don't you dare tell me that thing is what you call a flapjack. rather than using the word as an alternative to pancake
It always kinda sucks to rag too hard on stuff that originated as poverty food, but from what I've read, it seems that American flapjacks are descended from British ones (we just learned to mill our grains better, I guess), and that just means England has had longer than us to improve on it and hasn't really risen to the occasion.
what counts as good american food btw cause every example i can zhink of is food zhat existed before america, got hyperoptimized and processed by capitalism and zhen culturally re-exported lol
like i know yall have some. but your cultural footprint in zhe UK is Not Zhat so i dont know it lol
the only thing hamburgers have in common with the the German dish that inspired them is being minced beef, I'm fairly certain. A lot of American food, while popularized and exported through capitalistic means, ultimately originates from an immigrant chef riffing, sometimes quite divergently, on a dish from home. Which is honestly rather common for how cuisine comes about,
yeah i was trying to get a reference line against zhe uk cuisine everyone seems to insult while ignoring all the cuisine brought in by immigration here, but you sorta just. cant lol
i don't think people really think all that hard when they stereotype a culture's cuisine. sure you got some duds in there who are a bit too fond of the culture they grew up in, but to most i think it's never really meant as an insult, just meant to poke fun. i think we all understand that nobody purely consumes their culture's stereotyped diet; you can think burgers are nice but prefer an italian restaurant as an american, or another day you'd much prefer having something simple and easy rather than something elaborate, yknow?
besides, i'm pretty sure plenty of people would be more than willing to poke fun at their own culture's stereotyped diets.
oh and, don't get me wrong, i'm not saying finding stereotypes like that to be reductive is a bad thing. sometimes bad stuff just becomes the "norm" according to everyone else (i'm american, i would know that very, very intimately), and explaining how that's reductive is a useful thing.
i honestly don't really know where i'm going with this one lol. i was never good at messages in stories. uh... airline food joke here?
(I only realized you already acknowledged the "immigrants play a big role in any country's culture" point after I wrote this whole thing, but I don't want to let it go to waste)
I mean I'd argue that "can't have descended from a food from elsewhere" is an unfair requirement for a cultural food. Burgers and hotdogs are from Germany, but I'd still say they're American foods, just like how fish and chips is a quintessentially English meal despite fried potato wedges having originated somewhere in continental Europe using an ingredient from the Americas, and, island nation or not, there's no way in hell the English were the first people to fry a fish.
If we're looking for more specific than general preparation - to allow the British to keep fish and chips - General Tso's Chicken is a popular dish at American Chinese restaurants, and it originated in New York. Chicago deep dish pizza, from Illinois, despite its similarity to Italian pizza, is very different, as plenty of Italians have loudly said online. And of course there's grits, from the southern USA, which is ostensibly a porridge using a specific grain, but I've had other porridges, and they ain't grits.
