Excerpts from Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom

Mintz’s text highlights how many people in American don’t think deeply about food, and how cuisine and culture are interwoven and inseparable. It’s more than a style or method of cooking, but a product of food availability and regional tastes. Cuisine has less to do with the country it’s in, and more about the areas it’s adapted to and ingrained itself in. Genuine cuisine has common social roots, where as haute cuisine is an evolution of common cuisine, spurred on by wealth and food availability. In the second reading, Mintz discusses the lack of cuisine in America. He cites the country’s large geographical size, as well as its origins as to why we lack a definitive cuisine. America’s roots in colonialization give it a diverse spread of different foods that the colonizers introduced to the natives, rather than having a centralized food/cultural presence. In the modern day, commercialization, industrialization, and the negative effects of capitalism have impacted “American cuisine,” turning it from a cultural pillar into a fad or convenience item.