Is There An American Cuisine?

Cuisine is an aspect of culture, but does every culture have a cuisine? Sidney Mintz, in “Eating America”, explores whether or not the United States has its own cuisine. When I think of nations with distinctive cuisines I usually think of Italy, China, India, Thailand and France, because these are the nations that restaurants in my area use to identify with. A cuisine, however, is more than just styles of cooking practiced by restaurants. In my opinion, a cuisine is a group of foods and style of cooking them. Mintz, however, argues that, “a cuisine cannot exist unless there is a community of people who eat it, cook it, have opinions on it and engage in discussions involving those opinions” (29). Using this definition, can we say that the United States has its own distinct cuisine? It’s clear that the US has regional cuisines, such as Cajun cooking, but Mintz maintains that there is no true American cuisine. Some think of hamburgers, hotdogs, barbecue, fried chicken, and French fries as the American cuisine, but this group is too narrow and does not have the same type of root in our culture as the cuisines of other nations.

Sidney Mintz goes into great detail to attempt to explain why the US does not have a cuisine. She traces the absence back to the way in which the US was created and populated. When people migrated to America, they brought with them their cultures. This created what is often described as the melting pot of cultures. It would then follow that the cuisines of these immigrants would all melt together to form a new cuisine. Because these cultures were coming together in an industrial era with a growingly commercialized food system, these cuisines did not melt together. Instead they formed a tossed salad of cuisines, where each maintains its own identity. Nations develop cuisines when they have access to a limited number of ingredients and cooking techniques for a very long period of time. This promotes a homogenized style of cooking that with time becomes a cuisine. The US, however, has access to an unprecedented number of ingredients and techniques. On top of that, the commercialization of the food industry, that is the switch from home cooked to prepared food bought from sellers (everything from hotdog stands, to restaurants, to TV dinners), has also prevented the developed of an American cuisine. In my opinion, it is not possible for a country as large as the US, founded as recently as the US, which was populated by people who totally rejected the culture of the natives and came from a huge variety of backgrounds, to develop a cuisine.