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Matt Yglesias posted on X an argument in favor of immigration (having trouble finding it now). The argument was basically “you like lasagna right? Well if we didn’t allow Italians to immigrate no lasagna. And now Italians are pretty indistinguishable from other Americans so clearly that will be the case with others such as Somalians. Think of the future lasagna equivalent you’d get with no cost since the immigrants will assimilate.”
Leave aside the HBD argument. It seems to me that one Matt and those who make this argument miss is the massively different technology that exists today that didn’t exist in yesteryear. If you left Italy in the late 1800s, you couldn’t easily get back routinely to see family (whereas now it’s maybe a days travel). You couldn’t FaceTime them at a whim. You couldn’t text message them. The populations were truly cut off.
It is likely harder to assimilate in the modern world where immigrant populations are not cut off as opposed to the old world. So pointing to historic examples of assimilation do not hold for today because the factors have changed. Now maybe you still think there will be assimilation for different reasons. But you need to make that argument. Comparing like and unlike however cannot be your argument.
I don’t think this is some kind of groundbreaking point but why would presumably smart people like Yglesias make such a sloppy argument? Maybe they aren’t smart. Maybe they don’t encounter enough arguments to the contrary. Or maybe they are propagandists. I can’t help but think repeating a catechism has value to building political unity even (perhaps especially if) it’s fake.
Why does it always come back to food?
No, I don't believe that this is just an idiosyncrasy of Yglesias, or just a fun example that he picked for no real reason. This is a recurring pattern. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard throughout my life "we live in a world with a large diversity of cultures, for example, different people eat different types of food...". Food is the first thing you think of when you think of "culture"? Really? The "we need immigrants for their food" argument is not unique to Yglesias, this is a known talking point.
Just last night I was having a conversation with a woman who claimed that she had a low opinion of Italy because when she went there on vacation, she didn't like the food. It's utterly mind-boggling to me that someone would judge an entire country based on such superficial criteria, but, here we are.
(I mean, frankly I should already know why it always comes back to food: Nietzsche suggested in GoM that a people's philosophical outlook is an epiphenomenon of their dietary choices. Perhaps this is the grug-genius alliance in action, and I am the seething midwit who insists on being unnecessarily contrarian. I dunno man... it just strikes me as an obliviousness of the fact that people even have a psychological or spiritual existence that extends beyond their material means of sustenance.)
Its low effort? I think that is it. Its difficult to articulate why Ethiopian culture is a boon to the District of Colombia if one is discussing civics, governance, literature, etc. That requires actual knowledge. Its easy (and in fact every time I visit DC, someone insists I go to their favorite Ethiopian restaurant with them) to throw down $50 for some food. It is similar to how most people who hate the Confederacy or Nazis don't know what Northerners or American Soldiers thought of said regimes in 1864 & 1944 respectively.
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Most Westerners won't ever interact with immigrants (or locals when they vacation abroad in poor countries) beyond a context of low-level service industries so food is the obvious thing to associate with them. It is also in the interest of the immigrant groups to hype their cuisine since ethnic restaurant industry is very common way to earn good money if you have no capital/know-how/education that is valid in the new country.
You might also hear from some less educated wanna-be liberal Westerners that "<immigrant_group> works hard and is good at <construction/farm labour/cleaning/etc>" as a praise. But this line of thinking will feel dangerous to higher-mind people as they will recognize they are praising brown people's propensity for mindless drudgery, or at worst a modern system of quasi-slavery quite often.
And almost everything else about any poor immigrant group's culture beyond ethnic food and cheap labour (and maybe fun weddings) will feel very icky to average Westerner so they would rather not think about it beyond any extremely sanitized context like Buddha statues and yoga studios.
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Can I ask where you live and your cultural background? Food is perhaps the great cultural ambassador while simultaneously many Americans are divorced from food as culture. This is why veganism and Soylent can both thrive here. Imagine trying to integrate either one into family meals with three generations at the table. Nonna/yiayia/abuela poors everyone a glass? Soylent is not just a replacement for food, but for the meal itself. This makes sense when meals lack value beyond base nutritional requirements and expedience.
Many Americans in my experience also lack awareness of food as culture or that they are missing something (exactly like the people who are blind but don’t know it, and whose family doesn’t know it either). See the Midwest at large, and to a lesser extent, generic white people elsewhere.
It makes sense to me that we first consider food as culture, particularly amongst the coastal liberals, who have already personally abandoned religion en bloc - we can’t say much about the culture salience of something that is at best, invisible to them. What other lens would they use at that point?
I live in America and I like anime.
Can a meal -- particularly a certain type of meal, repeated by custom on a certain schedule, with the appropriate pomp and circumstance, etc -- be imbued with deep ritualistic significance? Indubitably. But then, it's not just the literal food that acts as the "bearer" of culture alone in this case, but the body of ritual surrounding it, and the network of social and historical relations that that ritual exists in.
Immigrants coming to the US to sell their wares like any other fungible anonymized commodity on the free market would then represent the destruction of culture rather than its continuance, because the network of human relations that constituted the actual center of culture has been obviated. (At the very least, people who think that eating lasagna is the same thing as "experiencing another culture" are actually doing nothing of the sort.)
See here.
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I agree with you, it's a recurring pattern. Partly just because of the convenience of food. You don't need to learn a foreign language or study its history to understand it, hell these days you don't have to leave your house. You can get ethnic food delivered to your door, and stuff it down your throat without a thought. It's easy and fun to try different foods that way, but also considered hip and high-status to try lots of exotic ethnic foods, the more exotic the better.
It takes a lot more effort to engage with other parts of foreign culture. Listening to something like Indian sitar music or Mongolian throat singing, and it probably sounds weird and boring to most of us who didn't grow up with it. Much easier to listen to something like Kpop which is engineered to sound exactly like Western pop music, even including some English phrases and Western-style clothes. It's even harder to sit on a multi-hour foreign religious service. I've tried that (for Buddhism and Mexican catholicism) and found myself thinking "wtf am I doing here..." I imagine it would be even worse for someone who's less open-minded than me and believes strongly in their own religion.
What I enjoy the most is to actually spend time with people from foreign cultures, talking to them in depth in real life, and really getting to know them. It's fascinating! But I rarely get the chance to do that even when I'm travelling- people are busy, there's the language barrier, and many people just don't want to open up about their life that much. A lot of Westerners now have sort of learned that it's impolite to talk about certain topics, so they just kind of run away from talking about them. Once I read an interview with a student from an African country studying at an American college, and she said it threw her off how little anyone wanted to talk about her country. She was expecting all sorts of curious questions, but everyone was either not interested or afraid of being offensive, so it left her with little to talk about. That made me sad.
But there's also the darker part. When you really learn about foreign cultures, it's not all tasty food and fun dances. In fact, most of it isn't. You don't have to dig much before you encounter something that makes you think "wow, that's awful." Well, awful by my standards, but of course there's lot of stuff in my American culture that they think is awful so.... we just have to live and let live. I can tolerate their extreme religion fanatacism if they can tolerate our incessant and disgusting advertising. Different cultures will also often have views way outside the Western mainstream norm on things like feminism, democracy, human rights, education, sexuality, or even just what foods are clean enough to eat.
For example: I've spent a lot of time in Seoul, and it always makes me laugh how awkward the tourism is there for western tourists. They come in expecting this fantasy land they saw in Kdramas and Kpop videos. They want to experience "traditional Korean culture," but in a way that makes for a cute instagram story. They're not prepared for stuff like:
All of that is culture too! you take the bad with the good. But that's intolerable for most western tourists. Much more comfortable to just eat some rice and grilled meat, take a picture of yourself wearing a colorful robe at the palace, buy a fan, and let the culture stop there.
I'm not really surprised about the other things, but I've heard from many sources the dog thing is rather exaggerated and not that common or culturally entrenched. I mean, for me it's like one of the most known memes about Koreans but I always thought it's being quite far from the actual situation. Have I been wrong?
yeah like the other guy said, it's not really something you'd see as a tourist, and it's not at all common for younger generations, but used to be common for older generations. Apparently it was just banned last year, but I have no idea how effective that ban is. I'll be the countryside still has places for it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat_consumption_in_South_Korea
It was more common several decades ago, but it's in decline. The people who have eaten it before are of the older generation, and most of them do not consume it regularly.
If you're talking to a Korean online (especially in English), they probably have never eaten dog before.
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It’s the only basic, physiological need which has room for variety.
Since the Industrial Revolution, clothing has gotten into that territory, and since the Sexual Revolution…well.
But food has a head start measured in millennia.
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If I can rant for a second I'm going to say this person has utterly terrible taste, or more likely it is a skill issue - it's easy to end up at terrible tourist only places and order American Italian dishes instead of actual Italian food.
It is also possible to order Italian staples in the wrong regions and get mediocre food. Ordering pizza in Rome or carbonara in Bologna is like ordering a well-done steak in Paris - it's a signal to the kitchen that you don't care about food quality.
What do you order in those two regions?
In Rome, you order pasta rather than pizza. The local specialities are arabiata, amatriciana, carbonara, and giricia.
In Bologna, the local pasta dishes are the heavier, meatier ones, with ragu the most famous (known outside Bologna as spaghetti bolognese). Bologna is also the spiritual home of filled pasta dishes like tortellini and ravioli.
Luckily, it's the modern era now, and Italy has modern infrastructure. You can get pizza in Rome now, or risotto in Bologna, or really whatever you want in any major city. You can even get (gasp) non-Italian food! And sometimes (double gasp) it's actually better, because the local specialty places are just as likely to be cutting corners to save money.
But of course that's not what tourists want. They want to go to a very specific area, eat a very specific thing that got invented there 500 years ago, take a picture of themselves eating in front of a romantic backdrop, and then brag to there friends that it was just so much better than what you'd get back home, even if the restaurant back home is cooking the exact same food with better equipment and higher quality ingrediants. They'd lose massive hipster cred if they were seen eating the "wrong" food in Italy, even if they were eating it with actual Italian locals because locals also like to eat a variety of foods and they're not going to eat spaghetti bolognese every single day. They can appreciate a good kebab or chicken tikka massala just as much as anyone.
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I'd say that food is a massive and very important aspect of culture. Its behind language in importance. But maybe as important as religion. Definitely more important than holidays (since many holidays are heavily defined by religion and food).
You eat food every day. You share meals with family and the people you like most in the world. Food can lock in memories, and eating it again can bring back those memories. Its one area where attempts to relentlessly optimize everything enjoyable and unique out of life have mostly failed (meal replacement options were only ever popular in small enclaves of weird programmers and rationalist). Food is one the first ways people like to meet their romantic partners. Food is how we celebrate.
Aside from language, what is more foundational to the lived experience of a culture than its food?
Off the top of my head: attitudes and practices surrounding religion, childbearing (are you encouraged to even have kids at all, or at you an antinatalist?), cohabitation with immediate family and/or extended family, career choice (are you encouraged to stick with the family business, or do you have an individualist culture where "doing your own thing" is an aspiration?), different types of long-term planning (are you a square if you refuse to blow your paycheck right away, or are you an idiot if you do blow it?), respect towards elders and superiors (how unthinkable would it be to challenge your boss's ideas during a meeting?), freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression, sexual ethics, etc.
To be clear, there is no "lived experience of a culture" for a tourist on a one week vacation, that's an absurdity. The "lived experience of a culture" can only unfold over a lifetime. A culture is a concrete mode of life, as distinguished from other possible concrete modes of life.
Food is not culture. Foot binding, widow burning, jus primae noctis -- that's culture. To the extent that we increasingly find genuine cultural difference to be unimaginable, this is only a statement about the shrinking horizon of our imagination, and not a statement about the nature of culture.
We just fundamentally disagree here. I don't see any path to reconciliation. I didn't realize there was such a large disconnect on the meaning and essence of culture.
But this is also a values disconnect. It's subjective.
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Oh! Now I understand why no one likes the English.
Harder to be obese when our food is so terrible
And yet we manage!
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People love to rag on English food, but I don't really think that's fair. Any culture that comes up with a dish as great as fish and chips deserves respect.
...it's literally just breaded fish with French fries. How can one claim credit for coming up with that?
... Because they did come up with it? I'm not seeing the problem.
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White fish + white flour + white potatoes, all cooked in neutral flavour vegetable oil. If anything warrants the reputation for bland beige British food it's fish and chips. It's not even cheap, it's practically the same price as a takeaway chicken curry with rice.
Who cares? It's absolutely delicious, one of the all-time great dishes. I don't give a damn about the color.
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Also pies (pork / game / steak & ale etc.), bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, toad in the hole, Shepherd's / Cottage Pie (not a pie despite the name), Lancashire hot-pot, sticky toffee pudding, plum/Christmas pudding, Victoria sponge cake, Eton Mess, chutneys, marmalades, roast pheasant, the Full English, the Sunday Roast...
English food had a dip because of the wars and the temporary loss of food culture, but more than that it's suffered terribly from central heating & reduced global exercise resulting in a drive for low-calorie food.
There is also an earlier dip because we urbanised before the development of refrigeration, meaning that there were a lot of people with very limited access to fresh food. The other country of which this is true is Belgium, which is not coincidentally the other country whose cuisine is a joke and whose signature dish is cheap seafood and chips.
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Fair, it's not just fish and chips. That is the one that comes to mind most readily for me (probably because I'm from the Midwest and we love fried fish there), but the Brits have given us other good food as well.
Not complaining, just appending! I want British food to be more generally known, I think there's a lot to offer. We just need to find a format that works.
A friend noted that English food would have been eaten much more communally in the old days, buffet / feast style - it was much easier to do portion control when you had a table full of pies and hams and cakes and things and you just took a little of each and the rest went back for the next day.
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There are actually plenty of widely beloved British dishes, they’re just so widely adopted that they’re not considered uniquely English by most people(world spanning empire will do that to you) so distinctively British dishes are things like beans on toast, mushy peas, and warm beer.
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Always found it hilarious that they explored and conquered the entire globe in the hunt for spices then used exactly NONE of said spices in the food.
We traded the spices to pay for tea and sugar. Priorities!
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I can't believe this Reddit tier joke has made it to a motte thread. Aside from being a decade old and barely funny the first time, it's not even accurate.
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Balti, Chicken Tikka Masala, Vindaloo. No spices in British food, no sir.
[For Americans not aware of the history, all of these dishes originated in the UK and are largely consumed by white British people]
Portuguese, is it not?
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My tongue is mostly in cheek when I say this, but those items are generally not on the menu when I venture into an English Pub (here in America, to be clear).
Also Irish food is quite tasty, maybe owing to the need to get extremely creative when potatoes make up 80% of the diet, so I do respect UK food if we include that as well.
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As with teetotaler drug dealers, gay fashion designers or eunuch harem overseers, it can be advantageous to be immune to the temptations of your own supply.
I'm imagining a Captain on a British East India Company ship catching a crew member shaking a spoonful of nutmeg onto his rations and looking on in indignant disapproval as he orders 5 lashes. "Hands off the product, lads."
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