Back to an old question: What is American Cuisine?

Ah, hello! While I take a momentary break from cheese, I want to welcome everyone just stumbling upon my blog through Daniel’s post on Neuroanthropology. I am flabbergasted and extremely flattered to receive a mention on such a cool site. AND, I am still waiting to hear what other people would consider to be American cuisine.

It is funny. I wrote that post back in August, and I remember my mind spinning as I struggled with a way to define American cuisine. Like I said, I can easily tell you about American food, but as for the big picture and culture around American food (how I would define a “cuisine”)…can you actually sum it up? I don't think that you can. Nonetheless, I believe that it is still important to ponder such unanswerable questions.

For that matter, I think that someone will always find flaws in any type of generalization, and that is basically what a “national cuisine” is—a generalized way of describing how the people in a certain nation state eat. That being said, it is still easier to generalize certain cultures over others, and I think that it is particularly hard to generalize the food culture and ideology of the United States as whole.

However, I am still going to take a stab at it. I am going to pose a possible answer to my own question after having been abroad for a month and gaining a little outside perspective.

As I have been saying in my previous posts on English grocery shopping experiences and English cheese, the main difference I notice between the food systems of the UK and the US is one of scale. This is obvious. The US is a HUGE country, geographically and demographically. Outside of the US I have spent the most time in the UK and South Africa. All of these countries (I am including Scotland and Ireland here) have cuisines that are based on smaller scale food systems. This is perhaps why I notice much more fresh produce in the cuisines of the UK and South Africa, and much less processed food. This is not to say that processed, packaged food does not exist in these countries, because it does. However, processed food in the United States is so pervasive that I think I could generalize and say that as a nation, our national cuisine is one of industrial food.

Am I happy to say this? No. Not at all. In general, I do not eat processed food. Yes, I eat the occasional packet of M&M’s, and there are some nights that I just open a can of soup for dinner. However, like I said, if we are talking, “national cuisine” we are making generalizations. If I were to generalize the dominant eating practice and culture in the US, I would say that it has to be large portions of cheap, fast, processed food. But there is still more to my argument.

Cuisine is also something of perception—how we perceive other people’s eating habits. Like I said in my previous post, we often speak of “Italian cuisine,” which we Americans perceive as pasta and pizza. When we think of Japan, we think of sushi. France, we would say escargot and crepes. Even when we think of Canada, we think of maple syrup. Right, so when labeling a “national cuisines,” we pretty much name dishes. However, ask a non-American, “What do Americans eat?” They most likely will not name dishes—-they will name brands. Coke, McDonald's and Oreo cookies are the most likely examples. The following picture is evidence.



I took this picture in the food hall of Fortnum and Mason —a very posh department store in London. Anyway, in the food hall, they have a “foreign food” section with imports from various countries. There are spices and curry powders from India, dried seaweed from Japan, Serrano ham from Spain, cheese from France, and maple syrup from Canada. And then…from the US….Aunt Jemima syrup and pancake mix, Karo syrup, Betty Crocker cake mix, Skippy peanut butter, and Duncan Hines frosting…nice. (Also not pictured are the Oreo cookies that were on another shelf.)

There are hundreds of other studies showing the flow of “American” food into other nations—primarily meaning McDonald's, Burger King, Coca Cola, and so on. James Watson at Harvard and Yunxiang Yan at UCLA have both done ethnographies of McDonald’s in China, and both found that many Chinese families take their children to McDonald’s because they want them to be more “Americanized”. In America, if we are feeling like branching out and eating the “cuisine” of another country, we want to go to the most “authentic” little Italian restaurant we can find, not eat Nutella. Interesting...

So then, my stab at generalizing America’s “national cuisine” is to say that it is one of industrial, processed food. There are obvious flaws in this argument because it is a massive generalization. Fresh and “small scale” food exists here, obviously. I can certainly say that as an American, I don’t eat McDonald's or much processed food at all. However, I am sure that you can find some Canadians who hate maple syrup and Italians who don’t eat much pasta. You always run into problems when you generalize.

So then, I turn back to Sydney Mintz, and I reflect on his question in Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, “Why is having a cuisine important?...Could it be good not to have a cuisine?” While I think that it is an important exercise to critically examine the way we eat, maybe there is no point in stamping the US with a “national cuisine”. Maybe it is a good thing that this is an unanswerable question. Because in the end, all the best questions don’t really have answers.