When I blog, it’s usually spontaneous. Something vaguely interesting happens or an idea strikes me like lightning, I open up my shiny but obese WordPress admin panel, my fingers fumble around on my keyboard, and fifteen or fifty minutes (depending on how distracted I get by the rest of the internetz) later, after I’ve paid my dues to the Grammar Nazi Party and checked my spelling and grammar meticulously, an entry baby is borne of my cerebral uterus.
Sometimes, however, it’s different. Sometimes, something actually comes out of my long list of “things to blog about,” which currently rests in a bloated blue box on the right side of my laptop screen when I open Stickies and has encompassed the same few ideas for months on end. Among those ideas are: my thoughts on curry (which probably doesn’t deserve its own entry, so I’ll just tell you now: curry has held a long-standing animosity with both my taste buds and my sense of smell), my questioning of the idea that anyone still wears watches, and things that confuse me (why people have dubbed Beijing “The Big Cabbage,” why people wear Uggs and shorts in 85-degree weather, why “pescetarian” is spelled the way it is, why I think about weird things like this, etc.).
This is one of those times. This entry has actually been sitting as a bullet-pointed draft since June 16 (so I guess you could say the part of my brain that contains the ideas for this entry has been in labor for almost a month), and the conversation that sparked this entry happened I have no idea how long ago, buuut I’m writing about it now because I like food and I want to talk about food all day and I think all you little monsters (ignore that if you hate Lady Gaga, and I promise I won’t borrow her terms of endearment again) should talk about food with me.
I think every country has its stereotypical meal(s) or type(s) of food — sometimes the stereotype is accurate and describes the food the people of Country X eat most often, and sometimes it’s totally fictitious and the people of Country Y have the right to get offended.
So, here’s what some people and I have come up with as stereotypes or typical meals for several countries:
- United States: French toast or pancakes with eggs and bacon and orange juice for breakfast, burgers or hot dogs and fries for lunch, steak or meat loaf for dinner
- China: Bao zi for breakfast, wonton or some kind of noodle soup or dimsum for lunch, looots of rice and vegetables for dinner
- Italy: Pasta, pizza, gelato, tiramisu
- India: Naan and curry
- Japan: Sushi and tempura
- Spain: Paella
- Canada: Poutine
- Argentina: Good steak
- Korea: Kimchi
- UK: Bland food
- Mexico: Tacos, burritos, quesadillas, churros, anything that ends in -os
- Thailand: Pad thai, curry
- Greece: Gyros
- Turkey: Lentil soup, kebabs, baklava
- France: Croissants, ratatouille, crepes, escargot, anything Americans can’t spell very well
- Germany: Bratwurst, sauerkraut
Do you agree? Disagree? Take offense and think I’m a raging lunatic idiot? Have any other countries to add?