International Tongues...

I often like to eat.... you know, food.
I think everyone likes to eat food. But there's always something that happens when eating food. One gets tired of eating the same kinds of food all the time, and so one looks for alternatives to their normal fare. The only problem with this is that at this point, we are now at the mercy of the restaurant owners and their idea of what's "good" or even worse, what "stupid americans will eat that we can charget them for."

Of course i'm talking about different ethnic foods that we have trained our tongues to enjoy. Just take a look at the list of different etnhic cuisines that are available in your local yellow pages. I mean, it reads like a veritable united nations of restaurants (ok, that was a terrible thing to say... but i'm tired).

Just to name a few, you've got:
- american food
- chinese food
- mexican food
- japanese food
- korean food
- cuban food
- greek food
- indian buffet (because apparently this is the only method in which they serve food)
- middle eastern food
- brazilian barbecue (brazilians love cooking on swords...)
and so on and so forth.

The question i have is that if we're eating all these foods thinking we're so damn worldly, are we just fooling ourselves? Or is the food that we consume actually that good?

You have to ask yourself whether or not the different cultures bring over the best types of food for us to eat, or the worst types of food, just to see if we as a group (collectively known as "stupid americans" btw...) would eat it.

"haha look!, they're eating the dog food, i mean, combo #4 again! hahahahaha"
as the dog looks on with a sad look on his face.

I mean, has anyone who eats at an indian buffet ever been to india? I didn't think so. And how come you'll never find a chinese person dining at a chinese restaurant? Some people might argue that it's because they can cook the food at home just as easily, and oftentimes do. If that were the case, wouldn't places like mcdonald's go out of business because it's so easy to paint a bun with some beef flavor at home? (this is how they make their burgers just in case you didn't know... the brown part in the middle? yup, painted bread...)

I am an avid fan of the american style of cuisine. Burgers, steaks, pork chops, just any form of dead animal carcass really. Whenever i go out of the country for an extended period of time, i oftentimes crave these foods that i can get so readily in the us. So, i'll make my way down to the local "american" food joint, aptly named something like "sioux falls palace garden" and order myself a steak. I should know better when there is no mention of how i'd like it cooked, and when it arrives bears a striking resemblance to a shoe sole (one time it actually said dexter on it i think). I look around the restaurant and everyone is happily eating away at these monstrosities that are being passed off as good american food. They're all munching away at their corn, bacon, avocado, cabbage topped pizza thinking "man, this american food is awesome."

Who's to say that's not exactly what we're doing here? I mean, if you think about it, mexican food is just meet, vegetables and cheese on a tortilla in different iterations, middle eastern/greek-ish food is all some sort of mystery meat and vegetables on a pita (no cheese even...), and sometimes the meat turns out to not even be meat (a la falafel).

You think they even actually sell sushi in japan (well, they actually do, but for the sake of my argument, let's pretend no one knows)? I mean, can't you see it now?
"Yoshi, yoshi! i have a brilliant plan!" (p.s. 1 out of every 2 japanese people is named yoshi or some derivation...)
"whatu isu your pranu?"
"let's feed this fish to the americans... but we won't even cook it... aaaaaaaaaaaaaahahhahha"
"oooooooooooh, thatu iju goodu ideu...."

And so sushi came to be... a big countrywide joke on us. But the jokes on them, cuz it's delish... Now you'll have to excuse me while i go and eat some indian buffet with 12 "different" types of curry, that all suspiciously taste the same.





Mitch Hedberg's QotD:

That would be cool if you could eat a good food with a bad food and the good food would cover for the bad food when it got to your stomach. Like you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach, and then they would get there, and the carrot would say, "It's cool, he's with me."