The Menu of Globalization

Although they are fascinating, the details in Rassman's book that most interest me are not the descriptions of the recitations and their musical components. I am a visual/tactile learner with no rhythm, so while I can enjoy music, I can't really wrap my head around it.  What does interest me, however, are her descriptions of how many of the conventions that govern the recitations are imported from the rest of the Muslim world, especially Egypt. This natural spread of culture among Muslim nations is fascinating and mirrors the dissemination of American culture around the world. In this globalized economy, the culture of most of the world's nations can be accessed from any other nation. This is how I can (and totally would) read Korean or Japanese comics (manhwa and manga, respectively), watch a Spanish movie (like Pan's Labyrinth), listening to British music (like the Who or the Beatles), and eating Mexican food all in the same day.

However, whereas America has its own comics, its own movies, and its own music, it doesn't really have its own food. Sure, Burger King and McDonalds are huge internationally, but burgers and fries, which we try to claim as "American food," were invented in Germany and Belgium respectively. Very few culinary items actually originate here. The only authentically American culinary concepts that I can think of are the "international fusion" style and the fortune cookie. This makes sense, of course, because America is a land of immigrants, who all brought their distinct diets with them to the new world and, while continuing to enjoy their own food, found that they liked the food that the guy next door ate too.

This process built the modern diverse American diet a little bit at a time, the a result of the phenomenon that I knew as "the great American melting pot" when I was a kid (thanks Schoolhouse Rock!), but is now called "the great American salad bowl." The distinct cultural elements that are brought here from abroad do not merely melt together and dissolve into one cohesive homogeneous whole, but rather retain their distinctive features, but together form a new whole, like a salad.

The ramification of this trend is that unlike nearly every nation, we don't have native food. I read recently about Russian Jews in the 19th century, whose diet consisted mostly of bread, pickles, and potatoes, because they were cheap and locally produced. Regional fair is a result of what was nutritious and available in the area, and as we discussed with the example of Shibboleths, we naturally like the foods we are raised on because interpretation of taste is a result of past associations with a substance, and to survive we must eat the foods that are available to us. In the age of globalization, many diverse types of food can be obtained at the grocery store -- seasonal produce and foreign spices, for example, where once only available for a small fraction of the year, or as a result of long and expensive trade expeditions. Now that we can have any food at any time, diet and taste are no longer a function of necessity.

When I get hungry and begin to consider what I want for dinner (when I'm not on campus and the dining hall makes the decision for me), the first question I usually ask myself is "what kind of food do I want tonight?" And my options are nearly endless! I can eat Chinese one night, Indian the next, followed by Mexican, and then Italian, and Mediterranean. In fact, I have probably had that exact week. Given the menu of globalization and the new inter-nationality of all food, and lacking any kind of national or regional diet, my staple meals are no longer dependent on availability, and can be entirely dependent on taste (which is why my two most common meals are pasta marinara and burritos). Personally, I enjoy this trend and the diet it allows me, but unfortunately it is a double-edged sword; this same phenomenon of easy availability which has led to the deregionalisation of foods and the lack of distinctly American cuisine is also a huge factor in the current epidemic of obesity. Our bodies continue to assume a now outdated scarcity of energy giving foods, so they continue to crave foods high in carbs, and demand that we ingest fatty and sugary foods whenever possible, so that in this era of availability the same biological imperative that allowed our ancestors to survive long winters are making us fat.