The Importance of a National Cuisine

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I wanna ask you a question.

What forms your identity? How do you know who you are? What are the things about you that make you you?

Obviously, experiences play into that. You have DNA from your parents that makes you look a certain way.

You're born in a region. Perhaps most importantly, if you're a

Christian, you worship God the creator. All of these things play into your identity.

Well, one of the things that I think is often downplayed as somewhat superficial is cuisine.

And I wanna talk to you briefly about that today. I wrote an article on my sub stack, the link is in the info section called

When Dinner Stopped Being Ours, Cuisine Immigration and the Quiet Erosion of Belonging.

And I share a thought that I have had for a long time. In fact, I remember at a men's retreat, we had a culinary chef there.

And I asked him this question. I said, is there any chance that liberals might be trying to subvert our national cuisine?

And it was a question I don't think he had ever received. Because I don't think people think of cuisine in those terms.

Cuisine is something that you choose based upon your personal taste.

And that's all it is, is personal taste. And so if you like Chinese food, then you eat

Chinese food. If you like Indian food, you eat Indian food and Mexican food and the list goes on. But you notice in each of those scenarios, those cuisines come from certain regions.

What's American cuisine? Well, I think there's a number of things we conjure up in our minds.

There's hot dogs and hamburgers. There's perhaps Southern barbecue is American cuisine.

You might think of some of the foreign cuisines that we have Americanized. I mean, New York pizza is not the same as the pizza that you get in Italy.

So there's all kinds of things regionally and then more broadly speaking that go into an

American cuisine. But there was recently a clip that I saw of Piers Morgan on a

Tucker Carlson interview. And he was talking about how actually immigration is good for Great Britain, because it made

Great Britain better as far as cuisine is concerned. So it used to be terrible in London and now you can go to all kinds of these great restaurants that have flavor and spice and we didn't have that before.

And I am not familiar with British cuisine. My brother has written an article, I have linked it in the sub stack where he actually makes an argument that actually

Great Britain has wonderful cuisines and it's really just the rise of the suburbs that have created a reputation that Great Britain doesn't.

And so there's a particular context and reason for this stereotype. But actually things like shepherd's pie and the traditional

British breakfast are wonderful things. It's not just fish and chips, but I digress.

Piers Morgan tries to make an argument I've seen many people make in America too, try to say that immigration is really good because we were,

I guess, choking on our own food until foreigners came and showed us how to really make food. And to some extent,

I have a sympathy with the idea that other cuisines taste good. And in fact, I love Turkish cuisine and I'm not

Turkish, but I think it tastes good. And I've been to Turkey and a whole new world was opened up to me.

And I think that's a wonderful thing. Those cross -cultural experiences can be wonderful. I remember when

I was a kid in the 1990s, potlucks at my church normally included green bean casserole and I hate green bean casserole and all kinds of other dishes that were just not quite,

I would say, as diverse as what we have now, because we have a lot of people from other places in the world who now bring dishes mostly from islands and in Latino countries.

And there's something about that I really like, but also I think the fact that I'm originally from California and my family does enjoy

California cuisine, which is highly influenced by Mexico, that probably actually factors into the fact that I like tortillas and chimichangas and burritos and all the rest, right?

So I understand this whole idea of enriching your cuisine. I get it. But I think there is a potential for undermining your cuisine.

I think there is a potential for forgetting who you are, right? And we can do this in other areas.

You know, you can dress in a certain way and it can be a foreign dress, but that's not your country.

And if everyone starts dressing in foreign dress, according to a foreign dress code, and you totally lose and it's destroyed, whatever dress is associated with your culture, then you basically have lost that element of your culture.

And that does affect your identity. You are gonna be unsure about what you should wear and that kind of thing.

My grandfather came from Mississippi and we maintained a connection to the state of Mississippi growing up.

And that meant that when we traveled down South from New York, we would get barbecue, authentic barbecue. You couldn't get that in New York.

My grandfather, before I came along, was going to open, he backed out of it last minute, but a

Bear Pit franchise, which is a barbecue restaurant in California. And Tennessee Ernie Ford, who some of the older folks might know, was doing advertisements for it.

And he backed out. He used to smoke chicken in his, which Mississippi is kind of known for chicken, but he smoked chicken in this brick smoker he made in his backyard there in California.

And this might be a kind of a thin connection, but it was enough for me to be attracted to barbecue and barbecue tastes wonderful.

But I realized now there was more to it than that. This was an identity thing for me too.

I was connecting with my roots to some extent. And when I lived in North Carolina, they have a completely different barbecue cuisine.

In fact, they have multiple cuisines, depending on East or Western North Carolina, but I loved it.

And when I lived in Virginia, I loved it. Although Virginia is known for ham, but they did have barbecue restaurants. And I come back to New York and we really don't have it.

And so I start smoking meat. And my dad, he had had that hobby for a little while, smoking meat.

And I have to say that I think this does make me stand out.

In the region I live in now, but it's part of who I am. It's part of my identity. I love showing people, here's what barbecue tastes like and to see their eyes light up and to kind of be a local legend for it,

I suppose. I don't know of anyone else at our men's lunches at church who has done smoked meat, but it's a hit whenever I do it.

And so this is communicating more than just a flavor.

This is more than just, oh, my taste buds feel happy right now. This is, hey, this is part of who

I am. It's part of where I'm from. This is part of what we do. This is what it means to be me.

And it means something. And you can't tell me other cultures. I mean, the first thing that people do when they move to the

United States oftentimes is open up a restaurant with their cultural cuisine because you know what? That's where you feel at home.

It's in mama's kitchen. That's what you wanna share with the outside world. To get them to like you. Look how good our food is.

That's why Pierce Morgan thinks that people coming from Pakistan are great because he's in mama's kitchen when he is with them.

It can challenge stereotypes. It can do all kinds of things. Taste is one of our five senses and smell is another.

So that's two fifths of your senses right there. And we have so many flavors and textures and combinations, but those unique specific combinations are dependent on the spices and plants and animals available to particular areas, which is why cuisine develops the way it does.

And particular cultures. David Hackett Fisher writes about this in Albion Seed. He writes about the

Cavaliers and the Quakers and the Puritans and the Scots -Irish and how they each had different cuisines when they came here and the regions that they came to also shaped those cuisines.

And so the Puritans baked and broiled simple meals emphasizing fuel over flavor.

These hearty dishes such as peas porridge suited the harsh Northeastern wilderness in its winters.

The Cavaliers roasted and fried eggs and meat. They delighted in strong flavors. Their descendants still do.

The Quakers boiled and simmered milk -based dishes like porridge. Like the Puritans, their meals were simple and without elegance.

The Scots -Irish relied on salt and smoked meats that preserved well on the frontier. And in each case, these

Americans made their own regional dishes. They brought what they had from their homelands.

They combined it with the new climates they were in and voila. And like all cuisines, they faced limitations.

They could not access products, seasonings beyond their local environment as we can today through global trade. So this forced it creativity.

And so one of the examples of that is the apple stack cake in Appalachia. And it had some antecedents in Europe, but because they didn't have the same ingredients here, they didn't have apples, or they did have apples rather, but they did not have sugar and butter.

They had apples and molasses. It changed the dish. And this is a staple in Appalachia, but you know what?

It's harder to get it now. And that's kind of a tragedy. That means the local region is losing its identity.

And what's worse is that it didn't develop, right? It didn't become something better, something improved upon, something new.

It wasn't replaced by a different dish from the region. What happened is corporate interests moved in and were able to give cheaper food.

You had Mexican restaurants all over the place in parts of Appalachia now. It's cheaper food.

There's multiple reasons for this. It's labor goes into this, cheaper labor and that kind of thing.

But that's essentially a sad, tragic story.

And I know that's not tragic for everyone, but I think if you really care about identity, you have to think that's a little bit tragic.

Like, oh, that was what all the ancestors ate. That's part of what made you you. And now what makes you you?

Well, there's other things of course, but that was one of those things. We should care about cuisine.

We should care about it, not just for nutritional reasons, but for reasons of identity. And I think about the fact that so many of the cultural things that happen take place around food, even in the

Bible, right? Scripture repeatedly portrays important events around meals. You have Passover, simple acts of hospitality, such as the curds and milk

Abraham offered his visitors or the loaves and fish Christ used to feed 5 ,000 men.

Food distinguishes Israel from other surrounding pagan nations and anchors national festivities.

You have the unleavened bread, the wine of Passover. You have, you know, someone once asked me, hey, could we do communion with cookies and apple juice?

Well, no. And what's the reason? If it's just food, if it's just taste, who cares, right? It's symbolic, right?

Yeah, but the symbolism means something, right? If Christ can make the best wine at the wedding at Cana, we should probably be thinking in terms of, hey, let's give

God our best here. It does represent something. It does mean something. And of course, region went into that.

Grapes are common to that region of the world. So in America, I think one of the things that we need to think about is we need a national cuisine.

We do have some of this already, right? We have obviously 4th of July. We got beef and hot dogs mingled with firework smoke.

It smells like freedom. We've got all the sides that go with that, the mashed potatoes and, or actually not mashed potato.

That's more Thanksgiving. We got, I guess, French fries and potato salad. But then we mash those potatoes when it comes to Thanksgiving.

And we have turkey and cranberry sauce and stuffing and pumpkin pie. For Christmas, we usually have a beef prime rib or ham roast.

We have scallop potatoes, green beans, gingerbread, candy cane cookies. Now, obviously there's differences in different regions and families, but these are fairly traditional, fairly standard.

At least one of those elements you're gonna have at one of those celebrations. Even the Super Bowl now functions as a national holiday because it's associated with certain foods, right?

Wings, pizza, dip, nachos, chips. And if you don't watch the game, you'll still eat those foods sometimes.

I know because I do. So cuisine matters for national identity. Can you imagine Thanksgiving with tacos?

You wouldn't be tipping your hat and remembering Jamestown or the Pilgrims. It would be different.

And there would be something just that would feel out of place about it. We will be disconnected from the original meals at Jamestown and at Plymouth.

So we need to share, I think, a national solidarity around food. And as we grow more diverse, this becomes important to have a shared cuisine.

When people no longer eat the same food, it signals deeper fragmentation. So I think what multiculturalists like Piers Morgan forget is that Western societies were already losing their culinary inheritance through free trade, dual income households, fast food, microwaves, and freezers.

Not all these forces are harmful, but together they created a suburban culture without home cooking. And if people are what they eat, many

Americans have become mixtures of seed oils, preservatives, and artificial colors. When immigrants arrived with pre -modern societies, one of the easiest things for them to do is just to open a restaurant.

So this is the dynamic that we live in. I think cuisines can evolve, they can improve, but that process should be guided by those loyal to their culture.

When figures like Piers Morgan denigrates their native cuisines, they are not merely offending superficial preferences, they are trading a birthright for a bowl of lentil soup instead of improving what is theirs.

Undermining national cuisine is subversive. It deprives children of one of the most sensory -rich inheritances of any culture, food matters.

So that's an article and a summarization of an article that I wrote that some people did not agree with, some people did.

I'm throwing it out there because I don't hear anyone really talk about this. And I think it should be talked about.

So hopefully I'm getting a conversation started here. What are some of the cuisines, if you don't wanna think in national terms, what are the regional cuisines or what are the family recipes?

What are the family cuisines? How can you preserve those things? I think it really does matter.

It really does help one consider who they are and give them some stability in this world when they have memories of mom's kitchen and the kind of food they ate in there.

And so for me, that's chicken fried steak and biscuits and basically country food, field peas and butter beans.

My dad had a big garden growing up and all those food items now mean something to me, corn on the cob, cornbread.

And when I was a kid, they didn't as much, but now I realize what sets me apart and that's part of it.