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Comment by srgpqt | Hacker News Reader

Excess milk? Make cheese curds and sell poutine. Never understood why it hasn’t caught on much in the USA.

I’m actually surprised as well. Totally a match for the American diet. Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.

It might have more to do with the image of poutine. It’s gravy, cheese, and fries, it looks messy and unhealthy. I’m not sure about the messy part (forks maybe), but sprinkle some chives on top (mostly for color) and most people will be fooled.

They're called chili cheese fries. And they're popular here and there.

That's often different thing from real Quebecois poutine, most of the time. The cheese curds are different than queso-type cheese sauce I usually see in the US. It's only relatively recently that I've been able to regularly find curd cheese in the grocery store; when I was a kid, one of the best parts of going to Canada was getting packages of "squeaky cheese" as a road snack from little Esso stations.

Of course they're not exactly the same, but I'm saying you're not going to wow Americans with poutine. They'll look at it and say it's some kind of chili cheese fries. And it kind of is.

I hear what you're saying. But that's like saying that sausage on a bun is just a kind of hotdog. They're the same, but they're also not.

I love me a good chili fries and I love poutine. I especially love shawarma poutine which is a massive hit here in Ontario. People and their tastes are a very interesting thing.

True that. Before Chobani Americans had yogurt, but it was all that runny stuff that people from other countries wouldn't call yogurt. So same situation basically.

The shawarma poutine sounds brilliant! Perfect use case of cultural appropriation.

That sounds really negative. We have middle Eastern immigrants mixing middle Eastern food and Quebecois food. Isn't that exactly what we hope to get out of immigration? We invented something new and wonderful by combining cultures.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to the word "appropriation" being used as a blanket for "political correctness." aka. a new form of xenophobia because thou shalt not mix cultures for some reason?

Yeah. See: Britain and its Indianised cuisine. Nobody calls or thinks of that as appropriation and I really think that whole thing is overblown, only what I call the ‘college left’ tend to worry about that.

It gets blown up on the internet though, you actually see more memes mocking that than actual people bothered about it.

It’s silly anyway most American dishes are ultimately from somewhere else originally or use local ingredients to change them.

The bar fight scene in Talladega Nights put it perfectly, with Ricky Bobby listing off examples of "American" food and his new French arch-nemesis correcting him with actual countries of origin.

They called shawarma poutine "brilliant", so "cultural appropriation" was probably meant approvingly.

Whether or not you agree with the concept, cultural appropriation seems pretty easy to understand. Some things have deep meaning to people, like religious symbols. Other things don't, like most food. Also, many people don't like caricatures of their culture. That's about it.

Nothing a marketing team can't solve.

(Homer Simpson drooling voice)

“Squeaky Cheese... Aaaaah...”

I always find it fascinating when someone says they've "only recently found" something that I see even at places like gas stations and liquor stores. There's cheese EVERYWHERE in the midwest US.

I dunno, my local grocery is full of cheese, but those fresh squeaky curds are nowhere to be seen. There is more than one kind of cheese, you know.

Speaking as a dairy farmer, a foodie, someone who likes chilli cheese fries, and has eaten poutine in Quebec, they are TOTALLY DIFFERENT foodstuffs.

> Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.

Brindle Room, right? I've only had their burgers, but Mile End also has poutine for $9 and I can confirm that it is authentic enough for this Canadian.

I was blanking on the name when I was originally writing this, but yes it is Brindle Room.

"it looks messy and unhealthy"

Lots of popular foods in American cuisine are messy and unhealthy. Nor sure how that'd be a problem for poutine.

The actual answer to the question of "why ain't poutine more popular south of Canada?" is because it sounds French (which - unless that Frenchiness is tied to being from Louisiana - typically implies something fancy and expensive). It needs better marketing.

I've been saying this for years. Fries with gravy and cheese is delicious, and cheese fries are already popular in America. Big chains like McD and BK sell poutine in Canada, so why haven't they experimented in an American city with many Canadian tourists, like Bellingham?

Cultures change. When I was growing up, we had a class of milk with lunch and dinner, and often ate cereal for breakfast with milk. We don't do that any more. We still sometimes eat cereal with milk for breakfast, but the glasses of milk with lunch and dinner are gone, replaced by carbonated water, apple juice, or wine. Repeat that times a hundred million people, and it's no wonder dairy farmers are hurting.

The government used to have tons of cheese that they gave out. But there were multiple dangerous cheese fires.

Just give me cheap cheese curds period. I can demolish a bag in a siting no prob. They’re just stupid expensive unless I drive to Tillamook, and even then they’re a bit spends.

I can get it three places in my local Iowa town

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