Wasn't expecting to see this here. I created this article about 10 years ago, when I was a lot more active on Wikipedia. Every time I remember this article I keep expecting it to get deleted sooner or later, but somehow it's made it this long. Mostly a matter of finding and adding enough references that mention the phrase I guess. (Some of the recent additions don't…)
One thing I'll point out is that the effect as originally described is about things that always existed in their place of origin, but became more popular / accepted (improved in reputation) after gaining a warm reception/prestige elsewhere. (The examples here of things popularly associated with X culture despite not originating in place X are interesting too, though!)
Edit: Sorry for a tangential aside, but I just looked into the history of this article, and IMO it's representative of many Wikipedia articles (and not how either the general public or Wikipedia regulars think articles get written):
The article has 102 revisions, and all of them have contributed to its present form… who would we say “wrote” it? See the late Aaron Swartz's “Who Writes Wikipedia?” at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Swartz's article mentioned at the end is interesting, and contradicts Wales' study, who measured by number of edits per contributor instead of number of contributed words per contributor.
"When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content."
Oh, hi. I recently learned this about a few months ago. I contributed the Mexico City Day of the Dead parade as an example. I think that applies.
When I was a chilango kid in the 1980s, Day of the Dead was seen as a rather mediocre and secondary holiday to Halloween. Day of the Dead was much more Catholic and sombre and more similar to All Saints' Day in Europe (several European countries have a similar tradition to decorate graves on All Saints' Day). Now that foreigners think Day of the Dead is cool, we do too!
Isn't Wikipedia's Pizza Effect article therefore an example of the Pizza Effect?
You state surprise that it has existed so long, then go on to explain why it might have done, which seems to meet all the conditions you describe.
Namely it always existed in its place of origin (Wikipedia), but has improved in reputation through interest and prestige elsewhere, and is now better as a result (through people on Wikipedia improving the article)?
Cool to see the original author. I did notice a few of the examples didn't really have the pizza effect, as you said it's about the reputation changing after returning. Pizza and the Apu trilogy seem like the purest examples.
- White sangria. "Sangria" literally means "bloodletting", and has been traditionally made from red wine. But white sangria has become popular overseas and with tourists, and now many Spanish restaurants also offer white sangria.
- Eating paella at night. Traditionally in Valencia, the paella was to be eaten only at lunch time and never at dinner time. This is because it's rice-based, so it's too heavy to go to sleep afterwards and dinner time is fairly late. But a lot of tourists want to eat it at night, so restaurants serve it anytime. There's even light joking among locals when seeing someone eating paella at night "I'm sure they are tourists".
I'd guess countries where there's a lot of tourism have a lot more of this pizza effect than others. The inverse would be "Yoshoku" in Japanese, which is heavily adapting the foreign dishes to local tastes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%8Dshoku
Yoshoku has now been exported outside Japan and is quite popular in eg Singapore. So you can dig into a curry at Ma Maison, a popular yoshoku chain which has a French name for no obvious reason, and contemplate that you're eating a Singaporean version of a Japanese mutation of a British navy stew inspired by Indian curry. Looking forward to somebody opening a yoshoku restaurant in India and completing the circle!
If eaten too much then heavy foods can cause a stomach ache if you lie down soon after eating. If you remain standing or sitting and do things then you might not even notice it.
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 overheard a US coworker explain that "Australians say 'dollar-y-doos' instead of 'dollars'" - because they'd heard me say it a bunch. But I got it from The Simpsons making fun of Australians... so now it's kind of actually true.
(there's still no truth about Fosters Beer or "Bloomin' onions" though!)
I also have a somewhat similar story, through a US lens:
I'm an American who calls Kraft Dinner, well, Kraft Dinner (instead of "Kraft Mac N' Cheese" as it's branded here in the US) specifically because 1) I'm a BNL fan and 2) "Kraft Dinner" is much less of a mouthful to say (but just as much of a mouthful to eat, naturally). I also like poutine, hockey, and maple syrup.
On that note, it's pretty interesting to me how bidirectional the cultural influences are between Canada and the US. Not entirely surprising, given that we're neighbors and all and already pretty similar culturally (comparatively speaking), but it's fascinating to me how much popular-in-the-US music and television ultimately comes from Canada.
I see it called Kraft Dinner here in the southeast US. I figured since roux-based mac and cheese is a staple in southern cooking, they wanted to let everyone know to expect something quite different. But now I see on their website the full name is "Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner".
Something that most Australians don't even seem to realize is that Foster's group is indeed the maker of beers like VB. They simply don't sell anything branded Foster's in Australia, but they are very Australian.
They seem to have made the rounds in bottle shops in recent years. The first time I ever saw Fosters anywhere was in a bottle shop in Hobart after having lived in Queensland for 10 years.
I'd wager the same is true for the "drop bears" meme, right? I've seen it on Reddit and trying to google it turned into a rabbit hole of Reddit threads that all eventually resulted in "it's a joke, duh" but with enough time passing, I'm sure some Australians have picked it up as a joke in real life.
Yeah, I want to echo this. The recent-ish rise in drop-bear attacks is also a bit of a pizza effect. It seems that the increase can be traced back to a bacteria that irritates the mouth of the drop bear, making them more prone to attacking humans and other large creatures. Recent results state that the bacterial strain was a mutant strain that originated in a Swedish zoo exhibit of drop bears that were on loan from the Australian government. When one of the mating pair was returned to Australia, the bacteria spread like wildfire (no pun intended) to the wild populations and captive ones. More can be found here:
My personal favorite example of this is when any character in The Simpsons, other than Homer, says D'oh! They don't say it because Homer said it. They say it because Homer said it, then our entire culture started saying it, so it's only natural for other characters in the show to say it.
Another good example not listed is the burrito. The burrito in the US isn't a thing in Latin America. However, it is pinned as being Latin food vs Latin-American food. I guess the disqualifying difference is most don't travel to Latin America looking for an amazing burrito.
This is off the mark in a couple of ways, recognizable burritos are and have been common in Chihuahua and along the border in that region, where flour tortillas (another item often mistaken as being of US origin) are common.
And tacos and burritos are noticeably Mexican / North American, not Latin American things. Totally foreign in Buenos Aires or Havana whether it’s a Taco Bell or taqueria.
I'm from Chihuahua and I can confirm this, burritos are really common over here, but not so much in other parts of Mexico.
Burritos are the food you will get when you're in a hurry. You are late or you simply don't want to cook? if you have some leftovers and flour tortillas then you have burritos! You're on the road and you want something inexpensive and ready to eat? Just look for the old lady selling burritos on the street.
American burritos are kind of different though, we don't usually mix beans with rice, lettuce, cream and all that stuff. Instead we use traditional dishes like chile colorado, picadillo, chicharron en salsa verde, discada, barbacoa or whatever we have on the fridge ;)
Not from Chihuahua, but I live in Baja California, and the last 2 decades saw a surge in popularity in Tex-mex style burritos, at least in my city, Mexicali.
The US makes burritos really big with really crazy, heavily unhealthy fillings, stuff like boneless buffalo wings, rice and fries in the same burrito, smothered in creamy and hot sauces.
For some it's delicious, for others it's disgusting. But they were definitely not this way originally.
I would compare original burritos to tacos, in a rolled form.
On the other hand, US style burritos are more akin to wraps, mainly because of size and ingredient variety inside and outside of the tortilla.
I think the main difference is the size, burritos in Chihuahua are not as wide and they are usually made of a single dish.
I'm not an expert in Burritos from California but I've noticed they are filled with lots of things, different ingredients and dishes of what is considered Mexican food. Oh and also the way they're wrapped is kind of different, Chihuahua's Burritos are just a roll, they are not a wrap, if that makes sense.
In any case both look delicious to me and now I'm hungry.
True, but to the best of my knowledge the thing a Neopolitan pre-1900 would call pizza would have been described as a quick baked bread that was served with olive oil, basil, and a drizzling of crushed tomato sauce with maybe a chunk of mozzarella
That's only really true because the areas of the USA where the Burrito is common were part of Mexico until very recently. Burritos are definitely a Mexican invention.
> That's only really true because the areas of the USA where the Burrito is common were part of Mexico until very recently.
Texas and California were made states over 150 years ago, and Arizona and New Mexico were made states over 100 years ago. In the scheme of American history, this is not "very recently" at all.
I'm no burrito expert, but any theory saying that the term burrito were invented in the 20th century is almost certainly wrong
This dictionary of Mexican slang/dialect from 1895 says that burrito is a term used in central Mexico for something fairly similar to a modern burrito (a rolled up tortilla with meat or other things inside of it)
Another way of putting (part of) what you're saying is that New Mexico has been a part of America for roughly 1/4 of the time it's been settled by Europeans.
Nuevo México was established in 1598, New Mexico became a state in 1912.
In the scheme of human history it’s very recently, doubly so for an isolated population distributed across massive swathes of land that are far away from DC and DF alike.
It's very recent in terms of human history, but we're talking about American and Mexican history. The American Southwest wasn't settled by Mexicans until ~400 years ago.
As I understand it, the Pizza Effect refers to when the original culture adapts it back after it catches on elsewhere, so the burrito would only count if it did become a thing in Latin America.
Go to any city in Northern Mexico in Google Maps and type “burro” or “burrito”; you will find scores of restaurants (which do not obviously cater to Anglo tourists or expats).
Pad Thai being a favourite example: it's a Chinese-Thai dish, still often prepared in street stalls run by ethnically Chinese people whose ancestors have lived in Thailand for more than a century.
My understanding was that they both (hard shell tacos, burritos) basically existed, at least regionally - or something close enough. But neither had any sort of ubiquity, certainly nothing like their role in "american mexican" food.
Real-deal hard shell tacos were waiting on industrial food production.
Deep-frying a corn tortilla so that it holds its shape was part of northern Mexican cuisine, but it's a meaningfully different dish.
Also delicious, if somewhat fiddly to make at home. Worth doing once or twice, one lowers the tortilla into the oil with something like a disposable chopstick.
I wonder if there is a growing influence from the American craft brew scene back onto Europe. Last time I was in Italy I went to a place that made their own "American IPA".
I'm not a beer historian but I think the American craft beer scene is a 'thing' because home brewing was legalized in 1978 and it took this long for a fabric of breweries in the US to develop to mirror what already existed in Europe or any other country.
I think the influence of American IPA is quite limited and only adding to the selection rather than altering how others do anything ("influence"). That said, Duvel has a triple hop beer which tastes awful, so maybe I'm wrong and the hop fetishism is contagious.
Duvel triple hop is, indeed, vile, but there are other Belgian breweries that are taking on the IPA and doing an outstanding job of it; Brussels Beer project comes to mind immediately, but I'm sure that there are others. I'd take a BBP Delta IPA or Dark Sister over nearly any American IPA.
That said, the IPA style was originally British; it's called an "India" pale ale because they added a ton of extra hops to preserve the beer well enough to make the trip to India. It then got brought to the US, who picked a metric (IBU) and optimized it beyond repair, and the American take on IPA has certainly made it back to the UK (e.g., a good half of Brewdog's repertoire)
Austria has good beer, but here in Oregon there is a far larger variety. 40 years ago, Austrian beer was probably as good as it is now, but American beer was probably worse (I wasn't exactly of drinking age then), and there was far less variety.
Those are just from London breweries! American-style beers are so big in the UK now that CAMRA, the national beer association (think the NRA but for beer?) have had to change their definition of what real beer is, after many years of fighting against the invaders.
Definitely. Walk the beer mile in London and you'll find a bunch of places that don't even feel especially British and would be perfectly confusible with an American microbrewery. No cask ale, no bitter. A lot of NEIPA, kettle sours with fruit, etc.
Psy - Gangnam Style is a classic example of the pizza effect. Koreans like Psy before his hit and he was just a simple comedic singer. He's a legend now.
> The Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City was inspired by an event in the James Bond film Spectre, which was fictional at the time of the film's production
Yep! Mexican here, I added that example! And I think it's really cool! Day of the Dead has an interesting, very modern history. The celebration keeps evolving, traditions being born before our very eyes.
I'm pretty sure the coolness of skull face-painting in DotD is also a recent foreign influence, but I can't find a clear source for it. I just remember the first time I saw it was in 2008 during a Halloween party and I thought, wow, that's like the sugar skulls from Day of the Dead, cool! I didn't recognise it as a tradition but as something new.
Day of the Dead is one of my favorite holidays for very similar reasons. It's fun watching it evolve and expand in real time year after year. It's that perfect intersection of novelty and tradition, and all the while reframes mortality in a refreshingly positive light.
Yep. It's so true when it comes to Indian philosophy. There is a ton of revisionism and strange understandings where people pretend an idea invented in 1800s is ancient. It's also somewhat true for China and Japan.
Do you have any quick sources for the Indian perspective. I was arguing with a co-worker the other day about some of the, to my mind, odd statement they had made about Vedic practices and yoga, but didn’t have a concrete citation ready.
My understanding is that, although this teaching was technically formulated in the 8th century AD, it became popular and gained widespread resurgence in the West around 19th century. Hare Krishna movement and Theosophical Society come to mind.
My guess, as a hobbyist historian, is that most everyday Hindus practiced normal, layperson devotions to humanized gods rather than truly believing in a universal soul that underlies the entire universe.
Basically, any time someone tells you that Indians and Chinese people believe in "philosophy" rather than "religion", they are probably bringing in a Western orientalist bias. Actually, unsurprisingly, Eastern people are actually just religious. There is no woke philosophy going on except for the elite scholars and religious monks.
Except that pizza has never been a poorman's food in Italy, it was a kind of bread.
Still mostly is a popular inexpensive food, in many places is also a traditional food, not a delicacy as the article says.
The only contribution to pizza toppings from America has been tomato, that arrived to Europe after Cristoforo Colombo went there, specifically in Central America.
Before that pizza was white, but not less flavored, we have historical documents that date back pizza before the year 1000 in a place in Italy (Gaeta) which is well known for its olives (and consequently olive oil) mozzarella cheese and fresh vegetables, besides having one of the most idyllic seaside in Italian's west coast.
Pizza in North America has never been a thing before late XIX century.
> The Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City was inspired by an event in the James Bond film Spectre, which was fictional at the time of the film's production.
I had no idea. I honestly thought this had been going on for years prior to that movie.
Day of the Dead is a southern Mexican celebration that evolved from the assimilation of native culture (Maya and meso-American) into the Catholic calendar (all Saints/all Souls days). It wasn't celebrated much in Mexico City and northern Mexico until recently, pushed on in part by the government celebrating more indigenous culture and creating a national holiday, and then the movie.
Kind of a weird video. It basically comes down to "This isn't Neopolitan Pizza so it's not as good."
Neopolitan pizza has a whole association that certifies restaurants and Lombardi's isn't on that list. It's no surprise that the pizza will a different style.
It's also pretty funny he mentions that in Italy they fold their pizza, when that is practically the defining characteristic of New York style pizza.
Neapolitan pizza is one thing, Roman pizza is another, and much more akin to New York-style pizza. One type is made in big rectangular pans and sold by weight, it's similar to Focaccia. There is also a round style that is thinner and crispier, which is the best IMO. Fold and eat.
While I do enjoy a good old-fashioned Neapolitan pizza, I much prefer the Roman style, specifically the round thin style and by extension the NY style.
The problem I find with any reference to 'US pizza' - is it's an impossible comparison. There is, of course, no such thing. There are approximately 407 different pizza establishments in every small city in the US, and they all make their pizza differently. One thing the US doesn't lack for, is variety in its pizza offerings.
It's the same problem that crops up when foreigners proclaim that American chocolate is horrible. Which of the countless different domestic brands? They think Hershey's chocolate is the primary chocolate Americans can buy, it's amusing. The same thing happens in discussions about cheese.
It stems from most nations having small consumer & manufacturing economies, small numbers of suppliers of things. It makes it difficult to understand or relate to the enormous scale of the US consumer market (so large it produced Walmart, a $523 billion sales behemoth that is as big as the economies of Poland, Belgium or Sweden). The only proper consumer & manufacturing scale references are to the entire EU or China. It's almost the equivalent of saying pizza in the EU is good or bad; or cheese in the EU is good or bad. It would make absolutely no sense.
I don't think that most people who have had pizza from the top US pizza chains and have had a more "authentic" Italian pizza have trouble distinguishing the two. Italian pizzas are known for having thinner crust, a small amount of sauce, and more basic ingredients(albeit much more fresh usually), probably incorporates more olive oil, in contrast with something from, say, Pizza Hutt. American pizza has breadier and simply uses more of everything. A lot more saucy, a lot more cheesy. Don't get me started on stuffed crust! While there is a variety of toppings, most people go for a handful. Right now, zany combinations of toppings and sauces are popular, but people still most often choose pepperoni, sausage, "veggies", bacon w/ pineapple, etc. I don't understand how you can call it an impossible comparison; most pizza joints in America share very similar menus and kinds of pizzas.
Even pizza in New Zealand, when I lived there, was significantly different from American pizza. It's closer to American pizza, but Kiwis really love to use tangier sauces, which for some reason they also drizzled on to the pizzas. They even did this at Pizza Hutt.
Everywhere has regional differences. To claim otherwise is a bit blind, in my opinion. Just because American culture is mainstream doesn't mean that it's not distinct from other cultures it's related to.
> I don't think that most people who have had pizza from the top US pizza chains and have had a more "authentic" Italian pizza have trouble distinguishing the two.
That ain't the comparison being made, though. American pizza doesn't stop at Pizza Hut or Domino's. It includes the hole-in-the-wall pizza parlor with generic boxes and the ever-so-creative name of "New York Pizza". It includes the boutique shop with a proper stone oven and the thin crusts and "traditional" ingredients you'd expect from an "authentically-Italian" pizza. It includes hip vegan pizzas with cauliflower crusts. It includes pizza served alongside - or even incorporating - curry or kebab (side note: if you haven't had butter chicken pizza, stop what you're doing right now and find some). Hell, it even includes the "Bahn Mi'zza" I had for dinner a while back.
There are, in all, 70,000+ pizza restaurants in the United States, and that's just the ones that focus specifically on pizza - i.e. not including "Italian" restaurants as a whole, and not including restaurants that serve pizza as one component of a broader non-pizza-focused menu. All said and done, you've likely got more than a hundred thousand restaurants each putting their own spin - subtle or drastic, intentional or accidental - on the phrase "American pizza". That's in the ballpark of a 10:1 ratio of places serving pizza to incorporated cities/towns/villages/boroughs in the United States.
Point being, American pizza tastes - and thus the restaurants catering to those tastes - are so varied that "American pizza" v. "Italian pizza" ain't exactly a useful comparison. Same with Italian tastes, for that matter; not all Italian pizzas are the Neapolitan ones you're describing (prime example: Roman and Sicilian pizzas both feature thick crusts). Even regional comparisons are fraught with peril, but that'd be at least closer. Pizza is, fundamentally, a canvas begging for a painter to express one's creative vision upon it, be that a celebration of tradition or an exploration of new tastes.
I think it's fair to say that when people reference "X country's Y is awful" they are generalising. The US obviously has examples of decent chocolate, pizza, cheese etc.
I do think you should be able to compare the average experience:
If you drive around the US and visit pizza places on the way vs doing the same while driving around Italy.
If you go to the main US supermarkets and pick up an assortment of different US chocolate brands to try vs doing the same in, say, Belgium.
My local grocery store ( Wegmans) in a larger New York city has at least 60 options of chocolate bars available. A local pharmacy in my tiny rural village with a small selection still has 12-15 unique chocolate bars. This is a different selection than the standard candy aisle.
There is no good mass market American chocolate, but there is readily available access to gourmet chocolates and pseudo gourmet chocolates.
Chuao Chocalates comes to mind as having frequent distribution and can be found in many places, Sees chocolates is fairly easy to find and has been around for a century,it gets mentioned on cooking shows so I think it has some prestige/familiarity to it.
Gertrude Hawk chocolates exists in many eastern us malls (maybe elsewhere), it's made not far from Hershey park. The samplers arent bad, never really gave it a proper try.
I happen to like Godiva chocolates which is owned by Campbell's soup company and also has a factory near Hershey's but that is maybe nostalgia as I often purchased them only around Christmas and rarely even consider buying them now.
Ghirardelli is American and Theos chocolate has some esteem.
By conventional meaning of mass market, I believe only Lindt and Ghirardelli qualify and fit the description of "good"
I recently tried Callier chocolate which I read had quite a prestigious swiss heritage, it blew away any mass market Hershey/Mars "chocolate" bars but it wasnt particularly exceptional compared to similarly priced artisanal chocolates already available in the local grocery store.
‘Greasy’ pizza deserves its own category, comparing an amazingly greasy slice of meat topped pizza with a spicy sauce to NYC pizza or American ‘Neapolitan’ pizza via New Haven ala Sally’s (it’s better than Pepe’s, fight me) is like comparing sushi to ramen. All of it can be great!
This makes me wonder if there's a similar term for things that are created outside of the country that it's associated with that doesn't get reintegrated into said country.
For example, I (a Danish person) had to ask my Australian friends what an "Apple Danish" was as it's similar to, but quite unlike anything you'd find in Denmark.
When we moved back to Switzerland, we encountered an example of this: During the Mad Cow epoch, alternatives to beef like kangaroo and ostrich meat became somewhat popular here.
So in a Mexican restaurant in Zürich, we saw "Kangaroo Fajitas" on the menu, a dish that has the distinction of being unknown in both Mexico and Australia.
Danish pastry is (more or less) known as Viennoiserie in France, but it looks to me like it doesn't come from Vienna - rather, it was kicked off by a creative Viennese baker in Paris.
Well, plugging levees with fingers isn't a thing in the Netherlands, that's for sure. The town Hans Brinker came from has a statue of him purely to please the American tourists.
It's a reference to the novel "Hans Brinker" (or "The Silver Skates") by American author Mary Mapes Dodge [1].
I haven't read it, but it contains the story of the little Dutch boy who plugs a dike with his finger (which I guess is quite obviously "story magic" if you've seen a dike).
I wonder if the Dutch then erecting a statue of that boy is an example of trying to mitigate the Paris Syndrome [2] in tourists? Interesting. :)
There's a good example of this in my South Philadelphia neighborhood: The Italian-Americans here speak Italian with the accent of a southern Italian from a century ago, frozen in time. Italian accents have progressed in Italy over that time, but not among the immigrant communities here.
I've read articles claiming the American accent is closer to what the British sounded like at the founding of the United States than what they sound like now.
Things like the spelling of cheque are prime examples of this. We mock the Americans for their simplistic spelling, but in actuality we took "cheque" after America had split off already in an attempt to sound more French and eloquent. American drawl accent is also closer to older English than lots of modern English accents.
Not exactly the same thing, but maybe JavaScript's fat arrow function? It originally appeared in CoffeeScript, which is a language that adds some syntactic sugar to JavaScript, and then eventually it found it's way into the JavaScript language. Now most people probably associate it with JavaScript, since CoffeeScript isn't nearly as well known.
Common Lisp had an object system from way back when. I seem to recall the general opinion on it was "who needs objects?" for a while, and then after objects took over the rest of the world, the talk seemed to shift to "our object system is better!"
Rails didn't take a good thing and make it popular. It took a shit thing and gave people a reason to put up with it. There's a reason no one uses Ruby outside of Rails...
I think folds and such started in functional languages, were then adopted by imperative languages, which then made them prettier as comprehensions, which then made their way back into functional languages. But it could be that both features went one way.
Both features went one way. Comprehensions were introduced in the functional language Miranda (and to a limited extent its predecessor KRC) back in the 1980s.
Maybe python poetry? And pep 518. Rust designed cargo after pip and python setup.py and made it better. Then pep 518 was inspired by cargo, and now pyproject.toml works pretty much the same way.
C++98/C++03 give no real consideration to multithreaded code, which means that optimizers were free to work on the basis of preserving only single-threaded correctness (and they did!). The only tools you have at your disposal are inline assembly, external function calls acting as natural barriers, and (misusing) volatile. (Or maybe you have compiler-specific builtins, e.g., the GCC __sync_ builtins).
In terms of changes to semantics of pre-C++11 code, the biggest change is that the compiler is no longer able to introduce stores to memory locations that would not have been stored normally. This prohibits the optimization that would change this loop:
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
*res += A[i];
into this:
int temp = *res;
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++)
temp += A[i];
*res = temp;
(since res would not have been written if N were 0 or less).
Beyond that, the main effect is that it is now possible to write correct multi-threaded, lock-free code without having to rely on the scattershot nature of volatile. Volatile does not mean what many people take it to mean. The closest approximation to its actual semantics in practice is that any load or store instruction generated from a volatile must not be reordered (with respect only to other such load/store instructions), and it must not be removed (i.e., no dead-store elimination or hoisting outside a loop). In particular, volatile does not prohibit load/store tearing (e.g., reading a 64-bit location via two separate 32-bit loads); it does not prohibit other accesses from being widened to include the volatile memory address.
I know. But I think Java had them before C++, and I think that Java was the first mainstream, C++-syntax, object-oriented language to have them. (Yeah, I know, that's not saying much, because C++ and Java are the only two mainstream, C++-syntax, object-oriented languages.) The point was, C++ could have looked at Java as proof that a language like C++ could have closures, and so one could suspect that the immediate, direct inspiration was from Java.
I only mentioned closures because it's the only feature I could think of that C++ has, but Java had first. (I welcome other examples, if anyone has them.)
C# was the first mainstream language with a C-style syntax to have them - anonymous delegates in C# 2 (2005), then lambdas with type inference in C# 4 (2010).
Java got them in Java 7 in 2011, more or less at the same time as C++11 did.
In any case, Java and C# closures weren't particularly helpful to C++, because they have only shown that a garbage-collected language can have them - the main complexity around closures is wrt memory management and ownership. Hence why C++ closures are very different from either Java or C#.
I suspect that C++ got the now-deprecated exception specifiers - throw() on functions - from Java. But not entirely sure.
I checked my copy of the C++ Programming Language (2nd edition, 1991) which has throw() exception specifiers on functions. The Java project started in 1991.
I'm not sure these qualify as closures. But if they do, then they've been around in that exact form (named local functions with language semantics preventing them from outliving their environment) since Algol-60.
> I have no idea what the c++ committee were using as predicates
And in fairness, neither do I. My point wasn't "C++ copied closures from Java". My point was "I can't think of anything else they copied from Java", and therefore that I suspected that the answer to jedberg's question was no.
Interesting and good to have a name for this thing.
This seems to happen all the time in tech as engineers and ideas bounce between big companies. Some examples that come to mind:
* Stories from Snapchat to Instagram, back to Snapchat with replies
* App switching UIs iOS -> Android -> iOS with gestures
* Home UI Facebook -> Twitter -> Facebook (current beta)
This concept is about the globalisation project which has been growing steadily for the last century but has been stopped by the rise of populism. Somehow the coronavirus reminds us that we are still way more connected globally than politicians would like us to be.
I think it's really hard to say much of anything about the influence of different cultures on food, especially anything regarding flatbreads.
Every culture has some form of flatbread. Every culture has figured out "we can put other foods in/on-top of this flatbread". They figured it out thousands of years ago. Once you have the basic mechanic figured out, do the exact inputs matter that much, especially when you consider how varied the inputs can be within a specific, arbitrary category?
There is the common, bad-highschool-history meme of "(The Earl of Sandwich/his personal cook) invented the sandwich". Or, every culture has a tradition of picking up food with bread, for thousands of years, and it's not that big of a deal. A grilled cheese sandwich is just a Western European quesadilla!
One of my favorite ways to get people to scoff at me is to call polenta "grits". Yes, yes, "different strain of corn". But honestly, there are so many other variations in polenta/grits preparations that the specific strain of corn is really a minor drop in the bucket, and mostly amounts to regional availability. I know folks who will go nutso-spendo over "shrimp on a bed of polenta" but think "shrimp and grits" is cheap-food.
Polenta was (still is?) a poor man dish in the past. People got pellagra by eating only polenta all the time (BTW just discovered English and Italian use the same word). Selling it as a fancy food is a really,really good marketing trick.
Yeah, I live in Northern VA. We have a lot more dollars than sense here. We also like to white-wash southern food. Here in the DC area, for how it's prepared in dishes, polenta is definitely "rich-person's grits".
if one is to trust the historical information quoted on wikipedia, pizza was popular in Italy (Naples in particular) already in the 19th century, well before immigrants made it popular in the US.
Not a misnomer at all. The point is that what Italians now consider pizza is influenced by the American adaptation of the basal dish. That's the whole point.
Today a Chinese friend told me that people from China are getting the Corona Virus on other countries instead of China.
Could this be considered a Pizza Effect as well or is there a better word for that?
Italy was seriously disappointing for food. Small and expensive quantities. The food was quite simple but they had big emphasis on the ingredients. I still found it lack luster on most occasions.
I’ve been there a few times, and it has been generally great. One of the best european countries for food. Along Spain and France. There are bad places everywhere.
I just can’t agree with your experience, but am willing to believe that you certainly feel that way. I will say that hands down, the best meal I have ever had in Italy was a spit roasted half hen and crispy potato chunks on a paper plate from the random corner store by the Hotel Pink Floyd near Tremini in Rome. That experience was certainly not what most people think of when they think Italian food.
Uhm, sorry but no. Pizza has never been looked down in Italy. Because most Italians have most often been poor and miserable wretches that couldn’t afford to look down onto any kind of food in the first place.
Perhaps just during post-WW2 we had some form of cultural colonization and shame of the past that - peaking in the ‘80s - made us love and ape anything Made in USA.
It's a bit ironic you would put these two words together in your comment. No one would call a Neapolitan pizza a pie -- that word probably originates from deep dish (aka Chicago style) pizza, which actually resembles a pie.
There is more to Italian pizza than Neapolitan pizza.
Roman pizza is distinctly different. It's either Focaccia-like thick and made in rectangular pans, or round, thin and crispy, much closer to NY-style pizza, and much more adventurous with the toppings.
If anyone in Italy looks down on Roman-style pizza, they're idiots.
One thing I'll point out is that the effect as originally described is about things that always existed in their place of origin, but became more popular / accepted (improved in reputation) after gaining a warm reception/prestige elsewhere. (The examples here of things popularly associated with X culture despite not originating in place X are interesting too, though!)
Edit: Sorry for a tangential aside, but I just looked into the history of this article, and IMO it's representative of many Wikipedia articles (and not how either the general public or Wikipedia regulars think articles get written):
• Here are the first 3 years, where basically things were cleaned up and a couple of examples added, but the article was still substantially in its original (poor) form: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pizza_effect&type...
• Then a single edit by another user substantially “refactored” it and cleaned it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=585383004&oldid=58...
• Another 6 years where nothing much changes fundamentally, except for a few additional examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=943600315&oldid=58...
The article has 102 revisions, and all of them have contributed to its present form… who would we say “wrote” it? See the late Aaron Swartz's “Who Writes Wikipedia?” at http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia