Food is the best, isn’t it? I could eat every day and never get sick of it, which is great because there really are a lot of options out there. Yesterday I had sushi for lunch and saag paneer for dinner. For breakfast today I think maybe I’ll have huevos rancheros, and then tonight? Boom! Tonight is paella night.
Here we are – we live in a world where we can have Japanese, Indian, Mexican, and Spanish meals in a 36 hour span. We are worldly people in a globalized economy. Who even has time to eat American food anymore?
Wait. What is American food?
Excepting, out of good taste, esoteric curiosities like cream-of-mushroom hot dish and Jello salad, there isn’t really a uniquely American cuisine. What we think of as “American” foods are either culinary heirlooms like hamburgers, hot dogs, and french fries, or so banal as to be ubiquitous. Try chasing the true heritage of the grilled cheese sandwich.
Of course immigrant communities have been making do here for three hundred years, and that’s kind of American. Cioppino is, I suppose, technically American: it grew in the Italian fish mongering communities of San Francisco. Pizza is also essentially Italian, but a street vendor in Naples wouldn’t recognize a slice of Chicago deep dish.
The closest we come to truly American cuisine is in the Mississippi River Delta. Creole food is a triumph of innovation, applying French techniques to slave-trade flavors. The subtle, centuries old, provenance-based distinctions between Creole and Cajun foods further endorse Louisiana cuisine as the standard bearer for an America that still refuses to come to grips with its slaver’s heritage.
But even without putting our finger on a single dish that typifies American food, there are trends that stand out. Food in this country reflects the diversity of our past, sure, but national boundaries have been porous to ingredients and techniques for a lot longer than we’ve been around. The tomato is native to Bolivia and Peru, but it’s hard to imagine Italian food without it. Pretty much everyone came up with booze.
Really, when we think of American food, we think less of specific dishes than we do the brands that sell them. What’s more American than McDonald’s? Our contribution to the culinary lexicon has, in general, not been a new dish or flavor profile, but the industrialization of the foodmaking process.
Hamburgers are not American, but McDonald’s sure is. Pizza is not American, but Domino’s is. I can’t be sure about P.F. Chang’s, but I don’t think it’s Chinese. The real American food? Texturized Vegetable Protein and Roundup Ready Corn.
Chicken nuggets.
Yes. We’ve done it now. Chicken nuggets are uniquely American. Hormone injected chickens, penned en masse and force fed genetically modified corn (and previous chickens), peeled, liquefied, and molded into homogeneous pucks, breaded, frozen, bagged, boxed and shipped with neatly vacuum sealed freezer packs of corn syrup dipping sauce right to your door (not Prime eligible) just in time for dinner.
What’s more American than that?
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