Oikophilia
a reconsideration of American food culture
The state of modern American food writing sort of drives me insane.
Good food and a good food culture typically means one (or more) of a few things to the American food writer:
The food is very fresh and tastes very fresh. Perhaps it is minimally prepared. So, this is about access to ingredients1, having a good, long growing season and perhaps proximity to the sea or a legal atmosphere in which cows and chickens and other domesticated animals can be kept close to where people who will eat them and their products live.
The food is part of a long tradition and is “authentic.” It can be post-Columbian tradition, because no one really remembers what anyone ate before they had tomatoes and potatoes and chocolate, but it is preferably a tradition that is older than the government of the USA.
The food in some way depends on a lack of regulatory oversight or burden. Whether it’s a street food culture you’re talking about or the tiny, six-seat sushi bars of Tokyo, the thing you love in some other country is something that couldn’t happen in the US because of regulatory burden of one kind or another, from health codes to mandatory parking rules.
Most people’s opinions about food are formed in very boring ways. For most people, indifferently made familiar food will rate higher than very carefully made unfamiliar food. But certain types of people love novelty, and it is from that set of people that food and travel writers are usually drawn, of course. But even for such people, rarely can a food be considered solely on its own terms; always the eater has their own history, tastes, and expectations coloring how they receive a food.
I said in my previous post that Chris Arnade’s argument that America has no real food culture was correct, and in some ways it is, but in other ways it’s wrong in the same way that I see repeated in a lot of food writing. Arnade isn’t a food writer, of course (he was a stockbroker who disliked his small hometown and is now just a very niche travel writer), but the attitude is the same: that anything that is normal or middle class American is, naturally, not very interesting.
Notably, as far as one can tell, Arnade is not himself participating in any kind of “thick” food culture: I don’t see how he could cook very often, and he spends most of his time walking around places where he is not at home, always a spectator of other people’s cultures, joining in when he can, but as a consumer, not as a producer of any food culture. It is very easy to celebrate labor you yourself did not have to do. The boring American eats wings at the sports bar while watching the game, very much at home in his culture; the hip American goes abroad and buys street food to consume a culture they did not make and will never be part of.
Arnade also criticizes Americans for relying on the quality of our restaurants to defend our food culture — and then talks up restaurants in other countries, because that’s normally how he is experiencing the food of those countries. He extols their food cultures not on the basis of the food itself in many cases but on how social it is, how people spend hours sitting in a Korean bar, for example, eating slowly over a whole evening.2 This is a culture, for sure, but it’s not clear how it’s a defense of the quality of food per se. Have you ever had the dish called “corn cheese” in a Korean bar? I like it enough that I sometimes make it at home (since we have no Korean or Japanese bar here), but I am not delusional enough to think that if an Applebee’s put a dish composed mainly of canned corn, mayonnaise, and cheese in front of Arnade he, or any food writer, would praise its culinary qualities.
That is to say, a lot of what people are praising and liking in foreign cultures is not, strictly speaking, the quality of the food. It’s the context, it’s the romance, it’s the exoticism, it’s that suddenly canned corn and mayonnaise are blessed with ✨authenticity✨ that they aren’t believed to have in a middle American household.
Around our house, this whole topic of discussion has become a source of humor since I told the children that as far as I know the most popular sandwich in France, consumed by the millions daily, is the humble jambon-beurre. I ate one of these in Paris, because when I’m in Paris, I want to eat what they do, and what they eat is jambon-beurre. You can find recipes for this sandwich online, if you need guidance, but let me tell you it has three ingredients: baguette, butter, ham. The sandwich name tells no lies; it is a ham-butter sandwich. My children find it hilarious, because it’s ludicrously sparse compared to an American sandwich. But if the baguette is top notch, and in France it usually is, and the ham is good, and the butter is good, it’s a good sandwich! And I would know, because I am an American, and our sandwich culture here is itself pretty top notch. I am qualified to judge sandwiches.
In Switzerland one time, we went to a pretzel shop and got some pretzels (not the crunchy pretzels, but what we Americans would call a “soft pretzel”) that had some kind of filling, we weren’t sure what it was when we were looking at it in the bakery case. It turned out to be a slab of butter. A decent soft pretzel with a slab of butter in the middle! Sure! To what degree is European food culture just a willingness to use a lot of butter, to treat butter as a worthy food in its own right? I’m not criticizing this; it’s wonderful!
However, these kinds of foods — the jambon-beurre and the pretzel with butter from Zürich and the herring sandwiches Chris ate in Amsterdam that were literally just herring, raw onion, and pickle on a dry bun (on a dry bun! America would not do this!) — seem to be very popular in their respective countries and yet also very familiar to the American: hand-held foods you can eat outdoors or on the train, even. Maybe a true Frenchman would never eat a jambon-beurre by himself while scrolling Instagram (although the Internet does tell of places in Paris where one may only order the jambon-beurre while seated at the bar, not at a table); maybe he would always be sure to have a top quality wine with his sandwich, in glassware, and friends with whom to share some time. That isn’t how it seemed to me when I, along with a hundred other people, bought a jambon-beurre at the train station; it seemed like a lot of people were picking up a premade sandwich that they were going to eat on the train while scrolling Instagram, but what do I know, I was just a tourist.
One of my favorite things to do in every country I travel to is to visit the convenience stores and normal grocery stores. I want to see what average people who live in this place stop in to get on their way home from work or what have you. In Poland, we found a surprising array of instant noodles, some in really weird flavors; we brought a bunch home with us and ate, like, dill pickle flavored cup noodle as a souvenir of lovely Poland.
I want to taste the things the convenience store sells and sample the local potato chip flavors, because those, too, are things people who live in a place really, truly eat. Not ✨authentic✨, sometimes, but real. It always delights me what flavors of potato chips different nations come up with. Surprise favorites include the fried egg flavored potato chips from Spain and the pickled plum flavored chips from Japan. But mostly it delights me how many countries I’ve been to have potato chips: in our common humanity, we are craving crispy salty snacks.
But American food and travel writers rarely seem to mention these things. They’ll go on at length about the very fresh seafood they ate in some Italian or Peruvian town (how nice, you were by the sea then), the grandmas making pasta by hand (how nice that someone has the time to do that for you), every citizen spending hours cooking a huge feast every day, because they really care about food. The chickens are being freshly slaughtered the moment you order, the fruit and vegetables were all picked just this morning by a quaint paisano, and no one is eating a hot dog salad.
Peasant foods and foods from poorer countries are very chic, of course; poverty tourism is a whole thing. Street food is a culture; American fast food isn’t. Eating wings at a sports bar while watching the game with a bunch of strangers or semi-strangers isn’t a culture; eating wings alone at the bar of a Japanese sunakku is.
It is, of course, fine to find this attitude in travel writing; the travel writer’s entire raison d'être is, after all, to promote the idea of leaving home to find good and interesting things. It’s more pernicious in the writing of food writers who are allegedly trying to convince you to become a better home cook.
I cannot remember now if I was first irritated by this in Tamar Adler’s writing or if it was someone else first, but let’s pick on Adler first. Adler is a writer who focuses on home cooking, on making home cooking seem more desirable and possible. I have two of her books, and I respect them. But she is very prone, just like most other American food writers, to saying things like, “Good cooking doesn’t have to be complicated. On a beach in Thailand, I learned to make a very simple sauce consisting only of large quantities of lime juice seasoned with salt and pepper.” All right, that’s great, I’m sure it’s wonderful, especially when you are on a beach in Thailand, but what do you have for those of us who do not have such large quantities of limes available to us? Because that is a real constraint, even in this day and age. Her recipes and advice for normal home cooking are pretty good, but often very dependent on having a year-round farmers market available to you; her recipes and advice for people who live in Montana through the winter are somewhat wanting. But, look, she would never have landed a book deal or a spot writing for Vogue by focusing on the ways you can cook from what you canned during the summer or stored in your root cellar. It’s not sexy; having a whole lot of limes on a beach in Thailand, on the other hand, is very sexy.
Lately, we’ve been watching Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat on Netflix. I have the book, and it’s great, but my beef here is with the show. Each show should focus on one of these key elements and how home cooks can usefully employ these elements to make their cooking better. But, of course, we spend three of the episodes in other countries. For Salt, we go to Japan, where salt is, I guess, really special.3 For Acid, we go to Mexico (specifically, Yucatán) where we learn how many different kinds of citrus fruits they have available to them, such that they never need vinegar. Cool cool, I’m very envious, but if I were an American who wanted to become a better home cook, the show is not doing anything for me except making me want to get some of their citrus fruits FedEx’d to me.
Writing and television for the home cook based in America need to tell you what you can do with what you have, within the culture that you live in. Good home cooking cannot be simply dependent on living in a tropical or subtropical climate where fresh fruit is available year-round, or near the sea where some kind of very fresh fish or shellfish is always around. Good cooking can’t just mean that you live in a good agricultural zone, because some people do not, and if the imagination of what good cooking can be is limited by how much of your food is spanking fresh because you can have a garden all year round, then you’re leaving out a lot of people, and they’re just going to get some frozen pizza because you’ve convinced them they can’t make good food without having their own lemon tree.
This all amounts to an oikophobia, a dislike or distaste for home. Things are always better in Italy or Japan. You can’t eat peasant food in America because there aren’t any peasants anymore, and even doing poverty tourism is difficult here because everyone4 can afford to go to Taco Mac for some wings and the football game on their way back from the lake. The street food scene in a lot of our cities is very gentrified. We’re too normal; even the millionaires dress in jeans and hoodies, and it’s all very dull and not aesthetic enough. We aren’t classy or cool or chic.
But, god help me, I love America. I hate our politics and the War on Terror and things like that, but our actual land and people and culture and food? Magnificent.
The church potlucks and midwestern hotdish suppers? Gold.
Slightly stale cornbread5 with sweet tea eaten on a front porch while gossiping with the neighbors? Heaven.
The Junior League and Lutheran Ladies’ cookbooks, those spiral-bound books full of recipes from normal American ladies, being sold as fundraisers? Divine.
Super Bowl Sunday with its array of finger foods and dips? Splendid.
Chili cook-offs and entering pie at the county fair? Love them all.6
All the barbecue is good, from Kansas to North Carolina to Texas and all the places in between. France could never.7
Eating wings in a sports bar and starting to cheer for whatever team alongside total strangers? I do not really care about football or, honestly, any other sports very much, but the conviviality that comes from watching sports together, hell, even in Applebee’s? Truly blessed.
The little cafes all over this country with some little specialty, from the pickle pie cafe in Utah to Skyline Chili to “the good hot dog place”8 in Las Cruces, finding out about them and marking a “want to go” flag on your Google Maps so that next time you’re on a road trip, you’ll remember to stop in and try the pie? Truly grand.
New Orleans? So good. Memphis hot chicken versus Nashville hot chicken? I want to eat it all. Georgia’s historic tea rooms? Yes, please. Swedish meatballs and lefse made by a bunch of grandmas for the Lutheran church fundraiser? Cinnamon rolls at the Amish store down the road? How did we get this lucky, to have so much?
The tamales that some guy is selling from the back of his car in a Walmart parking lot have never let me down. Bobby Flay is a professional chef who lost many “throwdowns” against people who aren’t even famous outside of their locality but take great pride in what they do. I like all the pizzas, too: deep-dish, Detroit, St. Louis, New York, the pizzas that make Italians pull their hair out in anger at our American pizza subterfuge.
Speaking of subterfuge, how about the dragon and caterpillar and magic unicorn rolls9 at your local sushi place, and, come on, Korean tacos? Hell yes. It isn’t so much that we have so many varieties of world-class international cuisines, as Arnade complains about, it’s that we will make sushi burritos and Korean tacos and not even blink an eye because WE ARE AMERICANS. We sound our barbaric yawp.
All of this is our food culture, or many aspects of our food culture, or even many food cultures. We are brought together as Americans by 7-layer dip at your mom’s house during the Super Bowl and by green bean casserole10 at Thanksgiving and by the little church potlucks and chili cook-offs, and I love every bit of it. We are brought together by Taco Tuesday and corned beef and cabbage on St. Paddy’s Day, when we all become “Irish” for a minute.
We like to experiment, which is how American housewives ended up putting everything into Jello for a while or started making things like “bananas Hollandaise.”11 We like hand-held foods whenever possible, something portable and convenient because we are on the move, buddy, which is why every ethnic food seems to end up getting rolled into a burrito or taco or sandwich format at some point in their American evolution.
And you can’t really argue that I find these things in America just because I care about food or that they are inaccessible to all but the wealthy. The things I’m describing are absolutely common and normal. The chili cook-off guys and the Lutheran ladies selling lefse and cookbooks at a fundraiser are just normal small town and suburban people. They probably have never read Gourmet magazine. Nothing I’ve mentioned here is a Michelin-starred expensive restaurant12 in some seaside California city, mainly because I do not ever eat at that kind of establishment. I might, if I could; I’m not a reverse food snob. Everything I’m talking about is so normal, so pedestrian, that it’s too boring to mention in food writing.
It’s true that Americans don’t cook much anymore, and we eat too much heavily processed food with suspect ingredients. Americans can be real skinflints about food costs, preferring to spend money on things like … travel to places with a “rich food culture.” So, like bad street drugs, our food often ends up cut with the lowest cost ingredients.
I think it is right and proper to criticize this, for a lot of reasons. Don’t even get me started on how bad grocery store bakery items are and what a shame it is that many people no longer seem to be able to tell how bad they are. But it’s also true that our food culture, in all its portable and convenient chaos, is a deep reflection of what Americans are, where we come from, and what we care about.
And it doesn’t help that our food writing and television are completely discouraging. The food writers have no real love for American food or what kinds of things can be done with the foods of our native land, day in and day out. No one loves America well enough to promote its food, except Guy Fieri.
The thing about America is that, just as Jennifer said at the family reunion, we don’t respect traditions, in our food or anything else, really. We gave up worshiping the Mother Sauce Gods a long time ago. If you come here, from whatever long-standing dignified food tradition you come from, and expect to find something equally dignified and respectful, you will be disappointed. You will be disappointed because that isn’t American culture, food or otherwise. I have always maintained that people who don’t like Chicago deep dish pizza, for example, don’t like it because they have an idea of what pizza is, and it isn’t that, and then they don’t like it, but if they would accept it for what it is, maybe they would.
For me, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods captures my idea of American culture so well, but it includes our food. The old gods came to America and became hustlers and hookers. The war between the old gods and new is at Rock City, a kitschy tourist attraction in north Georgia. I would just add that Guy Fieri will referee, and the food served will be Korean tacos and curry pizza.
What we consider to be “good food” is much more about access to ingredients than most of us realize. Inland America has a climate roughly comparable to Eastern Europe or much of Russia; it is harder to be a good cook in those places, to make winter squash and aging carrots taste great for the thousandth time this month. And just like Italy and southeast Asia have year-round fresh ingredients, so do California and parts of the American South. Guess which areas have “great food cultures” and which are spurned?
And if you think much about this particular type of culture, as I have mainly because I spent a lot of my time doing this in Japan, you realize this particular thing is really heavily dependent on not having children or not spending time with the ones you do have. Japanese businessmen who spend a lot of time eating and drinking together after work often spend very little time with their wives and children, if they have families at all.
I sort of guessed in advance once I knew they were going to be travel shows that salt would be Japan. Why? Because Japan doesn’t use very many spices or other flavorings, so it is true that the salty elements of the seasoning, such as soy sauce and miso, take on special importance.
Obviously, not literally everyone, but compared to nearly every foreign country, Americans are shockingly rich. The fact that Americans do not want to admit this is, to me personally, sort of vulgar.
Chris asked me, why stale? Because the cornbread was made for dinner the night before (in a cast iron skillet, cut into wedges, every night) and this is leftovers, and cornbread goes stale a little quickly.
And these are exactly the same phenomenon as Arnade talks about with barbecue. The ladies who enter pies and pickles at the county fair are doing it because their ability to make great pies and pickles is part of their identity, and the chili cook-off gentlemen are, too. And chili cook-offs are a huge deal! You can find one almost every weekend somewhere in America, if your identity revolves around the excellence of your chili recipe.
No offense. I love France, and French food, even the jambon-beurre. But I love my home, too.
It’s called Caliche’s. I recommend the spicy dog.
These kinds of big sushi rolls, with like ten ingredients inside and then layers of avocado on the outside, that have all these cool names — the dragon roll, the “rock n roll,” whatever kinds of names your local place uses — are not really a thing in Japan (or weren’t when I lived there; it’s possible that they’re popular now). Sushi is, of course, very good and fine and respectable in Japan, but somewhat more boring than American sushi.
The traditional Thanksgiving foods are what is in season and available to people without modern airplane-and-refrigerated-truck-based supply chains. Potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, canned green beans, maybe Brussels sprouts or something similar: this is what you get in inland America for like half the year. We don’t have lemon trees in Montana.
If you fill a date with goat cheese, wrap it in bacon, and broil it, it’s so classy. If you did this with a banana, it’s so trashy. I actually have no idea if these banana things taste good or not; the whole idea is no one does, but if it’s good with a date or fig, then maybe also with a banana? Who knows? We’re all much too classy to find out now.
Ru San’s where we ate the sushi burrito was, in fact, shut down for health code violations, although I think it is open again.
I love every word of this.