I've largely stopped trying to say anything like "I do x because of y cultural influence." Like: "My mom's German, so..." I often have no way of knowing if my mom does that thing because it's a widespread thing in German culture or if that's just a thing my mom does and it's got little or nothing to do with her being born and raised in Germany.
(I've run into Germans who do the opposite of something my mom does that I thought was representative of German culture and been told their way was the norm in Germany. I threw my hands in the air and made my peace with "not everything my mom does is representative of most Germans.")
We routinely think X person is from Y culture, so X person is representative of Y culture and it's frequently just absolutely not true at all. Fascinating that this fact leads to the works of essentially cultural outcasts coming home again and being embraced as "one of us" and someone we are proud to claim as a representative of our culture when they were originally "that loser we want nothing to do with, so they had to leave the country to succeed."
The one thing I learned from the Ukrainian and Polish elders in my life: the people in the next village are idiots and have no idea how to make proper pierogis.
I have a theory about language, which I've formulated by living all over the world for 50 years.
It goes like this: If you have two villages, maybe separated by a lake, or by a mountain, and one village has goats, the other has sheep - or maybe one of these villages has brown goats and the other just white goats - or maybe there are a couple of cows in one and a coal mine at the other - then it doesn't matter how close these villages are, they will fight for their own dialect, which will eventually become a new language.
The real question is how the Polish/Ukrainian elders feel about those Ukrainian/Polish elders and those weird things they eat, because ‘those sure as hell are NOT pierogis!!’ Or worse ask the Romanian elders in my life and they’ll gladly tell you no one but there mother makes colțunași right, let alone foreigners (which of course includes the family up the street).
> We routinely think X person is from Y culture, so X person is representative of Y culture and it's frequently just absolutely not true at all.
It's trickier than that. It's almost always true. But culture has many, many dimensions. Nobody can be typical in every dimension. But if you choose a cultural element at random, and then examine a person's expression of that element, you're very likely to find that they are indeed typical of their native culture.
My father spent 26.5 years in the Army. He spent 18.5 years overseas in various places.
I've thought long and hard about such things. TLDR of a few decades of contemplating such: People tend to move elsewhere because they don't fit in and aren't really happy where they are.
The Pizza Effect explicitly describes things that got popular elsewhere first before being embraced and celebrated back home. This fits with my observation that it's the "misfits" who tend to leave.
This includes my mother who left home as a teenager, moved to another country and never went home again. She had excellent reasons for doing so. This is not intended to suggest that she was wrong for failing to go along to get along.
I think a lot of people that leave have high standards, refuse to compromise them and also don't want to fight with people they care about. So they leave to live by a value of "live and let live."
Which might actually help explain why the Pizza Effect exists. If your best and brightest get tired of your shit, go elsewhere with their good ideas and market them as "a cool thing from my home country" and it gets successful, this could very well explain why this happens at all.
I have read that real change only happens when the old guard dies out. Most people never change their minds and actively work to suppress the success of people who are a threat to their position at the top of the pecking order. So real change only happens when they drop dead, thereby making space for newcomers with new ideas to take their place.
This describes some migration, but by no means all of it, and by sheer head-count is probably not typical.
For America, the case I'm most familiar with, people tended to settle in large waves, and start in ethnic enclaves in coastal cities. The first person to move was probably a misfit, but was followed by dozens of cousins who were just not thriving, due to local conditions (nothing to inherit being a very popular one).
These enclaves had, and have, dual forces of assimilation into the baseline culture, and the natural attempt to rebuild what is best about the home they've left behind.
Point being that you don't have to be dissatisfied with e.g. Sicilian culture, if you're offered an opportunity to move to New York, keep speaking Italian, and have a piece of the promised American Dream if you work hard, at least for your kids. It's an attractive offer, if you don't stand to inherit and can't find a job.
Doesn't imply you don't want to keep eating what you already like.
I'm obviously not talking about what could rightly be described as refugees. I'm talking about people who moved away from areas that more or less worked, just not for them for some reason.
I moved around a fair bit as a military wife. Every single move caused dietary changes, in spite of dietary restrictions and being a creature of habit.
There are always things that I'm happy to eat, but they are more convenient, cheaper, whatever in one place than another. I learned to like pineapple the first time I lived in Washington state. You can get it fresh year round at reasonable prices. Growing up in Georgia, I mostly knew pineapple as canned pineapple and couldn't fathom why anyone ate this stuff. But fresh pineapple is entirely different.
Even if you are trying to faithfully recreate dishes from back home, they will tend to morph a bit because conditions are different and you just can't find the exact same ingredients or recreate the exact same processes, etc.
So some things morph naturally, without a plan.
I have also found that with travel, I was able to discover foods that work for me that are similar to favorite foods and more accurately determine why, exactly, I like those foods. This may not happen if you don't travel because X works, X is available consistently, you have no particular reason to think too deeply about "but exactly why do I like X?"
Still, to move and adapt to new settings arguably requires the first wave to be "the best and brightest." If you aren't that bright, you better up your game if you want to survive. I don't doubt that happens at times.
I'm not talking about refugees per se either, simply the median immigrant. Who, in the United States at least, was neither a refugee nor solitary, but someone who moved from the home of their co-ethnics to an enclave of the same.
I've done a fair amount of migration of my own, over the years. Your observations concerning it are familiar. This:
> Even if you are trying to faithfully recreate dishes from back home, they will tend to morph a bit because conditions are different and you just can't find the exact same ingredients or recreate the exact same processes, etc.
Is a solid description of the mechanism (one at least) behind the Pizza Effect.
I'm not trying to win an argument. I don't think either of these explanations needs to trump the other.
I homeschooled my twice exceptional sons and did some pro bono professional work for an education organization as support for that effort. This helped me get to a gifted conference where I was a low level presenter.
So I've thought quite a lot about people that don't readily fit in, what makes them not fit in and how people successfully cope. That background helps inform my opinion that some folks recognize that it's an uphill battle they really don't want to fight and that going elsewhere is the better option.
People who are somewhat socially savvy show up in new environments and often know how to package themselves to their advantage. If you are strange to people in your home town, you're the weirdo everyone picks on. If you go somewhere new, you may be able to package yourself as "exotic" and interesting rather than the weirdo no one wants to listen to.
It's fine if the entire internet thinks I'm silly and clueless and uninformed and can't support my argument. I'm not making an argument. I'm just talking and trying to explain my point of view, why I have it, where it comes from and why I think it's worth contemplating.
I realize that not how most people engage. Most people on the internet are arguing a thing, expect there to be two and only two points of view and insist one of those needs to win and the other needs to lose. I see life in a much more Technicolor, vibrant fashion and I don't even desire to reduce it down to shades of grey. There's so much more to life than that and I like the complexity of it.
Have a great evening, or whatever time it is where your body resides on planet Earth. I'm gonna play some games and deal with my life.
> If you go somewhere new, you may be able to package yourself as "exotic"
That's one of my favourite things about working/living away from home - you can present your personal quirks as national quirks, and people accept them without batting an eyelid
No one in the Deep South ever saw me as sounding or behaving "Southern." My father was career military and originally from Indiana. My mother is a German immigrant. I never really fit in anywhere while growing up.
When I hit Utah, people began identifying me as Southern. My Southern accent is more apparent to the ear of people west of the Rockies than anywhere else and they are happy to talk about me as having "Southern charm and manners."
It's easier to say nice things about a person if you chalk it up to their culture. There's less danger of it going weird and problematic places than if you attribute it to them as an individual.
It doesn't put pressure on them to be perfect and always live up to your high expectations of them. They get to still be a person with good days and bad who can't always get it right while being given credit for generally being more of something than is typical for most people around these parts.
On a lighter note, I've always hated pineapple, even fresh, until a friend put salt on one. Salted pineapple is super. I don't know how common this is around the world, she grew up in Vietnam.
I wish to put emphasis on this part of your thoughts, due to personal experiences:
"I think a lot of people that leave have high standards, refuse to compromise them and also don't want to fight with people they care about. So they leave to live by a value of "live and let live.""
Depending on ones temperament the phenomenon could be called chased away or traitor or something in between but whatever we call it it exists prominently in almost all society (well, all that I came across).
I wouldn't go that far considering it the reason behind the pizza effect (plain old tourist visiting each other's country might as well generate pizza effect, or just a simple movie as we seen with Spectre), but definitely have influence on each other.
I really like that phrasing. I had not heard it before.
I did reply to you earlier, but I'm running a fever, short of sleep and angsting about a pandemic. So I deleted it, cuz reasons. I do appreciate you chiming in.
I think a lot of people lean on saying that they're doing X "because of tradition" because it's socially easier than saying that you like it yourself.
Vague memory of a story of someone who was walking across America (or similar giant arduous travel project) who found that, if he said he was doing it because he wanted to, he got looked at weird, but if he said he was doing it for a bet everyone understood immediately. The latter anchors him in society, while having your own preferences makes you a loose cannon.
This leads to people travelling the world looking for a tradition to adopt, because that's "easier" than starting your own tradition.
I crossed the country from Georgia to California while homeless. I walked a lot and accepted rides.
People routinely wanted to impose some larger explanation, like "Are you doing a fundraiser? Are you trying to raise awareness for something?"
"I'm too poor to travel by planes, trains or automobiles" is an alien concept and large parts of this country go out of their way to make it difficult to walk somewhere. Walking as a means of travel ought to be some kind of basic right, but it's actually illegal in many places because you can't walk on the limited access roads and there are no other roads through there.
Nah. Rides covered most of it. We walked 10 to 17 miles a day and rides could cover a lot more than that in very little time.
I was evicted December 31st. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to me.
It was a three day weekend and I slept in a tent and I wasn't initially planning on quitting my job. After three days in a tent, I felt better than I had in years and decided I wasn't going back to my job to re-expose myself to more Sick Building Syndrome stuff, so I emailed my "I quit" notice to my boss and me and my sons left town on foot.
We arrived in Port Aransas, Texas about January 15th because someone had picked us up in Florida who had a flexible schedule. She said she would drive us an hour, but she really enjoyed talking with me and said something like "I'd drive you farther if I could afford the gas" and I said I would pay for a tank of gas.
So she made a couple of phone calls to clear her schedule for the next day and drove us to Houston, Texas. The next day, some very, very sincerely Christian lady stopped to pick us up and I explained we were heading to Port Aransas and she too just dropped everything and drove us to Port Aransas.
We stayed in Port Aransas for a month. The goal was to not freeze to death or lose toes to frostbite while crossing the Rockies in the dead of winter.
We left Port Aransas February 15th and arrived in downtown San Diego about six weeks later in late March. Actual travel time was about 7.5 or 8 weeks total. Even with a month in Port Aransas, we were in San Diego in under three months.
To be fair, we did not start at the coast in Georgia. We started on the other Georgia border, up against Alabama.
Reminds me in the late 1940's the USAF was losing pilots and jets to 'human factors'. They thought to solve it by hiring a statistician to measure their pilots and determine the average pilot. The better the design cockpits and controls around. That guy found there wasn't an average pilot. You have more combinations of foot/hand size, arm/leg length, torso's etc than you have pilots.
With culture ultimately everyone's some sort of deviant.
I found when I visited Prague a few years back that the Czech cuisine that I grew up with had apparently managed to be completely unmodified from the original in its American version. The same cannot be said for Mexican cuisine in the US. I suspect part of that might be that very few people without Czech heritage (or Czech-adjacent, it seems the cuisine is fairly uniform across much of the old Austro-Hungarian empire) eat Czech food in the US.
My theory is that the descendant generations from immigrants to America don't care to modify the family recipes at all, to keep traditions going, and there are generally not any outside influences to change this, so the food stays frozen in time from 100-200 years ago. Like, your Irish American neighbors are not going to weigh in with ideas on how to improve or evolve the squash strudel.
For what it's worth, Germans from the Bohemian/Sudetengau area make some dishes much the same as Czech. There's no substitute for bread dumplings with pork and sauerkraut! Or plum dumplings the one month in the year the right kind of plums are available. But when you get to other areas of Germany, they all have different ideas about how to make dumplings.
Foreign foods are modified by the locals according to a lack of ingredients, and on the basis of the local palates.. in Austria, for example, I've gotten used to eating ultra-bland Asian or Mexican food, since Austrians rarely have the disposition to weather the more exotic spices.
>Overall, Prague is a must if you’re going to be in Europe, just be aware of the time of year you go. We had a surprisingly decent Mexican meal at a place called CzechMex. We also ate a ton of goulash which was a tasty, hearty way to stay comfortable in Prague’s blistering, windy February cold. Prague Castle and the Charles Bridge are the main sites and you can easily complete the whole trip in no more than two days. -- Keenan
>Think Innerview: Federico Salas, Mexican Ambassador to the Czech Republic
>THINK: So, where do you go for Mexican cuisine in Prague?
>SALAS: My House. It’s the best place to have Mexican food. I don’t cook but fortunately enough, there is a person who has been cooking at the residence for 15 years now. She cooks Czech very well, but she also knows how to cook Mexican. So we’re developing a new style of cuisine which I’m calling CzechMex.
>THINK: Have you tried some of the Mexican restaurants here?
>Yes, but the places in Prague are more in the nature of TexMex, less traditional. Good Mexican food is not just about the spices, it’s also the nature of knowing how to mix the ingredients. The one thing that does surprise me is that Mexican Food is really popular – authentic or not. And it seems that people are drinking more and more tequila...which is a good thing.
>Czech-Mex Bakery & Cafe is famous for it's amazing breakfast and brunch menu with Texas and Czech tastes. We're kind of a big deal at lunch time in Corpus Christi. Come see what the fuss is about!
>Best Kolaches in Texas. We've been accused of that title. And Texas is a big place. Our delicious kolaches are what made us a Corpus Christi favorite! They bring out the Czech-Mex in all of us!
I believe this kind of over simplification or representation exists for many aspects of life, this is how our brain copes with complex matters (I believe).
Which I understand but do not like or willing to accept when it comes to me as it is being lazy (or dumb) behavior sparing the observer from the job of real discovery of the subject at hand leading to prejudice or much worse destructive practices (e.g. racism).
(I've run into Germans who do the opposite of something my mom does that I thought was representative of German culture and been told their way was the norm in Germany. I threw my hands in the air and made my peace with "not everything my mom does is representative of most Germans.")
We routinely think X person is from Y culture, so X person is representative of Y culture and it's frequently just absolutely not true at all. Fascinating that this fact leads to the works of essentially cultural outcasts coming home again and being embraced as "one of us" and someone we are proud to claim as a representative of our culture when they were originally "that loser we want nothing to do with, so they had to leave the country to succeed."