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Comment by tranced | Hacker News Reader

I'm grateful, as an American, that we have access to so many different cultures and cuisines. It's the one thing I missed sorely when I was travelling across Europe.

You're right on the label though, Italian American =/= Italian in the same vein that Chipotle/Taco Bell isn't Mexican. However, there are plenty of institutions in the states that do nail a more purist experience of Mexican or Italian or what have you.

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Italian-American cuisine, including places like Buca di Beppo, are absolutely not in the same vein as Taco Bell or Chipotle. Italian-American cuisine is a unique part of a culture that arose organically from millions of Italian immigrants and their children in the United States. Taco Bell and Chipotle are culture-less money-making ventures with superficial ties to a foreign cuisine.

Tex Mex or Cajun cuisine would be a more apt comparisons.

Taco Bell is junk food Tex Mex and Chipotle is just mass-market Mexicali burritos. You can find Tex Mex and Mexicali analogs to Buca di Beppo.

Is there really such a thing as culture-less food? The fact that Taco Bell, for instance, has struggled so much in some international markets suggests there might be a stronger cultural element to it than you’re giving it credit for. Yes, it’s a business that exists to make money. But the fact that it does make money is because the food connects with millions of people in the US.

There’s something very unique about the US, which is that we’re taught from a young age that “culture” is something that other places have and the US is just a melting pot. But you can’t mix things together for 200+ years and still seriously claim you haven’t created something just as unique as the ingredients that went into it.

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