is their such a thing as non-ethnic cuisine?

Question

If all food can be traced back to an ethnic group, why not call it food instead of ethnic food?

Answer 1

No - there isn't. I think the word ethnic is ridiculous to begin with, at least the way it is abused here. Everything is ethnic as far as I'm concerned.

But! If you're going with how the word is abused, then non-ethnic "cuisine" would be something along the lines of fries and a shake.

Answer 2

All food idea comes from China.

Answer 3

ike language, cuisine changes as you try to define it. Food preferences shift constantly, depending on what makes people feel most comfortable and what they can afford. America's diet, rooted less firmly than most in common traditions -- at least in traditions that don't turn out to be myths of recent creation -- rarely stands still long enough for anyone to draw its portrait. Two new books try.

Donna R. Gabaccia, a professor of American history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, seems to wish that the many groups that settled the United States had taken better care to preserve their food as a way of preserving their identities. This is well-explored territory, and it takes almost half of ''We Are What We Eat'' for Gabaccia to state her theme: ''With immigrants, Americans and ethnic foods regularly crossing over ethnic boundaries by the turn of the 20th century, the confrontation of values represented by America's many cultures of eating seemed inevitable.'' We expect to see heated clashes and passionate adherence to quaint ''foodways.'' Instead Gabaccia recounts, with scolding dismay, the inevitable watering down of the few ethnic foods that found widespread acceptance and offers little idea of how these foods could possibly have maintained their purity -- even among the groups that originally ate them.

Those groups were eagerly assimilating into the larger culture and rejecting their own cuisine, even as the non-ethnic-owned companies the author so mistrusts were denaturing it. Gabaccia spends much of the book explaining how dishes that began by differentiating the people who cooked and ate them were dulled in order to appeal to the masses. ''Ethnic foods,'' she writes, with her penchant for pointing out the obvious, ''often lose their ethnic labels, their 'authenticity' and -- critics argue -- their taste once they are mass produced by large corporations. It happened to hot dogs, beer, egg rolls and bagels; it is happening right now to pizza, salsa, hummus and sushi.''

One would hardly expect otherwise in such a heterogeneous country. Gabaccia does not suggest how one ethnic group could have been persuaded to appreciate genuine renditions of the unfamiliar foods of another. And she hardly notes the growing taste for ''Mexican'' and ''Caribbean'' dishes far hotter and more extreme than the originals. Ethnic foods do not only become bland when America adopts them. They become coarsened and distorted too. Subtlety is lost when industry rather than individual cooks prepare dishes, using mass-produced rather than home-grown ingredients, and flavors are exaggerated to compensate. The author seems unaware of this, and she also largely ignores the current ransacking of ethnic repertories for potentially curative foods.

In a rare sharp moment, Gabaccia notes that ''new ethnics'' are trying to ''recapture through food and eating the closeness of a bygone era, when families always ate a home-cooked, mother-served, meal and spent holidays together.'' The way to do this would be to reverse the national restlessness and stay in one place with parents and cousins. But rather than invest the time and emotion necessary to reproduce the ''close-knit familiar world'' they miss, these roots-seekers -- ''consumers to their American core'' -- try to ''re-create the past by buying it'' in the form of cookbooks and dinners at community festivals.

Too bad the author ended, rather than began, with these ironies. One wishes, too, that she had gone much farther with her brief discussion of what various immigrants thought they were saying about themselves by their choice of foods; dietary climbing and slumming, as her few provocative examples show, is nothing new. Unfortunately, most of ''We Are What We Eat'' jumps confusingly from place to place, group to group and decade to decade without connective threads. It's also difficult to have complete confidence in someone who describes knishes as ''crispy square potato pies.''

Richard Pillsbury likes cooking, tasting and thinking about food. A professor of geography at Georgia State University (and no relation to the food manufacturer), he also knows a great deal about the economic and demographic trends that underlie food preferences, and he has written a far more persuasive and complete picture of the American diet. ''No Foreign Food'' is also a good deal more readable. Although there is much overlap with ''We Are What We Eat,'' Pillsbury's book is less concerned with ethnic interchange than with how migration and the economy have shaped the American diet, region by region. His discussion is realistic, succinct and contemporary. In asides, for instance, Pillsbury corrects the notion that some American foods are timeless -- like cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving (a relatively modern invention of Ocean Spray) and biscuits, which became ''a Southern staple'' only as wheat flour ''came into economic reach of the majority of the population, probably in the early 20th century.'' He is especially strong, and refreshingly open-minded, about the unstoppable rise of fast food; his agenda is less politicized and his style more direct.

Pillsbury manages a clear-eyed tolerance that seems to elude Gabaccia. He is less alarmed by the promiscuous mingling of cuisines and the Americanization of formerly distinct foods, which, however bastardized, have allowed people ''unfamiliar with and fearful of 'foreign' cuisines to be a little more adventuresome.'' If some regional favorites have become endangered, it is because the home cooks who once made them could afford to try something new. The dishes that bored them and symbolized poverty have now become the province of roots-seekers (even if the roots are not theirs) who turn out gumbos ''more authentic than the real thing ever was.''

The American culinary interchange goes on with every new arrival and every population shift. Pillsbury is sanguine. ''Ultimately,'' he writes, ''the vitality and power of the nation's all-embracing culture has meant that there can be no foreign food.'' Perhaps the most useful attitude is simple curiosity about what's on the next guy's plate.

Answer 4

yeah. it's called white people's food.
Hamburgers, hot dogs, etc.

Answer 5

yess its called "ice"