How Apple Pie Became 'American' | Hacker News Reader

How Apple Pie Became 'American'

priceonomics.com

Pumpkin pie would probably be a better candidate as an iconic American dish, since pumpkins are at least native to North America. Pumpkin pie is good, but I do favor Apple.

Somewhat similar to how Tomatoes became synonymous with Italian food, even though Tomatoes originated in the Americas.

Not really, Apple Pie is American for the American and maybe some other English speaking countries.

In the rest of Europe, there is no association of the US with the Apple Pie, and until very recently, there was nothing cooler than US-stuff or US-style stuff. I guess the bakeries would have been filled with American style apple pie.

Coca Cola and McDonald is synonymous with US food where I come from.

Edit: Pizza is a better example than tomatoes. It is American yet has become synonymous of Italian food.

"The Pizza Effect is a term used especially in religious studies and sociology for the phenomenon of elements of a nation or people's culture being transformed or at least more fully embraced elsewhere, then re-imported back to their culture of origin"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_effect

I can't resist following up with this quote from that page:

"""Stephen Jenkins noted that the feedback phenomenon could continue; in the case of pizza, he wrote that the return of pizza to Italy again influenced American cuisine: "...pizza-loving American tourists, going to Italy in the millions, sought out authentic Italian pizza. Italians, responding to this demand, developed pizzerias to meet American expectations. Delighted with their discovery of "authentic" Italian pizza, Americans subsequently developed chains of "authentic" Italian brick-oven pizzerias. Hence, Americans met their own reflection in the other and were delighted."""

-- Stephen Jenkins (2002), "Black ships, Blavatsky, and the Pizza effect: critical self-consciousness as a thematic foundation for courses in Buddhist studies", in Victor Sōgen Hori; Richard P. Hayes; James Mark Shields, Teaching Buddhism in the West: from the wheel to the Web

It's the sort of feedback mechanism that really brings out the cool effects various cultures have on each other. Not only can one culture co-opt an idea, but the original may take it back and own it, only to have it co-opted again. It's a sort of cultural evolution. (And let's be honest, brick-oven pizzas really are superior to everything else, so I'm not going to complain.)

This is what it looks like when someone is caught in their own reality bubble.

American patriotism is famously goofy that way. I'm convinced one of the major reasons the USA is such a cultural juggernaut is that it gleefully co-opts other cultures and absorbs them right up into the mishmash that is America. (American English is pretty extreme in this regard.)

But there's no point acting offended or put off about it. Americans certainly aren't the first or last to do it. But it's certainly done with gusto.

One of the most striking things I notice when traveling abroad is that almost everyone in a given location looks the same. Germans are tall and blonde, people living in Mexico are short, squat and brown skinned with black hair, Nigerians are tall and skinny with very dark skin. It's not a universal truth, of course, and it can even vary by region within a country, but by and large a person will look like his neighbors.

Americans, on the other hand, look nothing like each other. So it's striking for an American to go to another country and see people who all look very similar to each other, because we don't see that at home.

You should see advertising in Mexico. Thin, White, Tall people. Everyone in tv ads is a 6.5 ft Sweden blonde.

Oh, I have. Mexico has a bit of an identity crisis because by and large, the people with money and power are of European descent and live in Mexico City - the economic and media center of Mexico. People in Mexico City are taller and lighter skinned (though maybe not blonde) as a result. But outside of the center of Mexico City, the country is filled with short brown people, half of whom live in poverty. But this portrayal in the media is an extension of the historical imbalance of power that favored the European aspects of Mexican heritage and looked down upon the Native American aspects. That attitude has been changing in recent years, but it still doesn't change the fact that the people who wrote the history of Mexico were nearly all of European descent.

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