I can make kipfil & pierogies ... can you?? (Score 1)

Yeah, I can. I know where the European, mid-Eastern, Asian, African and latin American countries are too. OTOH, I know from doing business in every one of these continents except Africa that most OTHER people haven't a clue about the US. A recent article in a major periodical had a well-known European historian asserting, with a straight face, that years of living part time in New York City plus a visit or two to San Francisco meant he knew all that one really needs to know about the nature, attitudes and politics of Americans. Uh huh. You guys forget that most Americans have grandparents or great-grandparents that came here from SOMEWHERE ELSE. They spoke other languages, often in our memory, visited old friends and familyh, sometimes worshipped in interestingly styled buildings and generally, brought parts of the old culture and the old Country with them. I can and do make kipfil, pashka, pierogies, borscht, houlupki ... just to name the foods from my father's Ukrainian side of the family. We worshipped in a Ukrainian Orthodox church, where I not only followed the liturgy in the old language, I learned the conventions and meanings of the icons and the church architecture. When I visit my husband's grandmother Sigrid we eat her native Norwegian foods. My mother-in-law learned to make sauerbraten as a child, speaking German in the midWest. Can you make cole slaw, fried chicken, American-style apple pie? Until you can, you really have no basis to think that Americans are less cosmopolitan than you. -- food is the first technology