The thing that’s always been weird to me about American food is that they serve you a giant slab of meat as your meal, and then everything else is sides, which leads to the whole “eat your vegetables” problem in the first place.
I think “American food” is a bit too diverse to generalize. You have your steaks and your meatloafs, but plenty of chilis, fajitas, stir fries, beef stews, soups with bits of meat in them, spaghetti-and-meatballs, chicken cut up and put-in-a-salad sort of thing, and plenty of other examples of meat “not in a big slab”.
And yes, I would still consider stuff like Mexican-American, Chinese-American etc. food sufficiently “mainstream” in American culture that they are American food. Maybe most Americans don’t eat those things every day, but they are parts of the culinary repertoire familiar to and used by them.
I have no idea of stats, but I bet most Americans of unspecified heritage would not find tacos, ground meat, stir fry meat, fajitas, chile, particularly exotic by any stretch and many Americans probably eat them, if not cook them themselves, a few times a week etc.
The thing that’s always been weird to me about American food is that they serve you a giant slab of meat as your meal, and then everything else is sides, which leads to the whole “eat your vegetables” problem in the first place.
I think “American food” is a bit too diverse to generalize. You have your steaks and your meatloafs, but plenty of chilis, fajitas, stir fries, beef stews, soups with bits of meat in them, spaghetti-and-meatballs, chicken cut up and put-in-a-salad sort of thing, and plenty of other examples of meat “not in a big slab”.
And yes, I would still consider stuff like Mexican-American, Chinese-American etc. food sufficiently “mainstream” in American culture that they are American food. Maybe most Americans don’t eat those things every day, but they are parts of the culinary repertoire familiar to and used by them.
I have no idea of stats, but I bet most Americans of unspecified heritage would not find tacos, ground meat, stir fry meat, fajitas, chile, particularly exotic by any stretch and many Americans probably eat them, if not cook them themselves, a few times a week etc.