Note to vacationing non-Americans: while it’s true that America doesn’t always have the best food culture, the food in our restaurants is really not representative of what most of us eat at home. The portions at Cheesecake Factory or IHOP are meant to be indulgent, not just “what Americans are used to.”
If you eat at a regular American household, during a regular meal where they’re not going out of their way to impress guests, you probably will notbe served twelve pounds of chocolate-covered cream cheese. Please bear this in mind before writing yet another “omg I can’t believe American food” post.
Also, most American restaurant portions are 100% intended as two meals’ worth of food. Some of my older Irish relatives still struggle with the idea that it’s not just not rude to eat half your meal and take the rest home, it’s expected. (Apparently this is somewhat of an American custom.)
Until you’re hitting the “fancy restaurant” tier (the kind of place you go for a celebration or an anniversary date), a dinner out should generally also be lunch for the next day. Leftovers are very much the norm.
From the little time I’ve spent in Canada, this seems to be the case up there as well.
the portions in family restaurants (as opposed to haute cuisine types) are designed so that no one goes away hungry.
volume IS very much a part of the american hospitality tradition, and Nobody Leaves Hungry is important. but you have to recognize that it’s not how we cook for ourselves, it’s how we welcome guests and strengthen community ties.
so in order to give you a celebratory experience and make you feel welcomed, family restaurants make the portions big enough that even if you’re a teenage boy celebrating a hard win on the basketball court, you’re still going to be comfortably full when you leave.
of course, that means that for your average person with a sit-down job, who ate a decent lunch that day, it’s twice as much as they want or more. that’s ok. as mentioned above, taking home leftovers is absolutely encouraged. that, too, is part of american hospitality tradition; it’s meant to invoke fond memories of grandma loading you down with covered dishes so you can have hearty celebration food all week. pot luck church basement get-togethers where the whole town makes sure everybody has enough. that sort of thing. it’s about sharing. it’s about celebrating Plenty.
it’s not about pigging out until you get huge. treating it that way is pretty disrespectful of our culture. and you know, contrary to what the world thinks, we do have one.
Reblogging because I honestly never thought about it but yeah, this lines up.
filipinxs and americans have similar food/hospitality cultures
hmmm, this explains a bit about our level of generational assimilation compared to other asian subgroups
Sometimes this is true of what we make at home as well, but again, you’re not supposed to eat it all at once. My friend just made me a whole tray of baked ziti because they were making two other trays for a party I wasn’t going to and knew I loved it. There was no universe in which they were going to be offended if I didn’t eat the whole fucking tray in one sitting. They were making me a weekend’s worth of dinner and lunches, at least. A lot of our food culture (see: traditional recipes that are AmericanTM and not necessarily ethnically tied) came out of the Great Depression or Post-War era. Millennial Meal Prep Culture where you cook a shit ton of food on Sunday to last you the week is just… pretty common. There are some cultures where you’re expected to leave a clean plate, and others where you’re expected to absolutely not because eating all your food is a sign the host didn’t feed you enough. America is sort of a balance. You’re supposed to clean your plate (at home), but have more left over in the pot/pan/casserole dish/whatever. At a restaurant, you’re absolutely supposed to still have more on your plate to take home because they’re just giving all of it to you at once.
We don’t even need trains to drive themselves. We just don’t need cars. That’s it. There doesn’t need to be automation. There just needs to be a change in our infrastructure.
Why does every faux leftist want to take out cars away? Is it just cause they’re mostly children online and they’ve never had a job let alone own a car…
Beware anyone who would restrict your freedom of movement
Lmao you think cars are freedom, not just another means of control. That’s hilarious. Henry Ford would be proud of your ignorance.
I’m a grown adult who’s tired of being a slave to my car and my town’s hostile infrastructure. Sorry you’re too much of a dork to get that cars and modern American roads absolutely fucking suck. Sorry you hate poor people and want to force us into constant debt and chain us to useless metal coffins.
I don’t want to take anyone’s car. I want a world where hardly anyone needs a car and therefore get rid of theirs willingly. I want a world where I can walk most places I need to go and can ride a bus or train or my bicycle everywhere else. But ok buddy.
Taking public transit in a place where public transit is well-funded and well-designed is a goddamn delight. You want freedom? I can go wherever I want, I don’t have to park, and there’s a tram or bus every ten minutes so I’m not even worried about my schedule. I don’t even fucking like walking and I would love to live in a city where that was an option.
Naturally this is not an experience most Americans have had because even our best city public transit is blown out of the water by what other countries are doing. It’s not easy to explain how life-changing that level of transit access is!
And if you really must drive, well, the roads are a lot clearer when everyone else is on a train.
We all have preconceived notions of certain countries and cultures. We might even understand that these are gross generalizations but that doesn’t keep us from believing them. The French have quite a few preconceived ideas on what it means to be American. I’m going to explore where these stereotypes might come from.
*Disclaimer: This is all (slightly researched) speculation. *
1. Americans are stupid
Americans have the unfortunate stereotype of being not so bright. Many Europeans would agree. Is there some truth to this? Well according to OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the U.S ranks 26th worldwide in scholastic test scores, below other world powers such as France, Germany, and China. But this is only proof if you believe that test scores accurately define intelligence. Also, the typical French person probably doesn’t know this statistic…so why do they think we’re “idiots”?
Probably because we are generally ignorant of the world around us. Who’s the Prime Minister of the UK? What political scandal is currently going on in Brazil? What is ISIS? The reality is many Europeans could answer these questions and many Americans could not. The other day I watched this American girl try to order at a french bakery. This first thing she said was “Hola” (*face palm*) and then she very loudly asked for a sandwhich in english, as if yelling would help the cashier understand her better. This is the American traveler in a nutshell - we go overseas without any regard for common practices, norms, or courtesies. This lack of cultural curiosity is what probably makes us seem uninformed, silly, and quite frankly, stupid.
2. Americans are superficial
Outsiders believe that all we care about is our looks, status, and wealth. Materialistic is our name and consumerism is our game. But like, we can’t like, be bothered with things like “inner beauty”. I mean, duh, we have reps to protect!
It’s not hard to understand why one would come to this conclusion of us. Watch American TV for 30 minutes and you will see how we eat up ideas of popularity and wealth. I mean we are the same country that has made famous-for-nothing Kardashians a household name. We’re also the same country that lets Channing Tatum “act” and lets Taylor Swift whine on every stage. I must admit (ashamedly) that I’ve thought to myself, “Wow, french actors and singers are not attractive”. But their celebrities are actually famous for being talented. Crazy concept, right?
3. Americans are conservative
One day when I was babysitting, I took the kids to the park. On the side of a building was a LARGE ad for a burlesque show with a topless woman gracing center stage. I remember feeling appalled. This is a park where children come to play! I looked around and none of the moms or their kids paid it any attention, almost as if this was normal. Am I a prude? No, I’m just American.
When it comes to nudity, cursing, or anything else considered taboo, we tend to censure it. These things are typically reserved for private spaces among adults. But in France, whether its in the media or in real life, they are much less likely to censor themselves.
Theory time: Part of this may be because we are a much more religious country than France. Although we express freedom of religion within our Constitution, we cannot deny that our country was founded on Christian principles and those principles manifest themselves within our political, social, and cultural identity. Around 88% of American citizens are affiliated with a religion compared to almost 55% of French citizens. Why are LGBT and female reproductive rights hot button issues? Why is the drinking age still 21 years old? Because of persisting conservative sentiments. Perhaps we hold more modest values because of our country’s subconscious (or maybe not so subconscious) ties to religion.
4. America is dangerous and racist
To many outsiders, most of our major cities are synonymous with danger. New York. Miami. Chicago. I’ve been asked several times by wide-eyed Frenchies if I’ve ever visited these cities and if I’ve ever felt unsafe. What puzzles them most is why, oh why, can’t America solve its gun issue? Trust me, we’re asking ourselves the same thing. Mass shootings have become unnervingly commonplace and we are just as exhausted.
As for the racism thing, French people have televisions. They see our public discourse on police brutality, the physical aggression at Trump rallies and that same presidential candidate’s stance on Mexican immigrants. They know well that our country was built on the backs of slaves and immigrants and has a 400 year history of racial oppression and discrimination. But don’t be fooled, France is not at all a racial utopia. They’ve had their fare share of discriminatory laws over the years. However, due to our track record, its the U.S that usually wins the prize of most racist world power.
5. Americans are fat
This is without doubt the number one stereotype about Americans and unfortunately there’s a lot of merit to it. We are one of the unhealthiest countries in the world. In 2015, 74 million Americans, almost 2/3 of the country, were considered overweight or obese. Researchers predict that these numbers will only increase and by 2020, 75% of the nation will be overweight. Compared to the 40% of overweight French citizens, these numbers are quite egregious.
But what’s ironic is that we are by far more obsessed with exercise and healthy eating. We have a strong “work out culture” in the states and for most Americans the question is not whether you’re dieting but which diet you’re on. As a whole, French people don’t actively work out. In fact in the 9 months I’ve been here, I have seen one gym. ONE. And it was extremely empty. They don’t have to work at being healthy because they just naturally are. It’s not in their culture to eat large fast food portions or eat out for that matter. Where as in the US, we love to dine outside the home. Not only is it a great way to connect with friends but its convenient. And from drive-thrus to 24/7 restaurants, you cant deny our love affair with conveniency.
6. Americans are self-involved workaholics
“You can be anything you put your mind to” “Reach for the stars” “You could be the next president of the United States!”
From an early age we are told that everyone is special. That hard work is the key to success and to dream as big as possible. I asked a couple of my students what they wanted to be when they grew up and none of them had an answer. From an American perspective this is very strange. Every American child knows exactly what they want to be by the age of 3. Even if the answer is a Princess, we raise children to have a very clear and confident vision of who they are and where they are going in life.
Our society is characterized by individualism. What that means is that we emphasis personal achievements, we value independence, and much of what we do in life is self-enhancing. Many countries fall into this category and you can argue that there’s nothing wrong with it. But the inevitable result of individualism is that we lose sight in the importance of people around us. We are less family-oriented and instead place more value on our personal success, which typically translates to how we perform in our careers.
Everyone is chasing the “American Dream”, hoping to make something of themselves. But instead of enjoying life, we’re too busy working hard for the money. We work 30% more than Europeans, have significantly less paid vacation time, and we’re one of the only countries that doesn’t guarantee parental leave for new mothers and fathers. We don’t value leisure time for ourselves or with our family. Maybe we are not personally “self-involved workaholics”, but the way our society is set up its almost impossible not to be.
Feeling bitter? Well let’s glance at some positive stereotypes.
While in theory my general idea of religiosity would lend itself to the concept of a nondenominational church, the reality of nondenominational churches is that the vast majority of them exist to cast a wide net and get as much money from as many people as possible because that way they don’t have to limit their demographic.
How do nondenominational churches even work? I feel like it would be pretty hard to come up with even a single sermon that doesn’t contradict the doctrines of a single denomination. And that’s not even getting into all the issues with the structure of the service, which I understand can vary quite a lot.
(I went to a nondenominational Christian school, but that’s a bit different, since the doctrines and structure aren’t nearly as central to the way a school functions.)
In America, at least, “nondenominational” means in practice “Evangelical Protestant”. This is partly because the self-conception and project of low-church evangelicals is explicitly to brand themselves as “mere Christianity”, and they like to pretend that their practices and doctrines aren’t historically informed and contingent. They often have a lot of strong feelings about doctrine and liturgy in practice, but they don’t belong to formal structures that establish and enforce these.
There is a broader sense of “non-denominational” that refers to cooperation across actually, substantially different denominations, which usually has to limit itself to like “Hey, Jesus was cool, right?” But you’d be hard pressed to hold an actual service in this style.
Non-denominational just means that absolutely nobody outside of the police is going to tell church leadership to stop their nonsense, and IME non-denominational churches are even more prone to fuckery than other churches.
Regular reminder that there’s literally nothing stopping white people from enjoying their own heritages and that all that bonehead noise about how “the SJWs” are gonna come after you because you wanna learn Irish or you think Vikings are cool is just straight-up a lie.
Y’know what robs white people of culture? White supremacy does. And you can take that to the fuckin bank.
This is actually something I’ve felt for a long time but was afraid of talking about because I wasn’t sure if anyone else felt the same way. We’re losing any and all important ways of positively and benevolently performing, expressing, sharing, and celebrating our cultures because they keep getting invaded and corrupted by white supremacists.
It’s the white supremacists we need to annihilate. Then we can have our celebrations.
Gatekeep white supremacists from white culture. Separate them from it, remove them from it.
They’re not white culture, they’re hate culture.
When Urgroßvater fled the Rhineland way back in the day, he wound up in Mississippi. All the kids grew up as monolingual Anglophones, because the last thing you want to be in a place like that is different; better to identify with the dominant group, if you’re lucky enough that that’s an option. Any meaningful sense of heritage was gone by the time the next generation learned to talk. Now it’s 2018 and all the German I have is Berliner Hochdeutsch from school and Duolingo. Whatever songs and stories and traditions I could’ve had are just gone, like a fart in the wind.
Deep down in my bones, I feel like I was cheated out of something. And it was the pressure and desire to assimilate into whiteness that did the cheating.
The same thing happened to me with Italian on both sides, children raised to fit in without any real heritage or traditions passed on.
My grandfather told his Prussian parents, “We’re in America. Speak English.” He spoke Polish, Russian, German, and English. My grandmother spoke German, Norwegian, and English. My parents used to have arguments in German but refused to teach us. I’m a monolingual Anglophone. I’m still upset about it.
My grandmother’s family assimilated so hard because they were Russian Jews. I am continually working my way back to my ancestress’ list of languages and crafts skills.
(There is probably an argument that I’m carrying a lot of Nanna around here, but hey.) (She spoke English, French, German, Russian, and probably some Latin. I’ve swapped Latin for Spanish and am kinda crappy at German. She also could look at a piece of finished clothing and go home and put together a replica; I’m working towards it with knitting instead.)
And yes: I was named for her.
One of the truths about European colonization of the world was that most of those who were most emphatic about assimilating or eradicating non-European cultures were usually those who’d already had the same thing done to them. Which can go all the way back to distinctions of rank and station in what we think of as “the same” society - some of the areas of the USA and Canada that were/are the worst in terms of anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism were those colonized by the Welsh, Scottish, Irish and even English farmers and peasants who’d had their entire generations and centuries of culture, ancestry and livelihood ripped up and thrown out by Enclosure or forced relocation or the Famine or what have you.
They came to the Americas and thought now we can be on the top and acted out the worst parts of their own (often intergenerational) trauma on everyone vulnerable to them. It’s a very very common human pattern and all over the world it continues today.
I’m relatively connected to Scottish culture for a western Canadian—my mother and uncle did Highland dance when young, my brother was in pipe bands, I’ve been to a lot of Highland games, my grandmother took me to Scotland when I was young.
And it’s basically all because my Orkney ancestors REMEMBER and are still VERY PEEVED about being invaded by the English, having their language, culture, and traditional forms of dress outlawed and stolen, and losing political autonomy.
So even though they were still kinda racist, when my grandparents went up to the Arctic to exploit the environment and learned about how Canada’s Indigenous people had been colonized and had their language, culture, and traditional forms of dress outlawed and stolen… even then they were like, “Hey, that sounds shittily familiar” and worked in small ways (in between drilling oil wells) to help preserve Inuit culture and help individual Indigenous people.
Imagine what might happen if white people remembered what it was like for their families to be fed into the meatgrinder that took in their heritage and spat out mayonnaise, and decided that maybe it wasn’t so great after all.
I was always very, very pissed off that my grandparents steadfastly refused to teach me Greek.
If it weren’t for “We’re in America, speak English,” I might have grown up speaking Norwegian, German, Dutch, and maybe some Gaelic.
“We’re in America, speak English” is also “We’re in America, speak only English,” and that is loss beyond measure.
Sometimes I want to cry because I want want want the Czech culture that my great-great-grandparents were raised in… but when they came over, they renounced it all. They were Czech, but their children (my great-grandparents) were American. Their children’s children (my grandparents) were American. They spoke English and they participated in American culture; even their last name had to be pronounced the American way. They might speak Czech to their friends when they went to Mass at St. Wenceslaus, but at home, they worked hard to learn English and practice American traditions.
My grandfather knew a little Czech, and remembered some of the traditions his grandparents had brought over. But when he died in… 2013, 2014? we lost anything he didn’t pass on, because he was the last child of that line.
I once had someone at a pagan gathering say to me “oh, you’re Czech? that means you can worship the Slavic gods!” But even if I could trace my family back to pre-Christianity Prague and Bohemia, would those gods even recognize me? Through Americanization, my family’s Czechness was reduced to a fun fact and a way of excusing our weird last name.
And sometimes that really just boils my blood.
There is no “white” culture, the traditions of my Welsh ancestors do not look like the traditions of my German ancestors or French ancestors beyond a certain few surface similarities. The languages and religions, traditional metalwork and buildings, the musical styles, they are not the same. They are even less like Russian or Slavic culture. Reducing everything to a bland, homogenous “whiteness” is assimilationist bullshit.
I was lucky in my family’s retention of at least some traditions. My great grandmother came over in 1915 from Ireland. The Garlic language schools were a little too new for her to have learned the language, but songs and stories were preserved, and passed to her children, and then to my father, who spent nearly all of his life so far in preserving and sharing as much as he can of traditional culture as a musician. It’s not much, not in the face of what’s been lost and how much is being taken and sat upon by boneheads and nationalists. But it’s something, at least.
May Brighid and her forge and hammers do to them as they have earned.
omg, I had a huge conversation with one of my Pakistani friends about this recently.
We were talking about “American” culture = “white” culture and then what is that? What is “traditional” (not-native) American food? Hot dogs? Apple pie? What about clothes? The Pilgrims, the way so many public schools try to dress up our little ones every Thanksgiving? Revolutionary War garb? Civil War? Victorian? How old are we talking? When a white American that’s been completely white-washed of their specific European heritages wants to honor their ancestors, what the eff do they do?
But I can go to the Highland Games and find the exact effing tartan pattern Mr. B’s ancestors wore 500 years ago.
White Americans are desperate for culture. I think that’s one of the big factors behind cultural appropriation (ranking behind imperialism and racism, of course). There’s the “American” culture is “white” culture, yeah, totally, but it’s also a whole lot of nothing. What’s our heritage? 250 years of the current government? There’s not much sense of connection, of being part of a culture deeper and more meaningful than just ourselves which I think is also where a huge part of our toxic patriotism comes in. We’re just so effing desperate to belong. What’s our mythology? Where are our legends? Effing Paul Bunyan and his origins in ad campaign?
My family lists about 8 different European countries as our background but on both sides everyone’s been in the U.S. for over 100 years (150 for most of my dad’s side) and there is just nothing left of any ethnic pride, culture, identity, sense of a homeland, nothing. Just “American.” And we’re not too thrilled about this country right now but the culture is the country is the identity is….. I’m too tired to parse this well.
My partner’s family still talks about being forced to cut ties with the German cousins that remained in the homeland nearly 100 years ago now, so as not to arouse suspicion or cause anyone to doubt their patriotism. That’s when they deliberately stopped teaching their kids German, stopped making their favorite dishes, started making differently styled clothes, etc. They wondered what happened to their relatives during WWII, if they resisted, if they joined, if they survived, what happened to them. But never tried to resume contact.
The melting pot idea is real, y’all. And some of our ancestors took it too darn seriously. What happens when all the European immigrants are stewed up together and melted down and have no connections to who and what they were before and there’s poison in the pot? We get some seriously sick culture.
This forever: “They came to the Americas and thought now we can be on the top and acted out the worst parts of their own (often intergenerational) trauma on everyone vulnerable to them. “
Rest in peace to author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison! She was the first Black American woman to win a Nobel Prize. She was a towering force who spoke about the Black American experience. She has such a special place in my heart and she’s an inspiration to so many. (18 February 1931 - 05 August 2019)
I was manipulated into getting one because my little sister did as well and since I couldn’t find the original baptism certificate, I decided to get this and frame it in my house.
Of course no one needs a certificate to denounce a baptism but it might be comforting to have something physical in your hand.
Yo more people need to know about unbaptism.org I think that would give a lot of people great comfort
“The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the US GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.
Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d'état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of ‘national security.’ The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.”
- Chris Hedges, from “No Way Out but War.”The Chris Hedges Report, 22 May 2022.
“Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.”
