American Food when it is foreign to you

Oh...my...god! Hilarious to insane. I wonder how old the introduction to American food is for Taiwanese students. I'd like to think it's very old but fear it is far too recent. (Frankly, I found the guy more than a little scary....) Loved the "ethnic food" section...oh, hell, loved it all. Thanks for sharing!

Cathy, I will be coming back to this thread again and again. I agree with Gypsy Boy on the Intro of American food to the Taiwanese. I am hoping, by the look of the orange/brown panels behind the speaker that this is an old bit. Let's hope so anyway. Loved his "supper" description in a so bad it's good way. This is mesmerizing stuff. When I lived in other countries, much of the food and packaging struck me the same curious way.

Does Justin Bieber have a younger brother in the UK? Adorable. I can not imagine not having Mexican food. I wonder if there are any takes like this on British food by American kids. The other clips are interesting.

The pure joy of a gift box of American junk food!

A friend sent this link to The burger King: Restaurant's monster meal has three pounds of beef, 12 rashers of bacon and a dozen cheese slices

It contains more than three pounds of minced beef, 12 rashers of bacon, a dozen slices of cheese and 12 onion rings.
This monster burger is being served up at a new restaurant where bosses believe it could be one of the biggest on offer in Europe.

I love the little United States flag atop this monster burger, it just rings American!

Regards,

How interesting. That first British kid should have his own TV show. I found myself agreeing with most everything he said (especially about mustard on burgers). I love that he was shocked by the amount of sugar in everything, a reaction one would not expect from a teen. I am not a big sugar eater, and could never stomach Fruity Pebbles for breakfast. I also find McDonald's buns to be really sweet, but most people don't get it. To me, McD's buns taste like cake (same with Subway "bread"), but many people don't even taste the sugar. It was also interesting that the guy liked root beer right off. I always thought root beer was an aquired taste. I have given Chinese friends root beer, and they were unanimously repulsed by it, some to the point of spitting it out (which is something the Chinese only do if the alternative is even less polite). Speaking of Chinese, I don't think the Taiwanese video was that old. The author used cell phone pictures. Even though they were cell phone pictures, do you think he could find any less appetizing examples of American food to photograph? That Thanksgiving dinner looked like prison food. It will be a while before I can eat stuffing again. Thanks C2, for linking to these charming vids.

Note: this one is from a comedian

I am currently the food service director of a large senior living community in a NW suburb. (Yes, very glamorous, I know.)

It's a challenging time in this area of the industry as the tastes of the residents in their 90's are vastly different than those in their upper 60's and just wait until the boomers start to dominate.

Anyway, this thread reminded me of a recent discussion I had with one of our older residents. We have a new chef who has introduced a lot of grains such as farro and quinoa to the menu. He's also moved beyond carrots and peas and is mixing it up with rapini, roasted eggplant, etc... The resident chastised me for having all this "foreign" food on the menu. When I asked her for some examples so I could explain what things are to her, she said "pasta". "What's the American word for pasta?". Took me a few minutes but I was able to come up with "spaghetti". Yikes. She then proceeded to tell me that it was because I have all these foreign cooks and they are trying to force "their" foods on us. Pretty sure I don't have any Italian immigrants working for me.

I guess what's "American" is all relative to one's own perception/experience.

Hi,

At Antonius talk on pasta recently, he said 'macaroni' was the term once used before we began using pasta. If there is an opportunity to do so, use macaroni with your elderly clients instead of spaghetti or pasta. I am curious about their response.

Regards,

Cathy2 wrote:At Antonius talk on pasta recently, he said 'macaroni' was the term once used before we began using pasta. If there is an opportunity to do so, use macaroni with your elderly clients instead of spaghetti or pasta. I am curious about their response.

Hi Cathy,

Indeed, I did say something along those lines, though for precision's sake I would put it this way.

For many Italians and Italo-Americans in the States who were culturally conservative, the way they talked about food was very much tied to the dialect of the region whence they had come in Italy. In most cases, they were southerners and the dialects were southern Italian dialects in which the word 'maccherone' was the basic or generic term for the sort of alimentary pastes that we immediately think of when we think about Italian cookery.

So for me growing up, the generic word for 'pasta' was 'maccheroni' (in dialect 'maccarune')... But the word 'pasta' was used in certain contexts... For example, there were certain dishes that had the term 'pasta' in their names (e.g. 'pasta e fagioli', in dialect 'past' 'e fasul')... And one would talk about making pasta (dough) in order to make ravioli or whatever other kind of fresh pasta... and among those shapes there is also a specific use of the term 'maccarune'... Thus, the word 'pasta' existed and had its uses for us but not as the generic name for alimentary pastes... as in: "We're having soup tonight? Geez, I was hoping we'd have macaroni..." We would not have said "I was hoping we'd have pasta..."*

In any event, I think you're right... for a lot of older Americans of whatever ethnic background, whose experience of Italian alimentary pastes predates the foodie revolution, 'macaroni' and 'spaghetti' are surely the more familiar and trusted terms to be used when taking about 'pasta' in the generic sense...

Antonius

*Back in the 1990 there appeared a cookbook by an Italo-American woman, Nancy Verde Barr... Like me, she's from the East Coast and her family was from Campania... She commented on this (post-foodie revolution) mainstream use of 'pasta' in relation to our own ethnic group's differing usage in the very title of her book, which is: We Called It Macaroni. It is incidentally a very nice book indeed and the recipes are the real deal.

LynnB wrote:Anyway, this thread reminded me of a recent discussion I had with one of our older residents. We have a new chef who has introduced a lot of grains such as farro and quinoa to the menu. He's also moved beyond carrots and peas and is mixing it up with rapini, roasted eggplant, etc... The resident chastised me for having all this "foreign" food on the menu.

Maybe best not to regale her with tales of the pea's Mediterranean roots or the carrot's Arab origins and Dutch influence...wouldn't want the poor old dear to go on a hunger strike

In any event, I think you're right... for a lot of older Americans of whatever ethnic background, whose experience of Italian alimentary pastes predates the foodie revolution, 'macaroni' and 'spaghetti' are surely the more familiar and trusted terms to be used when taking about 'pasta' in the generic sense...

Certainly in the non Italian suburban New Jersey environment I grew up in during the early 1970's, the use of the term "pasta" was just coming into vogue as a trendy affectation and the average person used either spaghetti or macaroni to describe pasta - and basically spaghetti and elbow macaroni were what was available in the average supermarket.

Re: macaroni -- in the 1700s, macaroni was seen as very exotic -- something only the well-traveled would know -- and in order to show what knowledgeable and worldly they were, the wealthy and very fashionable young men of London started a club called the Macaroni Club. Soon, the foppishly dressed snobs who were members of the club became known as Macaronis. When the British wrote a song to mock the backwardness of the American colonists, they implied that, instead of dressing in the over-the-top fashions of the London, the bumpkins of the colonies thought that sticking a feather in your hat was enough to make you a Macaroni -- hence the line in "Yankee Doodle."

As for when American food is foreign -- very fun videos, but a bit horrifying. I love sharing what the U.S. has to offer when folks visit from other countries, but the choices being made in the videos make me cringe. That said, I realize that's probably more true to what people regularly eat than what we discuss her in the forum. Still, it's a pity that people think that really is the best we have to offer.

And the comment he made on Hershey bars reminds me of a speaker we had a few years ago for Culinary Historians. She worked for Cadbury, and she mentioned that most Americans find Cadbury chocolate too sweet and "not quite right." She then explained that Hershey's uses sour milk, instead of sweet, as the English do. The minute she said it, I could taste the difference in my mind. But if you're not used to that sour taste, I suspect Hershey's would not taste as good as Cadbury's.

Growing up around a lot of Italians in the fifties and sixties I do not remember the word pasta being used. It was mostly spaghetti and macaroni. Then lasagna came into vogue. I believe pasta began to be used as a term maybe in the seventies.

My second generation mom knew no other word for pasta but macaroni. In the 70's but that is what it was. She grew up on Taylor Street in the fifties.

FWIW, both Hungarians and Arabs refer to Italian (or Italian-style) pastas as "macaroni" in their respective native languages.

Habibi wrote:FWIW, both Hungarians and Arabs refer to Italian (or Italian-style) pastas as "macaroni" in their respective native languages.

Same in Turkish. The word pasta means cake.

Habibi wrote:FWIW, both Hungarians and Arabs refer to Italian (or Italian-style) pastas as "macaroni" in their respective native languages.

While that is true (and the same happens in Polish), I've most often heard pasta referred to either as tészta or just by its Italian name in Hungarian. (And "mákaroni" isn't exactly native to begin with, anyway.) But, yes, mákaroni does take on the broad meaning of Italian-style pasta in Hungarian, though I don't think it's usage is the most common one. It's just that if you're looking on a menu or cookbook, it's much more likely that you will see the heading tészták for "pastas," rather than mákaronik. (I've honestly have never seen anything but tészta on Hungarian menus for Italian-style pastas.)

Looks like buzzfeed saw these videos and made several of them: