Forgive me for being prejudiced eurotrash but isn’t a lot of “traditional” white American foods just branded processed foods hastily mixed together? Are fresh ingredients that hard to get your hands on? Has the knowledge of how to cook them been lost?
A lot of “traditional” white American food rises from traditions of using government issued foodstuffs. Government cheese, spam, various concoctions devised from military rations. But quite a lot also comes from what immigrant communities were able to afford, which was generally the worse stuff. There’s also a not-insignificant number of white households that possessed no generational cooking knowledge because it was done by slaves, and thus had no culinary culture they could continue without the requisite skills.
A lot of the Americanization process encouraged immigrants to give to their customs and replace them with American substitutes. Shitty food is a result of generations of urban working class proles fed on cheap “American approved” slop and losing their customs and knowledge
It’s sort of a 50/50 split between standard poverty meals adapted by time and region, and recipes invented by marketing campaigns to sell processed slop.
Forgive me for being prejudiced eurotrash but isn’t a lot of “traditional” white American foods just branded processed foods hastily mixed together? Are fresh ingredients that hard to get your hands on? Has the knowledge of how to cook them been lost?
A lot of “traditional” white American food rises from traditions of using government issued foodstuffs. Government cheese, spam, various concoctions devised from military rations. But quite a lot also comes from what immigrant communities were able to afford, which was generally the worse stuff. There’s also a not-insignificant number of white households that possessed no generational cooking knowledge because it was done by slaves, and thus had no culinary culture they could continue without the requisite skills.
Roughly 30% of white families in the confederate states owned slaves
A lot of the Americanization process encouraged immigrants to give to their customs and replace them with American substitutes. Shitty food is a result of generations of urban working class proles fed on cheap “American approved” slop and losing their customs and knowledge
A lot of the weird stuff is a holdout from the Great Depression and the years after refrigeration became ubiquitous
I mean we have food deserts here for one thing. I imagine theres more to the answer to your question, but thats one thing I can mention.
Many people who come to a us grocery store for the first time are shocked at how cheap meat is, and how expensive fresh veg is.
It’s sort of a 50/50 split between standard poverty meals adapted by time and region, and recipes invented by marketing campaigns to sell processed slop.