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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Food with placenames often are misleading and not from the placename that makes up the dish: french fries, hamburger, german chocolate cake, danish, wiener, etc. add california roll to that list. [and how could I forget Hawaiian pizza? as noted in sibling comment]

Also, the headline is wrong, it was not a Canadian chef but rather a Japanese chef living in Canada.

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>Also, the headline is wrong, it was not a Canadian chef but rather a Japanese chef living in Canada.

According to wikipedia he moved to Canada in 1971 at age 21. It calls him Japanese-Canadian. I'd wager he's become a Canadian citizen by now, though I can't be bothered to research it. Do you have evidence that is he not Canadian?

At the time of his invention, back in '71, I'd say he was pretty Japanese. Today he's likely Canadianized. So the spirit of the invention is Japanese, rather than Canadian.

If I move to the UK and invent something, is it automatically a British invention, or an American invention?

But the headline of the story is technically not incorrect...that is that point being made I think...

the spirit of the invention is Japanese, rather than Canadian.

This is a pretty silly argument but the spirit (and purpose) of the invention is also clearly to make something more suitable for Canadian tastes of the time.

He immigrated in '71, invention was "late 70s".

>If I move to the UK and invent something, is it automatically a British invention, or an American invention?

Well, certainly not European.

But, maybe - wouldn't it depend on where you filed your copyright/ patent/ trademark and possibly who you work for?

Oh, still European. The British isles haven't drifted away from the European continent.

You're conflating a geographical area with a political arrangement. Not all Europeans are in the EU.

Seems like a straightforward question, as soon as we can agree on whether Nikola Tesla was Serbian/Croatian/Austrian/Yugoslavian/American.

It seems pretty accepted he was Balkan. At a minimum European. Nationality-wise he was Serbian-American.

> I'd wager he's become a Canadian citizen by now

52 years? No, at best landed immigrant status. With the legendary speed of Canadian bureaucracy I expect he'll be made a citizen posthumously.

Where I live we have "American breakfast." It's fried rice with ketchup in it, some little hotdogs and a fried egg. Cursed.

Ha! That is a funny one. We call those miniature _frankfurters_ Wiener/Vienna Sausages --man, I hope people in Vienna don't even know what those things are.

> german chocolate cake

it's german's chocolate cake... the guy's last name was literally german

Right, but it's not a cake originating in Germany.

correct but nobody would spell it German's chocolate cake if it was from Germany.

I don't recall seeing it in the possessive/genitive case like that. Any bakeries I go to have it as 'German Chocolate Cake' even google will autocorrect "german's choco... to german choco...

Just like hardly anyone says "baked Alaska-Florida cake".

TIL. In my defense, the first one I remember having (on my birthday at age 4 or so) was made by a nice German lady who lived up the street from us, so I guess it was a natural assumption.

Turkey:

The Turkish word for a turkey is hindi, which literally means “Indian.” The original word in French, coq d’Inde, meant “rooster of India,” and has since shortened to dinde. These names likely derive from the common misconception that India and the New World were one and the same. In Portuguese, it’s literally a “Peru bird,” and in Malay, it’s called a “Dutch chicken.”

https://www.dictionary.com/e/turkey/

In fact recent genetic research shows that the "chicken" derives from jungle fowl with genetic diversity centered on the eastern Indian / Myanmar region. So the Turkish name is in fact accurate, with respect to the probable origin of the bird (in a Turkish domesticated context). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31806553

Ok, I'll give you Japanese-Canadian in the title.

All the more to his credit that he figured out what the locals could handle back then.

This whole class of problems goes away if HN simply globally replaced 'Canadian' with 'Outdoorsy':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqQCyAQBgXY&t=115s

A quick check shows this is a big improvement in clarity - Outdoorsy Bacon, Outdoorsy Tire.

More ambitiously, there's renaming Canada to The Great Outdoors. The .ou country TLD is available and a lot less confusing than .ca

Canada gets such a free pass, being loved by everybody and all. Once the world figures out what we're really up to...

Lebanon bologna is from Lebanon... County. Not the country.

Shout out to my home town in the center of Pennsylvania Dutch culture.

Slight correction – French fries are in fact from France. It's just that the name "French fries" is mostly only used in America.

I thought they were fried in Greece

I thought they were from Belgium originally.

Only if you're really Hungary

And not in a Russia

Yeah, but they're mostly associated with Hamburgers these days.

There is a whole dispute of whether it was France, Belgium or Spain. I think most people settle on Belgium, some France and a minority point to a really old account of fried potatoes (uncertain of cut though) in Spain before they were even grown in France.

Also, the name comes from the French cut (aka Julienne), not the fact the fries are French. The pedantic name would be Frenched Fries.

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