What are your typical meals? To what extent do you eat foreign dishes in daily life?

28 comments

1. I use my air fryer a lot to make relatively simple meals. I’ll usually roast some chicken or salmon in it and serve it with some vegetables. Sometimes I’ll make some comfort food like meatloaf or chicken and rice. Occasionally I’ll make some foreign “inspired” meals, but I find it best to leave that up to the professionals. I love Middle Eastern and Vietnamese food.

2. Normally eat sausages, bacon, eggs, ramen (not the cheap kind), sushi, chips, salads (with chicken, tuna or beef), etc.

   For foreign dishes, just whenever I’m in the mood. I (and most of the U.S.) have easy access to foreign restaurants and foods. I love kimchi, sushi, and Jamaican patties so I eat those somewhat frequently. If I’m in the mood, I eat Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek or Indian as well.

   Not that I go out of my way to eat foreign food, but foreign food is as much part of American staples as any American dish.

3. I don’t really eat a lot of foreign foods. A typical supper would be pinto beans (or black eyed peas), cornbread or biscuits, collards, and pork chops. I also make a lot of casseroles and meatloaf. It just depends on my mood.

4. It really depends on what constitutes “foreign”. My family is Central Euro Jew in heritage, but I grew up in Arizona. My girlfriend is Black but grew up in NYC and Paris. We live in Chicago.

   When cooking: my comfort zone is broadly Mexican/Central American or Central/Eastern European. Hers is French/Southern.

   When ordering takeout: more Thai and Middle Eastern than anything.

5. I eat a ton of foreign food. Some authentic, some Americanized. I live in an area that really multicultural though, so I probably have more access to “international” food than someone in say, Nebraska.

6. Meals at home are typically American, but when I go out to eat at a restaurant, 90% of the time it’s foreign, mostly Mexican and Chinese and Italian as that’s what’s most common around here. I’m not a very good cook so trying to cook something foreign is just very intimidating, whether it’s actually hard or not idk

7. I eat a lot of “foreign” foods. We do all of our grocery shopping in an Italian market and an Asian grocery because its way cheaper than Krogers.

   We eat a solid mix of Mexican, southern Italian, and Korean cuisines. Days in between we make some delicious fusion meals.

   I am a dual citizen and the rest of my family is from southern Italy so I don’t consider these dishes particularly foreign.

8. I had tacos for lunch, I guess that’s foreign.

   A typical meal is about 30% protein, 30% vegetables, 30% carbohydrates/grains, and 10% fruit if I remember.

   There really isn’t any typical cuisine for me. I’ll eat some Indian food one day and Italian food the next. Then I’ll have a cheeseburger or phò the following day.

9. At least half of my meals are of foreign origin. Ramen, pho, Mexican, Italian, French…

   One of the things we do best is adopt and adapt cuisines from our immigrant communities.

10. I eat a lot of Asian and Mexican inspired food. We had fried rice last week with Chinese bbq pork and I prepared the rice with whole spices like at Indian restaurants.

11. Does Italian count as foreign? That’s a lot of what i eat.

    And a lot of veggies dipped in hummus for lunch.

12. I eat a lot of pasta or noodle based dishes. Yesterday was Annie’s Mac and cheese with some Mexican chorizo, today was spahgetti with leftover chorizo.

13. I eat lamb about once a week from a Syrian restaurant near my workplace. Aside from that, my food is whatever cheap or decent-tasting food I find at Aldi or Giant Eagle. No set diet.

14. You’re asking a question of foreign food to a Nation filled with foreigners. So, someone somewhere is eating the food from their heritage everyday.

    Usually order Mediterranean and Chinese a few times a month.

15. I eat all sorts of stuff. It’s not really confined to one particular thing (besides pizza and wings perhaps “. Also, my wife is Iranian and those ladies can cook. So I eat Persian food all the time. Their food is incredible

16. I eat all kinds of food. I have Mexican once a week, Indian at least once a month, we have a place that makes Cornish pasties, meat pies, and pierogi so I have those every few weeks I lived in Kenya for a while so a few times a year I make some East African food. I think the most exciting thing about traveling to different places is trying all of the different kinds of food.

17. We make or have something German every now and then, but not too often. That includes stuff like saurkraut, blaukraut, weißwurst, and rouladen.

    The rest of the time I eat what most Americans have.

18. If I can count Italian, Mexican and Caribbean food then multiple times a week.

19. It’s maybe hard to determine what’s foreign – my local Mexican place could be Oaxacan, could be Calimex. Lots of places are “fusion” which is maybe more American?

    I can tell you that any given day of the week I might have sushi, tacos, ramen, banh mi, pho, curry, bao…the list goes on forever. It’s easy to find anything you want, there’s an abundance of variety (depending on location).

20. Yoghurt and coffee for breakfast.

    I often go for Taco Bell at lunch, which is fake Mexican. My other options for lunch are bagel, cheese omelet, and egg and cheese on a roll.

    For dinner, it’s usually some kind of pasta with tomato sauce.

21. Now that’s a good question. I like a lot of variety. I’m in an area that is a big melting pot that has a bunch of diverse cultures around me. I like to mix it up between American, French, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (not Americanized Chinese, mostly Szechuan), Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian, and Italian. There’s a good German place pretty close too… those are few and far between. I really like to look for authentic stuff… usually the native version of a dish is better than the ‘Americanized’ version. Mostly I cook though as it’s much cheaper, and you can find very exotic recipes on the internet.

22. **CONSTANTLY.**

    When I was a kid, my dad kept making the same two dozen, bland, starch and beef-heavy, poorly executed Italian/Eastern European meals, some of which came from the back of Campbell’s Soup cans. By the time I graduated high school, I started to say “You know what? Fuck this! I’m going to start cooking my own meals, amd I’m gonna look for different stuff!

    And I haven’t looked back ever since. I’ve cooked stuff like Iranian Saffron-Rosewater Frozen Custard, German Pancake Soup, Indian Butternut Squash and Cabbage Stew, Mexican Hominy and Guajillo soup, the list goes on.

23. I mostly eat Chinese foods at Chinese restaurants, mostly Cantonese things. Chinese barbecued pork with rice is a simple favorite. I rarely eat the Chinese-American stuff. I also occasionally eat things like sandwiches, burgers, pizzas, etc.

24. Define foreign food?

25. We have little kids and work FT so we try to quick meals: tacos (beef, pork, potato, bean, etc) – sometimes we will do asian fusion type tacos; lettuce wraps (often with Asian flavors); chili (slow cooker); butter chicken or curry chicken (slow cooker); bowls (poke bowls, Mediterranean bowls, Buddha bowls etc); sheet pan dinners; breakfast for dinner; Hungarian goulash with red cabbage; stir fry. We sometimes have a big Caesar salad with steak sliced on top and biscuits on the side. In the summer we cook on the grill a lot – burgers, chicken, etc. and often have corn on the cob and caprese salad as our sides. Burgers and breakfast are our most “American” dinners- everything else usually has some international influence- zaatar or garam masala or coconut milk etc. but absolutely none of it is authentic(except the goulash is like grandma’s!)

26. I eat foreign food fairly frequently. This week, there is Mexican and Korean on the dinner menu, as well as a few American dishes. Last week, we had Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and American. I’m also going out to dinner this week at a restaurant that serves Contemporary American cuisine, which is essentially a mixture of foreign dishes that have become ingrained in American culture (pastas, pizzas, rice bowls, etc.) along with traditional American dishes.

27. My girlfriend is Italian and loves to cook, so we eat a lot of pasta and other Italian dishes. The 2 closest supermarkets are Central American and Asian specialty markets, so we also eat a lot of Mexican/Salvadoran and Asian foods, especially Korean. On weekends, we usually barbecue if the weather is nice.

28. This is America, there are no foreign dishes. Only grist for the fusion mills.