Defining the American cuisine has eluded people for decades, and to this day it is very difficult to provide an overarching and comprehensive description of the American cuisine. This is in large part because of a myriad of confounding factors, including: the undue influence of processed foods sold by multinational corporations, the influx of various ethnic foods and their fusion into the mainstream American diet, and the regionalism that is inherent to the heterogeneity of the American cuisine. However, the complexity of this topic has not stopped people from trying to define it – in fact, in the past many have even tried to fashion the American cuisine according to their own ideas. This is discussed in Donna Gabaccia’s book We Are What We Eat. In it, Gabaccia describes massive campaign waged by American intellectuals (so-called “food reformers”) in the late nineteenth century that only ended with the onset of the resource-intensive Second World War. These intellectuals, most of whom were upper middle-class Protestant Americans from the Northeast, attempted to forge a national cuisine based on Puritan New England ideals of self-denial, frugality, moderation and a focus on utilitarianism rather than hedonism. They promoted a New England diet of mostly bland foods (cod fish, brown bread, baked beans, etc) through programs instituted at schools and community centers across the country. In addition, they launched a concerted campaign to strictly regulate the production and selling of “un-American” foods through government regulation – including many ethnic, corporate, and pushcart foods and alcoholic beverages. Ultimately, however, these “reformers” failed to achieve their stated goals and in the post-World War II era there has been widespread acceptance of an enormous variety of foods – not just traditional New England foods – as “American.” As Gabaccia states in her book: “While adopting a language of business rationality, science, and technology in order to create a national cuisine, food reformers discouraged Americans from viewing food in the ways consumers, corporate food processors, and cross-over businessmen alike saw it: as a source of pleasure, novelty, stimulation, and profit.” Thus, food reformers failed while consumers and sellers won.
While it is extremely difficult to fully capture the complexity of the present American cuisine in words, there are some widely-recognized key characteristics that can be discussed. First and foremost is the multinational and multiethnic nature of the American cuisine. The United States is arguably the only country in the world whose cuisine can almost be uniquely characterized by its use of foods from nearly every culture and nation. While most countries have cuisines that are distinct from one another, the United States makes use of all of those different cuisines and then “Americanizes” them to suit American tastes. Chinese and Italian foods, in particular, are ubiquitous in the U.S. but have been significantly altered to suit the American palate. American pizza is greasier than Italian pizza, Chinese-American chicken is deeply fried and has more sauce than traditional Chinese chicken, and, on the whole, most Americanized food items have a higher salt and fat content than traditional foods.
The incorporation of different ethnic foods into the American cuisine has led to the rise of a uniquely American phenomenon: fusion food. American cooking is often the fusion of multiple ethnic or regional approaches into completely new cooking styles. For example, Tex-Mex is the fusion of the Texan and Mexican cuisines, deriving from the culinary creations of Tejanos (Mexican-Americans residing in Texas). Tex-Mex is characterized by its heavy use of shredded cheese, meat (particularly beef and pork), beans, and spices, in addition to flour tortillas. Dishes such as Texas-style chili con carne, burritos, nachos, hard tacos, fajitas and chimichangas are all Tex-Mex inventions. Such fusions of different cuisines are commonplace in the U.S. but rare elsewhere, because nowhere else has large-scale immigration from a vast array of different countries taken place.
Furthermore, another notable (and infamous) feature of the American cuisine is its unhealthiness. Classic American foods like hamburgers, fries, hot dogs, ice-cream sundaes, twinkies, soft drinks, chocolate chip cookies, donuts, canned soup, barbecued meat, and fried chicken can all be characterized by their high salt, high saturated fat, and high added sugar content. And Americans are not making these foods themselves (which would allow for better control of the amount of fat, sugar, and salt that goes into these foods) – they are going out to buy them from big-box supermarkets and, increasingly, restaurants. For the first time in recorded history, Americans are spending more on restaurants than groceries. This is a worrisome trend that indicates that Americans are buying and eating extremely unhealthy amounts of highly processed classic American foods instead of making healthier meals at home. As a result of this and some other factors, more than two-thirds (68.8 percent) of American adults are considered to be overweight or obese, which is one of the highest rates in the world. Moreover, most of these highly processed corporate foods are widespread in not only the U.S., but in the rest of the world.
Finally, American foods can often be easily identified by their corporate nature and global reach, which leads to my final point: the American cuisine is not only pervasive in the U.S. – it is global. The United States has dominated the world stage in the post-World War II era, and through its superpower dominion it has exported its culture, including its cuisine, to the rest of the world. Surveys in multiple countries have shown that McDonald’s golden arches are better known than the Christian cross. KFCs can be found on the street corners of Chinese cities and Coca-Cola soft drinks can be found in nearly any supermarket in the world. Gabaccia says that in the postwar years eating has gone “corporate” in the U.S. and has “finally and truly become big business.” But clearly, this is not just true in the U.S. – it is the case in the entire world. Today, the American cuisine is no longer unique to the United States. Rather, it painfully coexists with, and sometimes displaces, other ethnic cuisines elsewhere.
