Has food gone global?

A few days ago, I got a response about my ‘Why I never do Sunday lunch in a restaurant’ post. The response, from a friend Down Under questioned how I link sangria and an old Italian woman. Sangria, as most people probably do not know is originally a Spanish drink. It is however globally recognized as an Italian drink. In South Africa one could probably blame this on the scarcity of Spanish restaurants and the over supply of pizzerias.

This got me thinking about other foods (if such a word exists) that have gone global. Some have even fully embraced the globalization trend of rebranding. A hot dog is called a boerie roll in South Africa. It’s the same thing really; sausage and synthetic sauces in a bun.

Italian cuisine is probably the most global cuisine, and must have something to do with the mafia forcing people to eat pizza slices and bowls of bolognese or else they make you ‘swim with the fishes’. You have this nation and that nation pizza all over the world. Throw in some jalapenos and its Mexicana, throw in some pineapple and its Hawaiian. Maybe I should come up with a tripe pizza: the Xhosanostra pizza. I even had a pizza with avocado and biltong a while ago.

The most global though, has to be ice cream. It has gone so global that its origin is no longer material. I suspect the Chinese or someone from some cold place in the Orient came up with ice cream. It transcends all boundaries; religious, geographical, you name them. Even the poorest villagers have a bit of ice cream from time to time.

Second on the list has to be the hamburger. Conceptualized in the Mongolian battlefields where warriors would tenderize the meat with their saddles while fighting, it ended up named after a German city.

Has any African food gone global?

That is difficult to say as they pop up on the other side of the world and people claim to have made them since time immemorial. Biltong is beef jerky in the USA and has been around for centuries. Pap is polenta in Italy, the list goes on.

The effects of this globalization of food are similar to the ones you see in the world economy. South African kids are now growing up not knowing how to cook pap, samp and beans or even eat mopani worms, but can make you the best tasking lasagna by the time they reach their teens. Ask a young Afrikaner girl to make some melktert and see what you end up with.