No Spiderman, Burgers ARE American.

Enough with the Pedantry

Tom Holland went viral for claiming that hamburgers aren’t American because they come from Hamburg, Germany. By this logic, croissants and baguettes cannot be considered French because they come from Austria. This logic is clearly foolish - of course croissants and baguettes are French! But why? In this essay, I will argue that a nation’s cuisine is made of dishes that are a) commercially popular across the country, b) eaten regularly by households across the country, or c) both.

First, let’s define country. A country is a plot of land that has a boarder protected by a unitary military. Some countries have just one ethnicity, like Japan or Iceland. Others have multiple ethnicities. But in common between all of them is that they all have a plot of land that has a boarder protected by one military. A national cuisine then is the food that is found within the borders of that country.

Imagine you were dropped in a foreign country whose language you couldn’t speak. How would you figure out its cuisine? One way would be to see what restaurants sell. Restaurants make razor thin margins, if at all. So the fact that a particular dish or set of dishes are sold in multiple restaurants across a country demonstrates high demand for the dish from the country’s citizens. Sometimes the ingredients used in these dishes grow locally. Other times, they are shipped in. No matter the case, a popular dish means popular demand. And popular demand makes a dish belong to a country’s national cuisine. For example, burgers are popular in restaurants all over the United States. They should thus be considered a part of American cuisine. Croissants and baguettes are popular in stores all across France. They should thus be considered a part of French cuisine.

One must also look at what’s consumed inside homes by most people across the country. Many times, foods are not sold in restaurants/cafe’s/cuisines, but are consumed only in households. I found this to be the case in Argentina, known for Yerba Mate. I couldn’t order any at a cafe! But mate is consumed by everyone - one in every two people walking down the streat carry a thermos under one arm and a cup in another sipping maté from a bombilla. So maté should be considered part of Argentinian cuisine.

What then makes up Canadian cuisine? It is the dishes that a plurality of people eat because they cook it at home or buy it from a restaurant in the country. Can it be said that “butter chicken” is a part of Canadian cuisine? Yes. A country’s cuisine is made up of the foods that are sold across the country and of the foods cooked in households across the country. Canadians cook and buy lots of butter chicken, ginger beef, sushi, and kraft dinner. Therefore, Canada’s cuisine includes butter chicken, ginger beef, sushi, kraft dinner, “stir fry”, and more.

There are two counterarguments to this. One is that butter chicken isn’t actually Canadian; it’s Indian. The most obvious proof that this is the case is that in Canada, it’s called “Indian food.”

However, the name of a dish is irrelevant to whether a food is a part of a country’s cuisine. For example, both Argentina and Peru have dishes or condiments that they refer to as “criolla” which translates to Creole, which itself usually refers to the culture that arose from the fusion of people with European, Aboriginal, and African roots. The difference is that in Argentina, criolla refers to a salsa made of finely diced onions and bell peppers that you add to your steak, sandwich, or chorizo. In Peru, criollo cuisine refers to a set of different dishes. But it would be strange to say that Argentinian salsa criolla is a Creole dish akin to a Creole dish from Peru, even if they’re both called Criolla. I noticed the same thing take place in Canada. We may have “Indian food.” But so does Brazil. And Argentina. All three taste completely different because they’re not Indian food - they’re Canadian, Brazilian, and Argentinian food respectively. I didn’t see even one Argentinian restaurant that served butter chicken during my time in Buenos Aires. So the Indian food in Canada is actually Canadian food, even though the locals call it “Indian food.”

The most striking example of this would be Fettucini Alfredo. It is an American dish, even though Americans would call it Italian. But it’s not Italian because nobody in Italy eats Fettucini Alfredo. People in Italy don’t cook Fettucini Alfredo, and it’s not sold in Italian restaurants. So it’s not an Italian dish. It’s American.

The second counterargument goes something like this: if a dish can be found in country b, c, and d, then it cannot be part of the cuisine of a. For example, butter chicken is not Canadian because you can drive south for a day and find it in every Indian restaurant in America. Butter Chicken is therefore not a part of Canadian cuisine.

If this were true, then no country would ever have a dish to themselves, because every dish ever created is shared by others in another country, if not outright copied. Is butter chicken a part of both American and Indian cuisine? Yes! Are steaks a part of both Brazilian and Argentinian cuisine? Yes! That does not mean that butter chicken isn’t American, or that steaks aren’t Brazilian. No country has a monopoly over a dish. So it is foolish to define a cuisine based on whether it is solely served in that country.

Oftentimes, people hold up their most minute idiosyncrasies to feel unique. But wars and conflicts immediately teach us how different we are from each other, by default. Instead, one can and should look at the similarities between national cuisines to realize that we have a lot more in common with each other than we do separating us apart. Food brings people together - perhaps it can bring countries together too. To conclude, a country’s cuisine is not the dishes that were invented in the country. It is not the dishes that are made with the ingredients that are native to the country. It is not the dishes that are unique to the country. It is not what the people of a country refer to as the dishes in the country. It is instead the dishes that a large number of households in the country cook and eat, and/or that a large number of restaurants cook and serve.