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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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