Today we answered the question we asked at the beginning of this Discovery Term: What is American Cuisine? Throughout the past two weeks, our discovery term discussed the differences between numerous cultures and cuisines. Some of the cuisines were foreign to most of us, and it was interesting to learned about how it differed from “American food.” Today, we discussed what American food really is. When asking an American native to describe American food, the most common answer would probably be something along the lines a hotdog, hamburgers, or French fries. However, most of these typical “American foods” are just different versions of food from other countries. For example, the hotdog is a spinoff of the German Sausage, and French fries actually originated in Belgium. We started the day with a presentation from Dr. Meszaros on the history of barbecue, and its true definition.
Dr. Meszaros, a barbecue historian and expert, gave a talk in the morning about the history of barbecue. We learned that after the Colombian exchange, people used barbecues as a means of building relationships and hanging-out with each other. We also got the chance to taste five different barbecue sauces including Sweet Baby Rays, Carolina Gold, Walmart Signature, and Kraft. Most of us actually preferred the Walmart Signature brand barbecue sauce over most of the others, which was quite surprising, considering we learned that the Sweet Baby Rays barbecue sauce is the best-selling barbecue sauce in the nation. We also got the chance to blindly taste test five different barbecue sauces, and our group had a surprisingly high liking to the Walmart brand sauce.
We learned about the different barbecue sauces and types of barbecue among not only different countries, but different states within the US as well. We learned and then later experienced about the more vinegar based sauces seen in North Carolina specifically. After this presentation, we watched an episode of David Chang’s Ugly Delicious. This taught us more about the variety of barbecue types, focusing on Korean and Japanese specifically. Then for lunch, we stayed in the classroom because of the rain, and got takeout from Sam Jones’ BBQ.
We enjoyed eating our barbecue and various sides, and finished the day by finalizing our DT presentation for tomorrow.
