This is maybe a bit tangential, and I might’ve mentioned this before, but honestly I kinda miss being a little kid and telling my schoolyard friends that “when I was in America, I got to drink root beer” — and they’d be like, “wow, Americans are so weird and wild, letting children drink beer!”, before I’d reveal that root beer is actually a soft drink, and then we’d have a good laugh. Indeed, back in those days it felt like being an American gave me some sort of esoteric insider knowledge that my peers weren’t privy to — I even remember translating English-language place names in the United States into Norwegian for the sake of my peers who couldn’t yet understand English, not realizing that the English-language names I’d learned were originally translations of names in now-endangered Indigenous languages.
And I have memories of going to “American” stores like the one in this picture. I think that even when I was a kid, I had mixed feelings about them. How on the one hand it felt like it affirmed that feeling of having esoteric insider knowledge, to go to these cramped stores that clearly didn’t see much traffic and were sort of out of the way, and being presented with all of these names and labels unfamiliar to my peers… But on the other hand, so much of the American stores felt “plastic” for lack of a better term. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what exactly I wanted “American” to mean to me, but, like, Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs was certainly not it — stuff like that was just corporations preying on the health of children, right? It was a tasty treat, maybe, but there was nothing special or good about it. Whenever I was in the occupation zone I’d honestly look at my relatives and I’d think, “You people actually eat this poison outside of summertime?”
In any case, nowadays with globalization and cultural imperialism and social media and online streaming and online shopping etc, there’s just fewer uniquely American things. I can’t speak for the exact extent, since I would’ve noticed cultural imperialism less as a child, but it feels like even in the course of my fairly short life that the presence of Usonian shit in Norway has grown exponentially compared to when I was a kid. Nowadays there’s even Dollar Stores in Norway, literally called Dollar Store, in English, despite the fact that Norway doesn’t even use dollars as its currency.
Peculiarly, though, to my knowledge root beer still remains unpopular and comparatively difficult to get in Norway, and root beer is also incidentally one of the few* things that one could genuinely call “American culture” — as in, root beer isn’t a product of cultural appropriation, nor a part of the Anglo puritan core of whiteness, nor a product of consumerism for lack of a better term. Like, we literally do not know who wrote the first root beer recipe, all we know is that by the 1830s, recipes for root beer were being written down and passed around.
*I am being a bit hyperbolic, but I really do wonder how much “American culture” would be left if we got rid of everything that was stolen, puritan, patented or copyrighted, or invented to make a quick buck — or perhaps there are better criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.
I think the only “American” things are the foodways of displaced populations from different parts of the world colliding with each other in climates that required their palette of ingredients to shift and reconfigure.
it’s a somewhat recent area of scholarship, mostly because it appreciates how domestic workers and farmworking families at the margins were the ones who lead the way in experimentation and intergenerational knowledge transfer of traditional food wisdom. notably, not elite chefs or wealthy patrons demanding “authentic” experiences from whatever old world they imagine is most fashionable to consume in that day.
most of mass produced / industrial foods were inspired by these innovations, but they are pale shadows of the real thing. it is the stubborn and multigenerational households of multi-ethnic influence that are still finding new permutations, combining Grandma’s recipes with different vegetables that come from the nearby ethnic market nobody is connected to by descent. the East Asian family who makes Mediterranean influenced food, the West African guy who puts fried okra in burritos. the Indian grocery store that has more colors of lentils than there are in a rainbow alongside the spice aisle of the gods right in the middle of the historically Mexican neighborhood. just people getting weird where everything collides.
it’s happening everywhere as peoples are displaced and dislocated and resisting the pressure to eat the shelf stable poison that comes in the box.
This is maybe a bit tangential, and I might’ve mentioned this before, but honestly I kinda miss being a little kid and telling my schoolyard friends that “when I was in America, I got to drink root beer” — and they’d be like, “wow, Americans are so weird and wild, letting children drink beer!”, before I’d reveal that root beer is actually a soft drink, and then we’d have a good laugh. Indeed, back in those days it felt like being an American gave me some sort of esoteric insider knowledge that my peers weren’t privy to — I even remember translating English-language place names in the United States into Norwegian for the sake of my peers who couldn’t yet understand English, not realizing that the English-language names I’d learned were originally translations of names in now-endangered Indigenous languages.
And I have memories of going to “American” stores like the one in this picture. I think that even when I was a kid, I had mixed feelings about them. How on the one hand it felt like it affirmed that feeling of having esoteric insider knowledge, to go to these cramped stores that clearly didn’t see much traffic and were sort of out of the way, and being presented with all of these names and labels unfamiliar to my peers… But on the other hand, so much of the American stores felt “plastic” for lack of a better term. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what exactly I wanted “American” to mean to me, but, like, Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs was certainly not it — stuff like that was just corporations preying on the health of children, right? It was a tasty treat, maybe, but there was nothing special or good about it. Whenever I was in the occupation zone I’d honestly look at my relatives and I’d think, “You people actually eat this poison outside of summertime?”
In any case, nowadays with globalization and cultural imperialism and social media and online streaming and online shopping etc, there’s just fewer uniquely American things. I can’t speak for the exact extent, since I would’ve noticed cultural imperialism less as a child, but it feels like even in the course of my fairly short life that the presence of Usonian shit in Norway has grown exponentially compared to when I was a kid. Nowadays there’s even Dollar Stores in Norway, literally called Dollar Store, in English, despite the fact that Norway doesn’t even use dollars as its currency.
Peculiarly, though, to my knowledge root beer still remains unpopular and comparatively difficult to get in Norway, and root beer is also incidentally one of the few* things that one could genuinely call “American culture” — as in, root beer isn’t a product of cultural appropriation, nor a part of the Anglo puritan core of whiteness, nor a product of consumerism for lack of a better term. Like, we literally do not know who wrote the first root beer recipe, all we know is that by the 1830s, recipes for root beer were being written down and passed around.
*I am being a bit hyperbolic, but I really do wonder how much “American culture” would be left if we got rid of everything that was stolen, puritan, patented or copyrighted, or invented to make a quick buck — or perhaps there are better criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.
I feel like Americans are weird for not letting children drink beer
I think the only “American” things are the foodways of displaced populations from different parts of the world colliding with each other in climates that required their palette of ingredients to shift and reconfigure.
it’s a somewhat recent area of scholarship, mostly because it appreciates how domestic workers and farmworking families at the margins were the ones who lead the way in experimentation and intergenerational knowledge transfer of traditional food wisdom. notably, not elite chefs or wealthy patrons demanding “authentic” experiences from whatever old world they imagine is most fashionable to consume in that day.
most of mass produced / industrial foods were inspired by these innovations, but they are pale shadows of the real thing. it is the stubborn and multigenerational households of multi-ethnic influence that are still finding new permutations, combining Grandma’s recipes with different vegetables that come from the nearby ethnic market nobody is connected to by descent. the East Asian family who makes Mediterranean influenced food, the West African guy who puts fried okra in burritos. the Indian grocery store that has more colors of lentils than there are in a rainbow alongside the spice aisle of the gods right in the middle of the historically Mexican neighborhood. just people getting weird where everything collides.
it’s happening everywhere as peoples are displaced and dislocated and resisting the pressure to eat the shelf stable poison that comes in the box.