How Did the Hamburger Take Over the World?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.07.02 | 1:37 AM ET
Theodore Dalrymple, writing in the New Statesman, explores the question, noting that cheap, delicious Asian cuisine in Singapore offers proof that fast food needn’t be as bad as the now dominant global style—American. For context, Dalrymple examines the issue historically. The decline of the British Empire hastened the decline of bad British food around the world. “But as the British declined, the country with the second-worst culinary tradition in the world, America, ascended, and achieved a position of power and influence undreamt of by the British,” he writes. “The Americans’ terrible food is now everywhere - I am writing this on the way home from Singapore, sitting in a shopping mall in Dubai, opposite a cafe with a pink neon sign advertising ‘the finest American pastries’. Needless to say, a fine American pastry is a contradiction in terms, but the café does a roaring trade.” What? Is he dissin’ the donut?
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
