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This is maybe a bit tangential, and I might’ve mentioned this before, but honestly I kinda miss being a little kid and telling my schoolyard friends that “when I was in America, I got to drink root beer” — and they’d be like, “wow, Americans are so weird and wild, letting children drink beer!”, before I’d reveal that root beer is actually a soft drink, and then we’d have a good laugh. Indeed, back in those days it felt like being an American gave me some sort of esoteric insider knowledge that my peers weren’t privy to — I even remember translating English-language place names in the United States into Norwegian for the sake of my peers who couldn’t yet understand English, not realizing that the English-language names I’d learned were originally translations of names in now-endangered Indigenous languages.
And I have memories of going to “American” stores like the one in this picture. I think that even when I was a kid, I had mixed feelings about them. How on the one hand it felt like it affirmed that feeling of having esoteric insider knowledge, to go to these cramped stores that clearly didn’t see much traffic and were sort of out of the way, and being presented with all of these names and labels unfamiliar to my peers… But on the other hand, so much of the American stores felt “plastic” for lack of a better term. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what exactly I wanted “American” to mean to me, but, like, Lucky Charms and Reese’s Puffs was certainly not it — stuff like that was just corporations preying on the health of children, right? It was a tasty treat, maybe, but there was nothing special or good about it. Whenever I was in the occupation zone I’d honestly look at my relatives and I’d think, “You people actually eat this poison outside of summertime?”
In any case, nowadays with globalization and cultural imperialism and social media and online streaming and online shopping etc, there’s just fewer uniquely American things. I can’t speak for the exact extent, since I would’ve noticed cultural imperialism less as a child, but it feels like even in the course of my fairly short life that the presence of Usonian shit in Norway has grown exponentially compared to when I was a kid. Nowadays there’s even Dollar Stores in Norway, literally called Dollar Store, in English, despite the fact that Norway doesn’t even use dollars as its currency.
Peculiarly, though, to my knowledge root beer still remains unpopular and comparatively difficult to get in Norway, and root beer is also incidentally one of the few* things that one could genuinely call “American culture” — as in, root beer isn’t a product of cultural appropriation, nor a part of the Anglo puritan core of whiteness, nor a product of consumerism for lack of a better term. Like, we literally do not know who wrote the first root beer recipe, all we know is that by the 1830s, recipes for root beer were being written down and passed around.
*I am being a bit hyperbolic, but I really do wonder how much “American culture” would be left if we got rid of everything that was stolen, puritan, patented or copyrighted, or invented to make a quick buck — or perhaps there are better criteria for separating the wheat from the chaff.
I feel like Americans are weird for not letting children drink beer
I think the only “American” things are the foodways of displaced populations from different parts of the world colliding with each other in climates that required their palette of ingredients to shift and reconfigure.
it’s a somewhat recent area of scholarship, mostly because it appreciates how domestic workers and farmworking families at the margins were the ones who lead the way in experimentation and intergenerational knowledge transfer of traditional food wisdom. notably, not elite chefs or wealthy patrons demanding “authentic” experiences from whatever old world they imagine is most fashionable to consume in that day.
most of mass produced / industrial foods were inspired by these innovations, but they are pale shadows of the real thing. it is the stubborn and multigenerational households of multi-ethnic influence that are still finding new permutations, combining Grandma’s recipes with different vegetables that come from the nearby ethnic market nobody is connected to by descent. the East Asian family who makes Mediterranean influenced food, the West African guy who puts fried okra in burritos. the Indian grocery store that has more colors of lentils than there are in a rainbow alongside the spice aisle of the gods right in the middle of the historically Mexican neighborhood. just people getting weird where everything collides.
it’s happening everywhere as peoples are displaced and dislocated and resisting the pressure to eat the shelf stable poison that comes in the box.
The 0.89$ box of baking soda is very enticing for Brits I’m sure. I recognize like 12 items that aren’t just indistinguishable jams. Nothing on the top row.
mmm, baking soda. just like mumsy used to make us for the Consummation of St. Turdly.
I once ate an entire box during the homily and mummy had me paddled, bare-bottomed by the vicar, also bare-bottomed.
The top row on the right are Mr. Beast chocolates
The worst, most sugar-ladened versions of cereal
Boy, they have our number!
@[email protected] coming out as actually being JT from Second Thought this whole time
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the imported stuff is crazy expensive, too. i mean, everything is, at this point. but no way am i gonna buy mac n chiis in a box, when homemade is better & much more cost-effective. the whole thing actually pissed me off so much that i started making my own variations of mac n chiis like, semi-regularly… so thanks?
ps. pop-tarts were a mistake
We’ve got a pretty long lasting candy store here that has lived off European imports, it’s been around over 20 years tho, I’m Canadian so most of our candy and sweets if it isn’t imported from America is imported from England, so its usually just the weirder and wilder varieties of the stuff we have. It’s really strange how bad America’s chip and chocolate bar game is, feels like they’d be all over it, but trash candy and no all dressed chips
If you ever find it, get the caramel big cup n put it in the freezer😩
We have European import stores here and a lot of the stuff is fantastic.
okay but hear me out reeses cereal with strawberry milk im in my 40s and ill never give this up
Americans do be eating cereal
For dinner
Completely inauthentic. Where’s the undesirable being harassed by a rent-a-cop out front?
They don’t even have one of those “security tower” things with like 20 cameras and cop-like flashing lights that tell you in a stern
-type voice to “stop loitering and move along” blaring out of a loudspeaker every other minute smhExactly my reaction. And one flag? Have they even been to America?
I counted at least 15 US flags on my drive home from work today. I was just about to say I’m not sure why there’s all these goddamned flags all of a sudden but I just realized the alimpicks
only 15?? is your commute 2 minutes long or something?
There’s more Ukranian flags than Canadian ones up in my neighborhood even on the 1st
I haven’t seen flags for at least a year around here, but there are like stickers on traffic poles
I think a lot of the flags are just kinda still up cause they didn’t bother taking em down. Buuuuuuut also where I live has also had a huge influx of Ukranians since the war and well, they’re the people that left instead of joining a nazi battalion and fighting and so that does need to be considered and they did live there and where they were living is experiencing material damage and expecting a greater international understanding of events is a bit of hard thing to tell someone who’s home maybe got exploded. If you’re not an internationalist, you’re a nationalist and that’s most people. I can’t be holding every Ukranian immigrant under suspicion of nazism cause that would make me a racist, I’m certain some are and I’m certain even more may be just short of it and even more who might generally be more sympathetic under different circumstances could easily be more russophobic, nationalistic and NATO brained cause it’s a war the place theyre from is losing and most people do have a massive nationalistic streak unless it’s deprogrammed, so a lot are also just pretty normal ass apolitical workers taking the most obvious path and yknow being mad about all the explosions in their country.
hope you get a bulk discount on
Canada has a LOT of Ukranian immigrant families from way back when being a Banderite got you in and now have a lot of extended family who fled the war/refugees without family here, our public busses have a Stand With Ukraine sign that flashes back and forth with the route number, less and less busses have it going, there’s also a Black Lives Matter option. It seems weird to have any political slogans on your public transit, but yeah, locally, people do be supporting the Ukraine
Wow, you live near all 15 people who care about the Olympics.
Cereal and whatever snacks are on the top row? Yeah whatever.
Peanut butter and jelly? Good, but seems like stuff you could get anywhere at this point. My parents used to bring peanut butter to my cousins in Portugal but I’m pretty sure it’s easily available at supermarkets now.
Baking soda, coffee creamer, box cake mix, and icing? Just why?
JT on his Spanish vacation
JT’s version of Carmen Sandiego
Is this Second Thought?
I know Yugopnik posted in the last couple of days that he had just met JT and Hakim in person, so that would explain JT being outside the US at least lol
I think so, totally looks like him
I thought he had flat hair?
nah he has the curliest mop
It’s curly flat
flatly curly
Did you know JT is short for Justin Timberlake?
I was gonna say, my first thought was “Is that JT?”
We have one of these on my street, and the one thing it is genuinely good for is cookie cutters and sprinkles
Thumbnail made me think this would be a tempered glass PC build.
I might be prejudiced but I believe America is the country where they largest party of adult citizens’ diet is made up of things that has cartoon characters on the packaging.
That would probably be Japan
Funny that I never see the people that pedantically point out that “AMERICA is a continent, not a country” when its non-americans referring to the US as such.
Just something I noticed.
