EDIT: Okay, it was a bit silly of me to drag my heels in, I don't strictly hate it and there are good things about British cooking (mostly veggies), but I find the meme's meat obsession super silly. I am having stomach pains and cramped arteries just looking at this stuff.

Highly underrated

I love how it's superimposed on the diapers lmao, I hope the meme was ironic

  • JamesConeZone [they/them]
    ·
    7 months ago

    As far as food is concerned, the only food that counts is the food of the original settlers as well as the earliest Europeans who were incorporated into whiteness. So basically, Anglo Americans, Scot Americans, Dutch Americans, German Americans, and Scandinavian Americans. In other words, WASPs.

    That's not how foodways work.

    You don't get to pass a law blocking Chinese immigration for a century only to pretend the bastardization of Cantonese food called Chinese American food counts as American food. This has the same exact energy as Brits trying to claim curry as British cuisine after starving millions of Indians to death or Zionists trying to pretend the food Palestinians have been eating for centuries is "Israeli."

    This is an extremely weird thing to say. Italian-American, and Chinese-American foods are distinct from their origins, enough that they are recognized as unique. You can acknowledge the material conditions leading to a diaspora and ethnically segregated communities in the first place as well as the nature of foodways and still understand that slavery, racism, and oppression is bad. Black Americans are still Americans and "soul food" is a uniquely American foodway.

    • oregoncom [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      There are still large portions of the population who can't hold chopsticks. You can't claim cuisine belongs to a country if like half the population can't even eat it properly, let alone cook it. Compare that to Italian food. Everyone knows how to make pasta, everyone knows how to eat pasta.

      • JamesConeZone [they/them]
        ·
        7 months ago

        Are you claiming that Chinese Americans aren't American because Americans use forks to eat noodles unlike Italian food which is American because Americans eat those noodles with a fork? I hope this is a bit about how pasta was invented in China first and I'm just too tired to understand it

        • oregoncom [he/him]
          ·
          7 months ago

          I'm saying in order for it qualify as "American Food" and not just "Chinese American Food" non-Chinese Americans would need to know how to make it like they know how to make Italian food. At the minimum Non-Chinese Americans don't get to simultaneously shit on Chinese food and claim it for their own. KFC in China is also distinct from American Cuisine but nobody in China is claiming it's "American Chinese" or whatever.

          • JamesConeZone [they/them]
            ·
            7 months ago

            dawg I know you mean well here, but you are doing race essentialism based on food utensils. Chinese Americans have existed in America for nearly 200 years and have distinct foodways based entirely on the history of regional cuisines, available ingredients, and the interaction between those two things and other cultures in a new space. It is called Chinese American because it is distinct from the remembered cuisine and unique to the space where it was created. This is what happens to any and every culture when they are displaced, forcibly or voluntarily. Chinese-Argentinian food will be related to Chinese-American food but will be unique to that culture and local ingredients.

            • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
              ·
              7 months ago

              If they were truly unique, then you wouldn't consider them American food either. They would just be their own set of dishes that is neither Chinese nor American but its own thing. I could respect that and even make an argument earlier that Chinese American, Chinese Peruvian, Chinese Korean, and so on could be lumped together as Chinese diasporic food that is neither "pure" Chinese nor food of their host countries. But you are not doing that. In comparison to Chinese food, it's "these dishes are heavily divergent from Chinese food," but in comparison to American food, it's suddenly "uh aktually, these are American dishes despite having little in common with other American dishes." Chinese American food might be different than "pure" Chinese food, but it's still a helluva lot similar to that than "pure" American food. Why the double standard?