What Is American Food?

Last year at the inaugural Slow Food Nations conference in Denver, I attended a panel discussion dealing with an issue too complicated to broach over dinner, let alone in front of a roomful of attentive listeners. Its title: There’s No Such Thing as “American” Food. Its argument: more self-evident than it is controversial.

Just as our country was founded by immigrants on someone else’s land, so, too, our cuisine, which was built by immigrants on someone else’s foodways. And there’s no arguing that the state of American food continues to endure this way—built cultural exchange by cultural exchange—some welcomed, others reluctant and, still, others forced.

The struggle to define American cuisine isn’t a new one, but as our cravings for authentic flavors from all over the world continue to evolve, it seems like a more prevalent task than ever.

There are, however, no easy answers. In a world where information and ideas spread in an instant, what’s alien today is as American as apple pie tomorrow. Never mind that the word American manages to ignore two entire continents. To take a long historical view, perhaps a better starting place is the fact that the all-American apple pie isn’t actually native to the United States. It came, along with the apples themselves, from England.

No wonder the only definition I can come up with is a paradox: American food is foreign food until it isn’t.