BS Summary: This article contains 39 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Appeal to Emotion, and Negativity Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 20.2% saturation with 337 hits. Analysis detected 3,702 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,668 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 45.7% and a BS Rank of 41% (12,915 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 59.00% of the article peer group.
Amber Waves of Grease
America has a reputation for food that’s fatty, fried, and fantastically decadent.
How we got here is a gut-busting story—and it started way before McDonald’s.
The World Cup has seen a slew of visitors to the U.S. showing unbridled enthusiasm for burgers and chicken fingers and the physics-defying magic of free refills, the same as I might gush in France over coq au vin and not having to tip.
“I feel like I’m in a movie,” said one Swede holding a gas-station Twinkie and a bag of Buffalo Blue Cheese Combos.
The enthusiasm is certainly nice, but one can’t help wondering, with a bit of chagrin: Is this really what they think of as American food?
There’s this perception that all American fare is rough-hewn junk, that we prize sheer convenience and decadence over depth of taste, slapping together grotesque mongrels of processed meat and cheese, while unhinging our jaws to vacuum it up.
Talk to a hostile European or self-hating American, and chances are they’ll say that Yanks just eat burgers stuffed with bacon folded into a pepperoni pizza, with wieners lining the crust.
And, sure, I may have eaten that on Tuesday.
And Thursday.
But not every day.
Would Benjamin Franklin have stayed in France and never returned if he knew that one day we’d come up with the Croissan’wich?
I think we can safely say they weren’t eating things like the KFC Double Down in 1776.
So what happened?
Would Benjamin Franklin have stayed in France and never returned if he knew that one day we’d come up with the Croissan’wich?
Was our culinary reputation always this roughshod and comically greasy?
“The simple explanation is the spread of chains like McDonald’s in the 1970s,” says Paul Freedman, a Yale professor and author of American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way.
“For most of the world, American fast food was an emblem of American influence, kind of like Coca-Cola.”
Because of this country’s level of cultural export, especially in the second half of the 20th century, many people globally meet our fast-food joints before they meet an actual American.
Over the past few decades, KFCs and Domino’s and Burger Kings proliferated across the world, each one an inadvertent embassy of culture.
And America wasn’t exporting merely fried chicken and Big Macs—we were spreading the idea of mass production itself.
We did the same with the Ford Model T; the practice has just become even more associated with our food.
“And that sort of underlies the assumptions that many foreigners have that all that Americans consume is chain burgers, pizza, and the like,” says Freedman.
“I don’t think they realize that mac and cheese is such a big thing in the U.S., because there are no mac-and-cheese chains.”
But history shows that this impression of America as a gustatory wasteland actually started forming some time before the genesis of the chicken nugget.
In fact, an international perception began to arise in the late 19th century that American food may be abundant but was of poor quality.
That it was ill-defined and worthwhile only when merely echoing European cuisine.
This impression reached a crescendo with the visit of the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia in 1871.
He met President Ulysses S.
Grant, went buffalo hunting, and saw Niagara Falls—a perfectly respectable trip.
And how did the duke respond to this good old American hospitality?
“He commented that there was ‘no such thing as American food.’
He said he had some very nice meals in the U.S., but they were all French,” says Freedman.
“On the one hand, that reflects the hegemony of French cuisine over high-end dining internationally, but it also reflects a sense that American food is hard to pin down, and at best, it’s eclectic.”
An angry response followed extolling the virtues of regional American fare, most notably in the form of an editorial written by Philadelphia chef James Parkinson; it later became a pamphlet called American Dishes at the Centennial.
It might just be the culinary version of Thomas Paine’s American Crisis.
Incensed at the duke’s dismissal, Parkinson passionately defended the idea of authentic American food.
“I take it upon me to assert that our country has its own specialities in food, and dishes and styles of cookery peculiarly our own,” he wrote, “which no American need be ashamed of, and which indeed every American should be proud of and thankful for.”
It’s stirring stuff that should probably be read to the kids as the fireworks are going off on America’s 250th birthday.
What’s not clear is if the duke or anyone else overseas got the message.
With respect to Parkinson, determining what American fare actually constituted over the years is no easy task.
It varied drastically by class and especially region, because the limits of transporting food back then gave far more meaning to the word regional than it does now.
Even the concept of lunch was not mainstream, with many consuming a light breakfast and a heavy, sustaining late-midday meal.
That diet would probably crash the economy today.
But generally, we can say that in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the North saw cornmeal mush, cold meats, fruit pies, stews of pork and cabbage, syllabubs, porridge, soups, boiled eggs, and bread and milk.
In American Cookery, by Amelia Simmons—published in 1796 in Connecticut and considered the first cookbook authored by an American—we find early recipes for pumpkin pie, johnnycakes, winter squash pudding, and even the pairing of turkey with cranberries.
In the South, heavily influenced by European settlers and enslaved Africans, it was often sweet potatoes, pork, grits, cornbread, black-eyed peas, rice pudding, curried catfish, okra soup, and collard greens.
Suffice to say, if you somehow gathered all the disparate cultural groups together and tried to get them to agree on what to order on Postmates, it’d be difficult.
And yet a shift was gradually taking place.
“The 19th century was pivotal in creating the idea of a national cuisine, one that was greatly influenced by the New England/British cuisine into a hegemonic American cuisine,” says Beth Forrest, a professor at the Culinary Institute of America.
Technology played a key role here.
Forrest notes that the advent of steam-engine-powered mills refined wheat; railroads with refrigerated cars shipped fresh beef across the country; and steamships brought ingredients from foreign lands.
“It made what Americans eat much more homogenous with far less regional and seasonal impact,” she said, “and allowed far more Americans to access foods that had been restricted to the wealthy: beef and wheat.”
European elitists don’t want people to have it their way—they want you to have it the way they say it is.
So by the time Parkinson, the chef, published his defiant screed in 1874, patterns were emerging.
In American Dishes at the Centennial, he speaks of the plethora of finely prepared seafood, including Delaware shad, “parboiled, egged, rolled in cracker dust, and fried,” and oysters “not the peanut, copperish caricature of France or England, but the large, sweet, delectable, and glorious American oyster—the envy of the world.”
We hear mentions of Thanksgiving turkey, sirloin and porterhouse cuts, Boston baked pork and beans, New England chowder, buckwheat cakes, Jersey sausages, cereal, corn starch pudding, our cavalcade of fruits and vegetables, and, appropriately saved for last, the ice cream.
Granted, this is one of the finest chefs in the nation at the time, and his list doesn’t necessarily represent what average Americans were eating.
But if anyone’s going to go to bat for the nation’s cuisine, you could do worse.
Which brings us back to the duke.
It’s not that one insult set off a chain reaction that permanently altered the country (though one could argue it’s happened before).
But the huffy response channeled a resentment and spite toward the European elite that may also be why American food looks the way it does now, especially in the case of the burger.
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“In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson argued that it was the unsettled American frontier that influenced our national consciousness, or national character, which broke from older, European traditions,” Forrest says.
“And the hamburger reflects parallel ideas of this, in particular the rejection of an elite culture in favor of popular culture, as well as individualism and ingenuity.”
Who knew that so much was contained between those buns?
But the burger and other American foods like it do seem to capture the rebellious spirit the nation holds dear.
It’s often cheap, easily accessible, and unpretentious, and it defies institutional standards from on high with personalized customization—or, as Burger King puts it: “Have it your way.”
European elitists don’t want people to have it their way; they want you to have it the way they say it is—not to mix the philosophy of Thomas Paine with Burger King’s.
But he probably would have fired that mascot too.
There’s obviously infinitely more to American cuisine than its fast-food incarnations, and more than home-cooked classics like marbled rib-eyes and fried chicken and biscuits and gravy.
Taking just barbecue alone—which has multiple deep origins—one nonetheless finds numerous competing, regional versions in Texas, Kansas City, Memphis, and the Carolinas.
And in unison they provide an authentic American culinary experience unlike anywhere else.
Even if all that weren’t the case, there’s a patriotic part of me that wants to defiantly bellow: And so what if we were just burgers?
Burgers are fantastic, and if someone from a European country—without air conditioning, and who mistakenly thinks soccer is more entertaining than football and hockey—doesn’t make the effort to learn about everything else on our menu, that’s on them.
They’re as guilty of the same shortsightedness they accuse Americans of.
Besides, all those World Cup visitors seem to be enjoying the food far more than certain tourists did 100 years ago.
And that’s sort of the point.
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100%flagged-word coverageJames Parkinson
46 attributed words13% of attributed speech91% writer coverage
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