It’s really strange to imagine the restrictions on food described in the Gabbacia reading during the period 1870 to 1900 being implemented on foreign cuisines today. Food is such a rich part of America now. There’s countless of cooking shows and cooking books that covers cuisines ranging from Italian to Chinese to Indonesian. Walking down a block in New York City, I would not be surprised to see a Thai restaurant serving pad thai and drunken noodles right next to an American diner offering greasy cheeseburgers and fries. To see the restaurants and the shelves on grocery store just providing the bland options of bread, tomato soup, rice pudding, turnips, and wheat oats is unimaginable to me. In the excerpt, this concept of American food seems to have come from the idea that foreigners’ foods were unhealthy and and malnourishing. Americans (non-immigrants) claimed that the women were uninformed and that the consequences of that was grave. Apparently, “home visits revealed that 227 of 275 families needed instruction in preparing food, including assistance with marketing and greater economy” and “20 percent of New York City school children to be underweight.” As a result, home economics classes were created to inform women and girls what was appropriate to eat and how much should be used when cooking to avoid waste. Before Americans realized ethnic foods were emerging, there was no defined “American” cuisine. However, in the home economic classes, New England’s simple dishes of stews, cod fish, and puddings began to define the American cuisine. Later, confusion about what was American regional cuisine versus ethnic cuisine occurred in 1930s, but then was resolved in the face of war time. By World War II, “ethnic foods became central to campaigns” and even radio segments featured dishes by foreign cuisines. After 50 years of this food battle, Americans finally decided that they could accept immigrant specialties.
When someone asks me what is “American” cuisine, I first think of cheese burgers, fries, chicken fingers, and well, mostly fast food. This is ironic because these are all unhealthy foods and in the 1870s, American cuisine began as a set of dishes meant to inform women about what was healthy. American cuisine to me also involves the food that people call “fusion dishes.” This is the orange chicken or the General Tso’s chicken in Chinese restaurants or buffets, the hard taco shells that Taco Bell serves, and the shrimp scampi that American cooking shows put in potstickers. There are also people attempting to create dishes that are new and innovative using food that have their origins from a foreign country. For example, the sweet yam, ube, are incorporated into waffles, sushi becomes sushi burritos, and pho (Vietnamese noodles) are wrapped in a burrito (a phorrito???). I’m ok with this, but I can only say that these new dishes are not Filipino, Japanese, or Vietnamese. They claim to be of a different cuisine, but really, they’re American because they are not authentic to the country they’re supposed to originate from.
My definition of American food involves greasy fast foods and imposter dishes, which are very different from what the reading describes. I don’t think of beans or barley or stews (except for the chicken soup). The reading says that after the war period followed “decades of Jell-0 and Twinkies” which sounds more familiar to me. I’m sure that after the war period, there were the creations of these dishes that would attempt to appeal to both Americans and foreigners. The reading states that ethnicity goes corporate and becomes American in a newly tolerant culture. I’m assuming this means ethnic foods get merged into a new American culture of food, the foods that I see now as “American.” In a way, American food is now a mixture of all cultures.
