Sarah Archer

Yeah.

So in the same way that there's this idea that you can kind of go anywhere in the world and every alien you meet will sort of speak East Coast English and kind of be more or less humanoid.

This idea that you can almost in air quotes travel sort of.

Right.

An experience of a taste or a version of someplace exotic.

But what you're actually experiencing is basically like a creative director who works for 7up or Better Homes and Gardens kind of conjuring an idea.

of something that's Japanese or exotic in some other way.

And I think that that idea of foreignness, you can sort of, as a commodity, I think that American access, partially because we've had, thank God, so much immigration in, I'm going to be on my soapbox just for a second, we have wonderful food from around the world made by people who are from

Right.

So we're not kind of stuck in, you know, making kind of like esoteric sandwiches that are based on a thought experiment.

But so I feel like the travel boom, the sort of version of the travel boom that most Americans could not partake in because it was still expensive.

It's like now it's still expensive to travel.

Right.

This was a sort of instead of being on TikTok or Instagram and kind of looking at people posting from their vacation on the Adriatic, you had this version of it.

You could kind of bring, quote unquote, foreign food into your kitchen if you bought a cookbook like Meals with Foreign Flair.

Well, and then there's something interesting, too, about the fact that like that food like is both like a colonizing agent.

Right.

Where it's like very painful and often profitable how food traditions are like destroyed and consumed.

Yes.

And imitated by people who don't understand them.