silly as me claiming that Poland has no native dishes, since I have never been there and know little about it.

I will point out that this person also exhibited boundless ignorance in other areas. When I asked him, he was convinced that close to 100% of the population of the US was Jewish. When I told him it was closer to 3.5%, he was shocked and amazed. He found this almost impossible to believe. What is interesting is that before we talked, he was convinced he knew everything there is to know about the US from television and the movies. He was positive he was an expert on the US. Even after we talked, I had the impression he did not quite believe what I had told him...

I wonder how many people would be surprised to know that there are more Muslims in the US than Jews? It seems that I have never yet met a single person from the Middle East who knew that there was even a single Muslim in the US. This strikes me as odd since they all want to emigrate to the US and seem to have friends and relatives in the US, so why they would assume that the US has no Moslems just seems amazing. But it does say something about how people think and what they assume...

Addendum: Here is a nonexhaustive list of US national dishes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_dishes

Here is a nonexhaustive list of US regional dishes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_regional_and_fusion_cuisines
Here is an article about US cuisine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisine_of_the_United_States