Paul Freedman

However... There are some things that Americans like that few other people do, like peanut butter or maple syrup. You know, this is not a popular item in the rest of the world.

Thank you for having me.

Not really. I have a friend actually from Barcelona and his ambition is to open an American restaurant in Barcelona. But it really would be the first apart from, you know, fast food that's identified with America. And if you ask most foreigners, they think American food is just fast food, or maybe American food is just variety of foods.

So yeah, that's the reason that I became interested in this subject, just to find out, you know, what is American food? And even is there such a thing? Is there such a thing? Well, I believe there is. I think there are three aspects to it. They're not like typical dishes in the sense that As you said, if you go into an Italian restaurant, you know there's going to be pasta.

But the three elements I would identify are regional foods, kind of like a vestige of what used to be a more vigorous sense that, you know, you've got certain kinds of dishes in New England, certain kinds of dishes in the South, certain kinds of dishes in the Northwest. The second element is kind of what killed regionalism, and that is Modern food.

Modern meaning processed, industrial, standardized. And then the third element is variety. And by variety, it means, you know, like the Tropicana orange juice comes in eight different kinds. Or, you know, the yogurt comes in 30 different kinds or the ice cream is in 28 flavors.

And another aspect of variety is that Americans have for much longer than the rest of the world liked so-called ethnic restaurants, liked the food of foreigners and of immigrants.

I think that there are some foods people would say are, I mean, what about apple pie or what about pot roast? But in fact, you know, if you ask people, when was the last time you actually made pot roast or When was the last time you actually saw it on a menu and ordered it? I think you'd find that it was decades. And even apple pie is not, you know, there are diners that don't have apple pie.

So a lot of these things are kind of homogenized and they're not necessarily identified with the region. There are things like pizza that have become Americanized, donuts. You know, pretty standard items, but not necessarily American in the sense of being rooted in a particular place.

No, that's the thing. I mean, apple pie is a version of an English apple tart. There are some things that Americans like that few other people do, like peanut butter or maple syrup. I have a friend in France who, and here you'd have to include Canadians. She had a lot of Canadian professional friends. And I remember her telling me they always bring that horrible maple syrup of yours.

You know, this is not a popular item in the rest of the world. But American ingredients, a lot of American cuisine was based on corn, which grew better in much of New England than did wheat. So, you know, that's an ingredient. Or liquor made out of apples. Applejack was an old kind of standby. And some of these things continue to have some influence.

Hot sauce, you know, which originates from the Southwest, that's something that Americans like a lot. Even if the basic food is bland, we like a lot of different kinds of flavorings to top it off with.

Yes. Yes. Particularly because we like sugar and we liked it as kids. There's some tastes that we develop. Most kids don't like the combination of spicy and sweet, like barbecue sauce. I think you've got to become a teenager before that kicks in.

I think it could also be that your kids are a little more sophisticated. And in fact, I've got to say, kids have become more sophisticated. The kind of kid who would only eat at McDonald's for his or her first 18 years still exists. But I just had a dinner party yesterday and a friend has two kids, 10 and 13, and the 10-year-old actually made a kind of bread.

that is typical of the colonial era, you know, just like, because he wanted something to do while the adults were cooking. So that certainly wouldn't have happened when I was growing up.

Things changed in the 1970s, I would say, or that, you know, if I had to pick a turning point. The rediscovery of actual flavor in primary foods like seasonal, local, what we now all kind of take for granted, begins in California, not only with Alice Waters and her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, but that would be the most famous example.

And at the same time in the 1970s, although certain kinds of Immigrant food like Chinese and Italian had been popular for a long time. You see an explosion of other kinds of options. Thai food really becomes a big item in the 70s. Indian food. Mexican food becomes available in places like New York that had never had it. So in 1979, I started teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

And at that time, the food was not only meat and potatoes, but pretty bland. And it became spicier and more varied. The spicier I remember being impressed by. And not just Thai food or Mexican food, but items like blackened redfish or buffalo chicken wings. These things have a lot of spice. And so things did change. And I would pick the 1970s as the beginning of the shift.

Some of it is just the arrival of lots of immigrants. So in 1965, Congress voted to repeal the racist and restrictive laws about immigration that had cut immigration from all but Northern Europe since the 1920s. And then by the 1970s, you really started to get the arrival of large numbers of people, especially from Asia.

But more than just the availability of more kinds of cuisines, I think it has to do with the kind of individualism and rejection of mass culture. So instead of everybody, you know, watching the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday evening and