As a child, I had the vague idea that a typical “real” American diet consisted of cereal for breakfast, pre-packaged snacks (think Lunchables or goldfish crackers) for lunch, and frozen TV dinners. Most decidedly American foods that come to mind are created in factories or owned by privatized corporations, so I was always curious as to what defines “home-style American cooking”, if that is an actual term. According to Gabbacia, Americans used to see their diet as more healthy and nutritious than those of the reckless and slovenly immigrants, which I find bizarre. Apparently, meat, milk and corn are healthy and should be consumed in large quantities. I find the American shock over the lack of milk in Japanese people’s diet to be funny, since historically cows weren’t prevalent in East Asian societies. I know from experience that beef and milk were pretty much nonexistent in Chinese towns prior to open trade with the West, and even today most Chinese would prefer drinking soy.
A lot of the advice espoused by American dieticians echo the pseudo-scientific racism used to explain the inferiority of immigrants and people of color, similar how anthropologists used brain size and body measurements to explain levels of intelligence between races and ethnicities. The Eastern Europeans Jews’ emotional irrationality, difficulty in assimilating, and improper raising of children were attributed to their eating sour and rich foods such as pickles and fine-cut meat. At the same time, Americans exalted foods such as baked beans, pudding and vegetables “served with butter, salt and pepper”, which is arguably just as rich and thus bad for the body and child-rearing. In general, immigrants were advised to make “a blander dish, easier to digest and not harmful to the kidneys” – which sounds like a pseudo-scientific explanation for white American’s boring standards of cuisine and fear of foreign food.
Of course, this mentality has changed around the mid-to-late 1900s, where multiculturalism and corporations have created a more integrated and multiethnic range of foods to the public. I would argue that today, especially in urban cities, there is no such thing as American cuisine. Different cultures are represented in groceries and convenience stores, even though certain ones are located in the “ethnic” aisle. Asian restaurants sell dishes specifically altered or created for American tastes, to the point where they are unrecognizable in their country of origin. However, I still agree that Americans still look down own certain cultural foods as distasteful or unhealthy, or as Gabbacia describes it, “being dictated more by hidebound custom than by dietary or financial rationality”. This sort of mentality is prevalent in today’s health food movement, which (unintentionally or not) tends to criticize people who don’t follow its standards of proper nourishment as ignorant or unhealthy, which is often attributed to the culture or class they were raised in. At the same time, they try to claim things such as coconut milk and kombucha as discoveries, or appropriate ethnic cuisine by removing essential ingredients. While people may defend these practices as being multicultural and open-minded, I see it as taking away pieces of foreign cultures while rejecting the people and cultural significance behind them. In a certain point of view, that probably describes the essence of American food.
