I grew up in an American household eating home-cooked hybrid-but-largely-Chinese-influenced food. Basically every meal was a mix of protein (meat, tofu, or eggs) and vegetables over rice, which turns out to be plenty to work with. The thing that’s always been weird to me about American food is that they serve you a giant slab of meat as your meal, and then everything else is sides, which leads to the whole “eat your vegetables” problem in the first place. In Chinese food the meat is always cut relatively small, and sometimes tiny. It’s so mixed in with the vegetables that you wouldn’t even consider eating the meat without the vegetables.
Also FWIW I prefer cooked vegetables over raw vegetables and always have. So your discovery is not universalizable.
I live in Slovakia, but I noticed that Asian restaurants are the only ones here that provide significant amount of vegetables with lunch. Everyone else either gives nothing by default (hey, if you really want vegetables, you can order them separately in a small bowl for an extra euro), or put a microscopically thin slice of cucumber on the side of the plate (and some of my colleagues are like “ewww… why did they put this in my meal?”).
The thing that’s always been weird to me about American food is that they serve you a giant slab of meat as your meal, and then everything else is sides, which leads to the whole “eat your vegetables” problem in the first place.
I think “American food” is a bit too diverse to generalize. You have your steaks and your meatloafs, but plenty of chilis, fajitas, stir fries, beef stews, soups with bits of meat in them, spaghetti-and-meatballs, chicken cut up and put-in-a-salad sort of thing, and plenty of other examples of meat “not in a big slab”.
And yes, I would still consider stuff like Mexican-American, Chinese-American etc. food sufficiently “mainstream” in American culture that they are American food. Maybe most Americans don’t eat those things every day, but they are parts of the culinary repertoire familiar to and used by them.
I have no idea of stats, but I bet most Americans of unspecified heritage would not find tacos, ground meat, stir fry meat, fajitas, chile, particularly exotic by any stretch and many Americans probably eat them, if not cook them themselves, a few times a week etc.
I grew up in an American household eating home-cooked hybrid-but-largely-Chinese-influenced food. Basically every meal was a mix of protein (meat, tofu, or eggs) and vegetables over rice, which turns out to be plenty to work with. The thing that’s always been weird to me about American food is that they serve you a giant slab of meat as your meal, and then everything else is sides, which leads to the whole “eat your vegetables” problem in the first place. In Chinese food the meat is always cut relatively small, and sometimes tiny. It’s so mixed in with the vegetables that you wouldn’t even consider eating the meat without the vegetables.
Also FWIW I prefer cooked vegetables over raw vegetables and always have. So your discovery is not universalizable.
I live in Slovakia, but I noticed that Asian restaurants are the only ones here that provide significant amount of vegetables with lunch. Everyone else either gives nothing by default (hey, if you really want vegetables, you can order them separately in a small bowl for an extra euro), or put a microscopically thin slice of cucumber on the side of the plate (and some of my colleagues are like “ewww… why did they put this in my meal?”).
The thing that’s always been weird to me about American food is that they serve you a giant slab of meat as your meal, and then everything else is sides, which leads to the whole “eat your vegetables” problem in the first place.
I think “American food” is a bit too diverse to generalize. You have your steaks and your meatloafs, but plenty of chilis, fajitas, stir fries, beef stews, soups with bits of meat in them, spaghetti-and-meatballs, chicken cut up and put-in-a-salad sort of thing, and plenty of other examples of meat “not in a big slab”.
And yes, I would still consider stuff like Mexican-American, Chinese-American etc. food sufficiently “mainstream” in American culture that they are American food. Maybe most Americans don’t eat those things every day, but they are parts of the culinary repertoire familiar to and used by them.
I have no idea of stats, but I bet most Americans of unspecified heritage would not find tacos, ground meat, stir fry meat, fajitas, chile, particularly exotic by any stretch and many Americans probably eat them, if not cook them themselves, a few times a week etc.
It’s probably bad for you if you don’t have a lot of meat in your meals, because then you won’t get a lot of protein and will have weak muscles.
Meat cut up small != small amounts of meat.
Ah, I misread that, sorry.