American Food

I just ate a hamburger and that got me thinking about what foods are the most American, and I had to think of something to write about so I figured that I would just write about that….so here goes.

First on the list (in no particular order) we have that classic hamburger, or if you are truly American the cheeseburger. Like much of the food we call American, it doesn’t actually originate from the United States. As the name suggests, they originally came to us from Hamburg Germany via German immigrants where they truly became American. By this I mean that no one just orders a plain hamburger, you always end up getting a burger loaded with bacon, or deep fat fried onion rings, or something else that takes any hint of it German heritage out of it and turns it into what ever it is that you want it to be.

Next is a personal favorite of mine, the Twinkie. This little guy has become so popular over its life time that even as I write this Microsoft Word corrected my spelling of it and told me that I should capitalize it. However, one thing that makes me question just how American it is, is the people who make them. I am talking about the Hostess strike that left the world in a Twinkie shortage and even prompted people to sell their existing Hostess products on the internet for crazy amounts of money. Striking is un-American because striking is for socialist, and by default if you are a socialist you are fundamentally un-American. Sorry socialists.

I think that I would be pretty hard to argue that French Fries are un-American despite the fact that the name of another country is in the name of them. Much like the Hamburger, we Americans stole this delicacy from another culture and called it our own. We simply could not resist not having a food that requires a deep fat fryer to prepare and not calling it American.

Another prime example of American cuisine is a hotdog. As I have shown you, America steals food from the little guys and calls it our own and the hotdog is no exception. As with its brother, the hamburger, it was “borrowed” from Germany, but two other things help, in my opinion, to make it more patriotic. The first being it prevalence in baseball, pretty American if you ask me, and the second being the ideology of lets make as much money as we can. As you may know, hotdogs more so than other meats are made up of all of the left over animal parts that companies cannot use in their other products, so rather then throwing it away they but the meat into eatable plastic sock type things and sell it to the American people knowing that as long as it tastes good and is cheap the consumers of American would care what is in it.

Bringing up the rear of the list we have the “taco”. Same as everything besides the Twinkie, the taco was stolen and then Americanized. If you ask any real Mexican (person from Mexico) they will be discussed to know that the items sold to us by companies like Taco Bell and Taco John’s (whether or not Taco John’s is still a thing I do not know) are marketed as tacos. The tacos that are sold in American are basically hamburgers in a shell, meat, cheese, lettuce, and if you are feeling adventurous you might even add a Mexican inspired topping to your taco such as salsa. Another thing that may anger a true Mexican is that according to Taco bell’s new breakfast menu any thing that is wrapped in anything is a taco, like their waffle taco.   

I hope that in this I have been able to demonstrate that hardly any food is truly American. Nearly ever food that you eat is the American version of some food from some there country, even of you think you are eating the authentic version…you’re not. Take spaghetti for example, hardly anyone that I know eats it with out meat sauce, but that’s how they do it in Italy, despite that fact people will still say that they are eating Italian. I’m not trying to prove a point or anything like that by writing this, I am just talking about foods that I think, and the majority of American’s think to be American. (743 words)