to be honest, I dont know a single fellow american that thinks that “american food” (whatever that even means) is better than just about any other variety. Yet what you said is true nonetheless lmao
Can say the same thing about Hamas and their supporters. We should keep out of this mess. There’s no solution and it won’t end well. Don’t get involved.
If we’re to insist on it being a specific country’s food, it really should be Indian no? It was invented by Indian diaspora in the UK as (IIRC) a take on traditional Indian food using ingredients that are easier to obtain in the UK.
IMO saying tikka masala is British food is like saying General Tso’s Chicken, which was invented by Chinese diaspora in the US for similar reasons, is somehow American food. I don’t think the country it was invented in can really claim credit in either case.
Tikka Masala is an Indian-Inspired dish which was invented in the UK by people with Indian cultural heritage. That’s about as concise a description as you can get without running into difficulties of definition - there’s no consistent way of defining what “being a dish” means without running into contradictions.
In fact General Tso’s is the perfect counter-example: Multiple Chinese people have told me they enthusiastically disown General Tso’s Chicken and explicitly call it American food. So if we say “a dish belongs to a country if it’s invented there”, then Tikka Masala is British (which I agree “feels” wrong); but if we say “a dish belongs to a country if it was inspired by the cuisine of that country”, then General Tso’s is Chinese, which, apparently not!
And that’s without even considering the question of how far “back” you should go with inspiration - what if a dish was inspired by how the Indians used food they got from the Persians who traded it with the Chinese - is it Indian food or Chinese food? (Idk if that’s historically nonsense, but you get my point) Why is the most-recent ancestor more important than the environment of creation?
I respectfully disagree with one major caveat. I’ll get that out of the way first; I think there should be a name for these foods that recognize the creators (e.g. Italian American food is American food that comes from Italian immigrants). We’ve traditionally been bad at giving credit or, worse, using names to mark a cuisine as “other” and weird.
The thing is that there really isn’t a food of a place. People use ingredients that are available and use techniques from the people around them. When cultures interact, they create remixes of cuisine that take unfamiliar ingredients and techniques and create something new.
Let me use the food of my own home, New Mexico, as an example. The food of the region is a mixture of Spanish colonizers, later Mexican immigrants, and Native American foods using a crazy combination of techniques and ingredients from all three. It isn’t Spanish food. It isn’t Mexican food. It isn’t Native American food. It is New Mexican food, a thing that arose from a place and its history. Now, with Asian immigrants moving in, the food has started to incorporate stuff from those cultures too.
Careful, that’s like saying that the guy who made it, who was born in the UK isn’t really British either.
Umm what so you mean by ‘the guy who made it’? Curry has existed in Indian subcontinent, in various varieties, for hundreds of years. It wasn’t first concocted in UK in 1960s.
What I mean is the man who cooked the curry and served it to me and my two companions. He’s of Asian heritage but was born and raised in the UK.
Does that mean that he’s not really British?
What if he sees himself as British. Is he then culturally appropriating Asian food?
Because that’s the argument being used about the food too. That dish was cooked in a kitchen in Birmingham. It has Asian heritage too. But is it not the British food?
I’m making a point about the international nature of food, and the way in which it relates to identity, and you seem determined to take it in bad faith to truss up your own weak argument.
Ok, here, have a win. You’re right. You are so totally right. Well done. Enjoy the glory.
We are talking about importing spices to use them in the country. It doesn’t even matter where the cook is from. Even the most Indian guy can’t prepare an Indian meal without the ingredients
Mate, we’ve been making gravys and thick sauces before the Brits came along. Especially people in coastal regions who use coconut in nearly everything.
I think British people have a very different definition of gravy - more like meat juice thickened with flour and optionally some other stuff like caramel and onions. As I understand, they don’t put vegetables, herbs or spices.
It’s almost like, in such a huge country, there exist people with different tastes.
I, an American, went to India once. The hotel restaurant had a breakfast buffet. On one side was a glorious Indian spread. The other was some nauseating English breakfast spread, with like baked beans (that’s for summer BBQs not breakfast!).
Anyway me and my buddy head straight to the good side, when the hotel staff woman came running over to warn us that it was too spicy. She gently walked us to the gross English food. We confirmed with her, numerous times, that the Indian food was very spicy. We then dug in on the eatible food (the Indian side) and made a friend with the hotel staff lady.
It was somewhat spicy, but amazing.
Some Americans think black pepper is too spicy, some eat ghost peppers as a light snack, I am in between.
I saw this and figured, “I’ll show this bastard what evil Finland has done,” and I found some pretty appalling things…apparently, they don’t like small talk and can be emotionally reserved…and…and…its quite cold.
You know, people are saying it. Very smart people. If we could just rake our forests, we wouldn’t have the fires. They’re nice fires, though, very big. Some say the biggest. But if we’d rake, the fires wouldn’t happen. Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe, they don’t want to talk about the raking. I even asked some very smart people if we could turn off the sun to stop the fires, but I think the “global warming” elitists are worried about their solar. So we have the fires.
“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”
What’s frustrating to me as a person who’s generally against violence is that Israel has a pretty elite secret police force and pretty elite special forces that they (apparently) haven’t used at all to deal with the actual perpetrators of the October 7th massacre & kidnapping.
They just started bombing thousands of civilians to kill dozens, maybe hundreds of Hamas militants.
Like, surely they could have cut the head off the Hamas Snake with surgical strike teams infiltrating Gaza, probably the West Bank, and international locations in Qatar or wherever the leadership is.
Reasonable people could conclude that Israel had to respond to Oct 7th, and that the best target would be Hamas. I can’t fathom how any reasonable people could conclude that bombing groups of people with 90% or more innocent civilians and the rest possible militants is a good response.
I can imagine that UNreasonable people might conclude that all Palestinians are guilty by association (because Hamas is their Netanyahu-supported elected government) and they’re all militants (even the babies). Or those unreasonable people might believe that Palestinians aren’t people worthy of protection.
Israel could simply have not starved the people living in the Gaza strip to death over the course of decades while occasionally flicking airstrikes at them, which they were doing long before October.
I often wonder how people can forget this considering Isreal has been commiting genocide, ethnic cleansing, hate crimes since it’s inception like wtf ?
It's actually surprising that Hamas didn't get more votes in the election, when the other option was getting ruled by Fatah. Who would want the enemy's puppet governing them?
What’s the point of voting when you could have your entire family obliterated at any instant ? Women in palestine have said that their only wish when their children dies in a strike is to find their bodies intact and not pieces by pieces. Just remembering these words is making me sick and They’re living it. Fuck Isreal and anyone that defend it.
I think you are overestimating the value of special forces. We kind of mythologize them with our media, but they are not action heroes. You arnt going to send them into a hostile city where Hamas is not in uniform, planned for the retaliation, had time to prepare, and expect them to come out with low casualties.
Even the US after 9-11 didn’t just send in spec ops after Osama, they went in whole hog. And that was estimated at about 4.5 million casualties all around.
It sucks, but Hamas isn’t going to start wearing uniforms and abiding by the Geneva convention any time soon.
Actually, weren’t they severely embarrassed by those recent attacks, having been totally caught off guard? Maybe we’re overestimating just how good their forces really are.
What you’re saying is during an active war they haven’t heavily publicised what their special forces and secret agents have been doing?
I say heavily because they have mentioned various success their covert units have had, one example is them sneaking into a tunnel while everyone was busy firing rockets at Israel then taking all the secret documents revealing the location of other tunnel networks and fighters.
Of course Israel wants to find the kidnapped people and free them, of course they want to kill or capture the Hamas leaders, and of course they don’t want to kill innocent people. Those aren’t easy things in the situation they’re in.
The leader of Hamas assuming he’s back from his recent trip to Iran is at home in Doha, the local commanders are in their bases deep under hospitals, the fighters are dressed as civilians and of course get added to the civilian casualties lists - especially the teenagers fighting for Hamas…
People act like Israel is in an easy position but that really isn’t close to reality.
fanaticus.social
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