America's food confusion

One of the characteristics of America is that we adopt customs originating in other countries, often from countries from which we've received a number of immigrants, and then over a few generations adapt those customs to suit ourselves. This comic reminds me of how food snobs sniff at our very popular spaghetti and meatballs dinners, because "they don't serve those two things together in Italy". We just say, "Oh, that's very interesting", and still continue to load our meatballs on top of our spaghetti anyway.

Now excuse me while I heat up my spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.

@uktana the funny part is it was actually Italian immigrants that began to put meatballs on spaghetti cause meat was cheaper in the US than in Italy

@AmericanButterfly That's true, spaghetti and meatballs is a fine Italian-American dish, which in turn is a respectable regional Italian cuisine. Just like you won't find corned beef and cabbage in Ireland - Irish immigrants in NYC's Lower East Side adopted corned beef because it was cheap and tasty.

This is by no means limited to Americans, either. I have a joke every year that my family is going to have a traditional Japanese Christmas dinner: Kentucky Fried Chicken and sponge cake with strawberries.

@AmericanButterfly
@uktana
Pepperoni has a similar story. It wasn't invented in Italy, but by Italian immigrants in America, albeit with heavy inspiration from Southern Italian spicy salamis.

@EricTheRedAndWhite huh I didn't know the origin of pepperoni thanks for history lesson

@EricTheRedAndWhite I had a good friend who grew up in Hong Kong, who could never quite grasp that what we call "Chinese food" is a part of American cuisine, and is not intended to be authentic Chinese cuisine. In Chinese restaurants, he'd constantly complain that "we don't cook it this way, we don't serve it that way, we don't have anything like that one in China", and sometimes I'd be ready to tell him to take a slow boat.

Chinese restaurants (and laundries, btw) in America got started as support establishments for the men who emigrated to the U.S. to work on the railroad and who had little in the way of bachelor-living skills. At some point, it became fashionable for middle-class Anglos to dine at these exotic places, and the Chinese realized that these could be business enterprises in themselves; and over the years they altered their recipes or created new ones to suit the American palate.

@uktana
I gotta admit that besides the ones we already have, there are a few more American restaurant chains I'd like to come to Denmark. Olive Garden and Red Lobster, for instance.

@EricTheRedAndWhite How can you be that close to Italy and want Olive Garden?

And... Red Lobster is mediocre seafood. Your whole country is a coast, surely you've got far better options.

@VictorMortimer
Close to Italy? That's a matter of opinion. Denmark is a much smaller country than the United States, and almost four times as densely populated, so we have another sense of distance than you do.

Nevertheless, I would like to try out those two restaurant chains if I ever got the opportunity, and as rule of thumb, I'm not a person who judge something I haven't tried yet, no matter what other people have to say about it.

Wow! Very informative!

America combines EVERYTHING. Those hamburgers with fries and an egg on them come to mind. Who the HELL wants to eat a fried egg on top their burger? Or eat the fries on TOP THE BURGER!? AHHH! I hate when my favorite hamburger place removes something great from the menu and then adds one of those monstrosities as a replacement.

Yep, that's America.