Restaurants, Newspapers Ad Blog Post: I found Minz’s claim that America has no cuisine and uses the entrees offered at restaurants found within the United States to be a completely reasonable point. As he discussed in chapter 7 of Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, a Cuisine must be of a specific region or place and must be so ingrained in that communities lives that the discussion of said cuisine all the way to its ingredients, methodology of how to cook it correctly, and its taste is undeniable fact to them. His point that the entrees in American restaurants are so varied shows that we as a people have not come to a unison on what we as a place can truly offer to the world as our own cuisine. His point that the French history of cuisine as being not true cuisine but labeling it as haute cuisine is an excellent way of differentiating between the cultural, and community dominated regional cuisine that provides history and character to a town/ community and Haute cuisine which is the international glorification of a type of food that restaurants can claim as being French, Italian or even Bavarian cuisine solely based of their country of origin. Most of the foods offered in restaurants in America are the same carbon copied recipe of what the food is and not why it is, by that I mean simply taking a cuisine from a community in France and making a easily reproducible version of it using cheaper or readily available ingredients does not make the restaurant’s version cuisine in my opinion. The creation of a countries “national cuisine” solely based on the economic values and desires of the upper classes that dominate these countries political landscapes is another issue I see with trying to nail down a country’s true cuisine is. One of the examples of this was the introduction of red kidney beans to Creole culture through imports, and as a result of this mass import the Creole people found that they desired the red kidney beans to their own black turtle bean counterparts which were a staple of the country for hundreds of years. While the author makes an excellent point in how America has created its own cuisine through the development of its own restaurants I believe what we as a country has accomplished is just a mass commercialized bastardization of multiple different countries’ cuisines and have essentially made that our so called “cuisine” which seems rough to me as if that’s supposed to be our “cuisine”. These are just my opinions on what is American Cuisine, and while I myself do not see the restaurant cultural as being America’s cuisine the author makes an excellent case if were use the term “cuisine” in a very narrowed view of the definition.
Blog Post January 27, 2022
