San Francisco is a “Food City”, that is to the extent that we all eat food, and we all associate the city where we live in, as the means to offer us our favorite cuisines, food is the single great readily available entertainment on a daily basis right across our city-wide culture.
We all talk to our friends and meet at our mutual favorite spots in the city. Since most Americans are usually third or fourth generation Americans, comfort food or what we call “fast-food”, is not just about habits but about necessities of life-work balance.
Although we all prefer good quality food, and San Francisco is known for being one of the best food cities in all of U.S., we often have to resort to comfort and/or convenient fast food.
But these comfort foods or eating at a fast food restaurant or going to the groceries and buying frozen food for the week does not define or influence who we are within our so-called food culture. Our comfort foods is not about who are, where we come from, and what happened to us along the way, and how we have rush to the next task of the day before we run out of time.
Our food culture is the result of our social experiences, both as young adults (teenagers having some degree of freedom to choose what we eat) and as mature, responsible adults. As adults we are also influenced by those we interact in our society, for instance, the people we date, the things we have learnt from them, where we’ve gone, what ideas we acquired through interactions with others.
We may also have been exposed to elements from other cultures, and that may have also influenced us. I have always enjoyed Thai food after I went to a great Thai restaurant as a young man. These things influences our choices and our decisions.
We all agree that U.S. is a melting pot of people from all over the world. As a result of this, directly or indirectly, food is particularly important when you become part of a social inclusiveness and blends our nation into a uniting vestige of culture that brings people together.
The “melting pot” in American cuisine is indeed a very real aspect of the American life and socialization, especially in big cities like San Francisco, Dallas, New York, Chicago, Miami, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. Americans, after one or two generations, see their cultures represented by their cuisine in a somewhat monolithic terms, for instance, French, Thai, Middle Eastern, Indian, Mexican, Chinese, and Italian, etc. All these cuisines can even comprise of dozens of distinct regional foods, and even more, they could be influenced by many regional variations, for instance Lebanese cuisine is influenced by Arab, Turkish, and Persian cuisines.
San Francisco food culture is the same as the American cuisine as a whole and it is shaped by the natural wealth of our beautiful country, which comprise of the wonderful people and the food culture they have brought here over the many centuries. American people have now gotten use to the luxury of choice among wonderful foods from every culture on earth, from Japanese food from sushi, buckwheat, and rice, to Indian, Italian, and French offering lentils and beans alongside wheat. We are all the more richer for it.