I really enjoyed how in all three of the readings it went back to this idea of if there even is an “American cuisine”, but approached it from different perspectives. In the reading about newspaper ads and articles, I thought it was an interesting perspective to look at the frequency of different words that relate to “restaurants” and “cuisine”. They come to the conclusion that in some way American cuisine does exist however this poses more questions than it answers. I found the Mintz readings interesting and explained why Americans don’t have a specific cuisine because of the cultural norms in which we think about food. There are many reasons for why we as Americans didn’t develop a cuisine. Mintz points out that cuisine isn’t to be thought of as a national cuisine but cuisine is more regional. Here in the U.S. we have so many regions with vastly different resources and food available to us that it makes it difficult to develop an American cuisine. After reading these I really thought of that overarching question of “do we even have an ‘American cuisine’?” and I think that in some ways we do. We may not have a so called cuisine the way that other regions of the world have it. However we have developed certain ways of eating and certain products that have become recognized worldwide as undeniably American.
Week Four Blog Post
