Gray: American Culture in my view--Yupeng Yang

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

American Culture in my view--Yupeng Yang

I have been a month here in Columbus, but I’m still ignorant on most aspects about American culture; perhaps the only thing I can talk about is the culture of food.

To my perspective, the essence of American food culture is fastness. For instance, in Cane’s, they offer traditional fast food, like chicken fingers and chips. Probably frying is the fastest method on food processing, which they do a lot in Cane’s, KFC and Wendy’s as well. It’s just takes you 3 minutes waiting after ordering. It’s truly a convenient way to have a meal when you are in a hurry. But you can’t eat them everyday, because it is unhealthy.

Someone may say all the fast food is junk food. That is not so true. Restaurants other than those I have mentioned above provide healthy fast food like sandwiches. Subway, making fast food also, would be a good example. You could select the bread, the meat (non-fried), the vegetables and the sauce in your sandwich separately to have a healthy meal. They also provide vegetarian diet if you prefer. And some of the sauce is fat-free, which is a good choice to keep fit. Thus, fast food doesn’t mean unhealthy food.

The other significant element of American food culture is diversification. I have seen many different kinds of restaurants on the other side of High Street these days, Chipotle, the Mexico cuisine, Joy’s Village, the Chinese cuisine, etc. In American, the flavor of these foreign dishes may be a little changed to adjust to local customers, which is called integration. It may reflect that American is like a melting pot, which all kinds of cultures go into and come out with a little mixture from another one.

What I want to demonstrate is that American culture is a large pie that I couldn’t comprehend in just few days, and the view of myself is all about food because that’s my interest and major. Actually, American food expresses me profoundly and makes me kind of loving this country.