One of the things I'm doing at the moment is supervising a State-department-sponsored three-month visit by a Ukranian graduate student working on a Ph.D in law. She's interested in the effect of various institutions, especially NGOs, on cyberlaw. OK, that part I can handle. But as it's her first visit to the US, and this a sort of cultural as well as academic experience, I feel compelled to do more than give her things to read and talk about her writing. I want to answer her questions about America. This is not always easy.
Take this stumper: she has a small budget for our lunches. We'd like to use that to introduce her to representative “American food”. But what's that? No, besides hot dogs and hamburgers, McDonalds and Burger King. She can, after all, get those at home these days. And they are hardly the best advertisements for the place anyway (why I feel the need I feel to suggest good food is beyond the scope of this entry).
What foods are both suitably “American” and good (and not too expensive)? Most of the food I like best when I go out is 'ethnic', 'national' or 'regional'—Chinese, Italian, Indian, Nicaraguan, Mexican, Cuban, Peruvian, or Thai, for example. Now, these are, in my mind, as 'American' as, well, apple pie*, and indeed in the case of Chinese food I'm reliably informed that what we get here isn't that much like what they eat there anyway. So that's 'American food' to me. But it turns out to be a tough concept to sell.
Apparently, to the Eastern European mind Chinese food just isn't authentically American enough. So, for my first attempt I suggested bagels, as she'd never heard of them. But it turned out, unsurprisingly, that they do have something a whole lot like bagels in Kiev. So that wasn't so wonderful an idea after all.
My next choice will be BBQ ribs. But then what?
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