Syncretism in Food

Ah, dinner, the last meal of the day until a late night snack. My family is very simple about dinner rules: no elbows, no talking over others, no talking while your mouth is full, no phones, etc. With the food, well, we actually usually have some sort of pasta, despite having no Italian genealogy from neither my dad or my mom. I think a good point to make is that cultures of all sorts have spread through the United States, allowing there to be many different dinner options, such as Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Jewish, Persian, etc. We usually eat what we want, and special meals come around usually once a week or so, such as when my mom makes us tacos. Taco night woooo. So on that note, despite being a primarily American family, we eat whatever we want.

I haven't gone to a dinner at another house that wasn't American. Sure, there were different dinner rules, but they were only slight changes. One time a few years ago, I went to my friend Richard's house for breakfast and to hang out around the day. Richard is a 1st-gen-American I believe, as his parents came from China to here. Little did I know that day that we would be going over to a strictly Chinese restaurant. It was weird. The menus were primarily Chinese, with a bad English translation of everything, and Richard knew little Chinese, ironically, and so I had to talk to his mom. The food wasn't that bad, but just how I was the only American in the whole restaurant just gave me a sort of unease, something I didn't feel anywhere else. That is my only real experience of another culture first hand. Like no joke it felt like I was in China in that restaurant, with everyone speaking Chinese to each other and everyone being Chinese. But hey, it's good to be exposed to that; you quickly learn the differences between cultures.