Food Americana with David Page
Creator of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and author of Food Americana, David Page is an expert on American food trends, history, and what to expect post-COVID.
Food Americana with David Page
MICHAEL J: Today, we’re diving face-first, fork-first to learn about that accent with none other than David Page, the man who gave us a roadmap to America’s most iconic eateries with “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” A seasoned journalist turned food television maestro, David is also the author of “Food Americana,” a deep dive into American food culture, trends, and what we can expect in our culinary future.
From the ABC and NBC newsrooms to giving us the lowdown on everything from fast food to food trends, he’s the voice you want to hear when talking about America’s favorite subject: food! For now, I want to start with: What is American food?
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American cuisine, as I defined it, in my book, “Food Americana,” is similar to the immigration patterns that have created our multicultural society. It is a group of foods that came to the United States originally with an immigrant group, or that were indigenous to the people who were here when settlers found them. And that then, over the years, were modified, often very significantly, to American tastes, the availability of American ingredients, and evolved over time from that.
DAVID: Well, American cuisine, as I defined it, in my book,
“Food Americana,” is similar to the immigration patterns that have created our multicultural society. It is a group of foods that came to the United States originally with an immigrant group, or that were indigenous to the people who were here when settlers found them. And that then, over the years, were modified, often very significantly, to American tastes, the availability of American ingredients, and evolved over time from that. So, I believe Chinese food is American. I’m not talking about Chinese food as eaten in China. I’m talking about Chinese food as it evolved in America, after initially being brought here from the Canton province of China by folks who came to feed the Chinese gold miners who came to California during the gold rush in the 1800s. I’m talking about sushi being an American food, generally not the sushi that’s eaten in Japan. But, the sushi evolved from that.
Beginning in the mid-60s, when Japanese restaurants serving Japanese businessmen began to proliferate in California. The food was then sampled by and picked up by many of the beautiful people, many of the celebrities, especially in the very beginning, Yul Brenner. And then over time, the concept of sushi as raw fish, even though it doesn’t have to include raw fish, became unappealing to most Americans. So, sushi evolved, you got the California roll, which has no raw fish entered, it has imitation crab and replicating the fat of fatty tuna, you have avocado.
Mexican food evolved the same way. If pizza evolved the same way. These are foods that started someplace else that came here and then were changed substantially over time and together form our cuisine. Now I’m including as American food only the foods that are common everywhere in the country, and that are part of everyday conversations about what we should have for lunch today, which is why I’m including sushi and not Thai food.
Thai food is very popular in many places, but it’s not a universal go-to. It’s why I’m including sushi, but not Peruvian food, despite the fact that advocates of Peruvian food have been pushing for us to eat more of it forever. And it’s really, really good. But at least in the form as eaten in Peru, where the iconic dish is something called anticuchos, which is grilled beef heart, Americans are not stepping up to the plate and saying, “I gotta have me some of that.”
MICHAEL J: You realize you’re blowing my mind here, right? Okay, what is the difference? Because I have not been to Japan, I have not been to China. What is the difference between a sushi roll or any kind of roll in the US and Japan?
DAVID: The proliferation of sushi rolls is mostly what Americanized sushi consists of, and we are making sushi rolls with a variety of ingredients that never would have been used in Japan. There’s a place I know of that puts a pork chop in a sushi roll. They’re treating it differently than it’s generally treated in Japan. There’s a sushi bar inside a gas station across from an airborne side in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which is, you know, the kind of capital of the chicken fried steak. Sushi rolls are dropped into a deep fryer.
You don’t see that in Japan. You get the Philadelphia roll that has smoked salmon in it, and cream cheese. Cream cheese is an item that’s never been part of any Asian cuisine. You also have a variety of spicy sauces that you generally won’t get on a sushi roll in Japan, and just the size. Basically, our sushi rolls are super-sized compared to what you’d find in Japan.
MICHAEL J: Mind blown.
DAVID: And it’s everyday food. I mean, I spoke to a high-ranking executive at one of the largest sushi preparation companies in the country, who said to me,
“Look, when I was a kid, my friends and I would go out for lunch. It was burgers and fries. When my kids go out for lunch, it’s sushi. And you can get it everywhere. I mean, you can even get it at the drugstore. It’s pretty ubiquitous.”
MICHAEL J: Okay, so I have to ask this question then. You’ve defined it as things that we can find, and they’re ubiquitous in the US. If we go to another country, if I go to Japan, and someone says,
“What is American food?” What is something that you would say is iconic American food? And you’ve got to have this when you get to Chicago or New York or LA or Dallas or Memphis or wherever? What is American food to people who are not from America?
DAVID: Okay, that means ignoring everything that came here from their cultures and got modified. You’re talking about barbecue; you’re talking about lobster rolls. But, not a lot more. I mean, those are pretty much the two items that, to some extent, are endemic here or intrinsic here. Although I just read an article. It’s interesting. There is and has, for a long time, the accepted belief that the evolution of barbecue was that it first started in the Caribbean as something called “Barbra choanal.” That’s the Spanish translation of a Taino word, which basically meant a platform made of sticks, and barbeque initially was apparently cooked on a platform made of sticks over coals.
There’s an argument being made by another author that, in fact, while that existed and was parallel, it really was not part of the evolution of barbecue in America. To me, that difference is pretty minor, as whether you take the sticks from the Caribbean or not. Barbecue, for the most part, was created in America by enslaved people using techniques and flavors that they knew from West Africa.
MICHAEL J: Okay, so when I go to Korean barbecue, and Mongolian barbecue –
DAVID: Just because the word in English is barbecue doesn’t mean it’s what we would have known as barbecue for those who can’t speak Mongolian because I’m not sure of the cooking style. But Korean barbecue is meat in close proximity to coals and direct fire. I think it kind of came up in its own way in Korea, different than what the initial concept of American barbecue was, which is a whole carcass cooked low and slow over heat, that was quite some distance from the animal, taken to its extreme in Texas where it’s offset cooking. And no piece of meat is directly over the fire. It’s possible for similar kinds of food to be created independently in different cultures.
MICHAEL J: Gotcha. So we’ve got barbecue that is uniquely American. I want to talk about the American diet. Basically, it seems, at least from what I’ve read, that we eat much larger portions than other places around the planet. And now, we’re worried about eating healthy, right? How did that come about? Why is it becoming a trend? Is it a marketing thing? And do we want to eat like other countries, quietly? What is that?
DAVID: It’s a combination of factors. I would place much of the initial blame on the euphoria in this country that followed World War Two. For white Americans, specifically white middle-class Americans, minorities were excluded; they were excluded in law. I mean, if you were black, you didn’t qualify for GI Bill benefits or a VA loan. But for white middle-class America after World War Two, it was a time of massive expansion, growth, and a sense that anything was possible; more became better. Now, it didn’t start just there.
The fact is, when poor Italian immigrants came from Southern Italy to the United States in the 1800s, they found that being poor here was different than being poor there. In southern Italy, being poor meant you never had meat. Here, it meant you could have meat, not as much and not as good a cut as a wealthier person, but you could have meat. This created what we came to know in red sauce restaurants as bolognese sauces that previously were just tomato; all of a sudden, they were filled with meat because it was possible to do that. Portions got larger, meatballs got larger, and we have continued as a culture down that path of more is better. I mean, we did invent the McMansion.
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The fact of the matter is, salt, sugar, and fat are, if not medically, and perhaps medically, but certainly psychologically addictive. The more you give us of that, the more we want.
As for the content of the food, I heard a very interesting article the other day that placed much of our addiction to fast food – filled with salt, sugar, and fat – on the purchase of fast food companies by tobacco companies. I think in the 70s, they approached the marketing the same way they approached marketing cigarettes, to get people involved in desiring something that isn’t really good for you. The fact of the matter is, salt, sugar, and fat are, if not medically, and perhaps medically, but certainly psychologically addictive. The more you give us of that, the more we want.
MICHAEL J: I will attest to wanting more sugar as a sugar addict. I understand that. But, that is an eye-opening revelation that you just made. Where can we learn more about that? Is there an article somewhere?
DAVID: It’s a
Washington Post article, dated September 9, 2019. It’s an older article. Look at this: A new study suggests that tobacco companies, skilled at marketing cigarettes, employ similar strategies to hook people on processed foods.
MICHAEL J: What do you think about trends in food? What’s going on right now? What’s good? What’s what?
DAVID: It’s an unsettled time. It’s hard to tell. I mean, there’s a lot of talk about eating healthy. But what does that really mean? Does it mean eating a grain-only burger because somehow that’s better for us than beef, when in fact, it’s one of the most highly processed food products you’ll ever come across? And no one has studied the carbon footprint impact of producing that burger.
There’s a lot of lip service toward eating real food, which has allowed people to make a lot of money selling food kits, people. When, good God, you don’t need to open a pre-measured package of salt to put with pre-measured pieces of chicken. It takes you twice as long to do that as it does to cook something for real. You want to cook a chicken, get a pan, put a chicken in it. Robert would salt, pepper, and garlic. Add a little stock so it doesn’t dry out. Turn your oven up to 500, put the chicken in there, take it out 40 minutes later, and have dinner.
MICHAEL J: Did you just say 500?
DAVID: I cook a lot of things at 500. Interestingly enough, I recently adopted a different technique for cooking steak, which is the reverse sear. Most people cook steak by getting the pan as hot as possible, throwing the steak on, waiting until you get to see sear on one side, turning it over, or waiting until you get to see sear on the other side. And what you end up doing in the process is turning much of the exterior shell of that steak into well-done meat; you have much less meat in the center that is pink.
However, if you go with the reverse sear, what you do is you put the steak in the oven at a low temperature – I choose 70°C – and you let it cook slowly so that it cooks evenly at a low temperature. And when it’s pink all the way across, you take it out, throw it in a really hot pan on top of the stove for a minute on one side and a minute on the other side, and you’ve got the best steak I’ve ever eaten outside of a steakhouse.
MICHAEL J: I keep going back to your statement at the beginning about all these foods that became Americanized food. I think steak is one of those things you go,
“Steak. That’s an American dish.”
DAVID: Well, to some extent, it is. Look at the concept of the beef steak, per se, and our love for beef came from the English, who settled this country to a great extent. Cuts of steak are different here than in the rest of the world. But look, the French have steak frites. They like hanger steak. The Brits have entrecote. So, I can’t say that the concept of cooking a cut of beef is particularly American on its face. We have become, I think, the world’s greatest steak lovers.
Again, partially during the go-go years, if you will. I think it was a way of showing off: “I can afford steak.” And, you know, yeah, there’s a lot of steak in America. I didn’t focus on steak or beef per se in the book because I concentrated on a meat product that is quintessentially American. There’s an argument to be made that I could have included a chapter on steak or at least beef in the broader sense. You know, chops, roasts?
MICHAEL J: Okay, I get on board with that. Let’s talk about something, and I don’t know if it’s gonna blow up in the comments or not: pizza. Yes, pizza is a staple. If you don’t want to cook, you just grab a pizza, frozen pizza, order pizza, go out, and eat. So, let me go ahead and talk about some pizza. That seems to me, even though when one says “Italian,” I’m thinking pizza, American. What do you think?
DAVID: I think pizza, in some respects, is the ultimate American food. It came here from Southern Italy. When it arrived here, it was in southern Italy among the poor. It was simply dough with some tomato on it. If you had a really good week, maybe you could afford to top it with a piece of lard or a sardine. But it was the lowest of the low. When the immigrants arrived here, they found a number of things.
Number one, they could not replicate the pizza they made at home for a number of reasons. The wheat in the United States has a different protein content than the wheat in Italy. The ovens they found in New York were fueled by coal, while the pizza ovens in Italy were fueled by wood. So you ended up with a pizza with a different crust texture to start with. Then, in terms of the availability of ingredients, as I said earlier, this was a population that realized they could afford some meat and other things. So the concept of topping a pizza, the gate opened, and it was on.
What’s interesting about pizza, I talked about how food evolves. Food evolves in many ways. I mean, in most countries, food is regional. It’s based on what grew in that area or what the economic conditions would allow in that area. In the United States, we have a lot of regions that pizza began to travel to as the Italian population moved across the country. What happened there was that regional styles of pizza developed based on what was regionally available.
There’s a pizza in St. Louis made with something called Provel cheese, a processed cheese combination that involves Swiss and others, and liquid smoke. Then there’s the Chicago deep-dish pizza that developed there alongside one of the great pizzas in America, the thin-crust Chicago bar pie, which fewer people may be familiar with. All in all, there are at least 30 styles of pizza in the United States.
There’s also a kind of pizza called Old Forge that began in a Pennsylvania coal mining town called Old Forge, Pennsylvania. It was invented to feed hungry miners by a bar owner and is highly unique. It’s oblong and comes in two varieties: red or white. The red has the sauce on top of the cheese, and I believe the white has a flavor to it, almost like Caraway. These are unique pizzas only known in that section of Pennsylvania and so popular that when you enter Old Forge, there’s a sign that denotes it as the pizza capital of America.
Which, of course, you can call yourself the “David Page capital of the Jersey Shore.” You know, you say what you want, but it’s, and by the way, it’s available on Goldbelly, and it’s terrific, not to push Goldbelly and their ridiculous prices.
But there’s the most recent pizza to be discovered: Detroit style, which was invented in the ‘40s by a bar owner in Detroit who baked them in these blue steel metal pans that had been liberated from an auto supply shop or an auto factory because it was Detroit. That has this wonderful rim of caramelized cheese around the sides. In the last few years, a gentleman (I’m embarrassed to say I’m going to forget his name) made Detroit pizza in Detroit and took it to the World Pizza Championships in Vegas, and he won. That’s what put Detroit pizza on the map to the degree that Pizza Hut or Domino’s, or maybe both, put it on the menu for a while.
MICHAEL J: Where do you see food going in the US?
DAVID: I haven’t got a clue. Every prediction is wrong. You know, at one point, it was going to be all non-meat meat. That’s not working. At one point in the non-meat meat, you’re saying Beyond Meat and the meat industry were going to be shell-shocked by public acceptance of faux meat. Yeah, the people who are going to eat it are eating it. I don’t see them storming the ramparts of anything, frankly. Part of my mantra is if you’re going to eat, eat well, and we have a lot of work to do to eradicate factory farming and reduce methane release into the atmosphere. But I don’t see fake pizza sausage really contributing much to that.
There was a piece, I think in the New York Times this week, maybe the Wall Street Journal, about the difficulties that companies are having producing meat from the cellular level. They went into great detail about a couple of companies that are growing chicken from cells. Too many people are going to find that icky. And it is apparently quite expensive. It’s very hard since you’re not really sure which cells you started with. It’s hard to tell if you’re getting white meat or dark or both.
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I do think there will continue to be a broadening of American interest in foods from other places, perhaps to a big enough degree that I would consider them part of American cuisine.
I do think there will continue to be a broadening of American interest in foods from other places, perhaps to a big enough degree that I would consider them part of American cuisine. Right now, I see a lot happening in the area of what is not American cuisine, of trying foods as they are currently made in their historical countries of origin. Chinese food as eaten in China is becoming more available, for example. For many years now, Italian American food has been broadening beyond red sauce, often simplistically referred to as the difference between Northern Italian and Southern Italian, which isn’t true. Italy is made up of regions with different kinds of food.
Mexican food also sees increasing interest in Mexican foods that are not traditionally part of Mexican American cuisine, which grew out of the foods of the northern border with Mexico and all of the inhabitants there who suddenly found themselves American one day after the Mexican American War. More foods from other parts of Mexico are becoming popular. There’s something called Birria, which is a spicy meat stew that’s just fantastic.
Birria tacos or quesabirria tacos are just extraordinary. You take a tortilla, dip it in the sauce that the beef was cooked in (it started out as goat but by the time it got here, it’s mostly beef), put it on a flattop, take the meat out, put it on the tortilla, add the cheese, fold it over, let it crisp, then pour more of the sauce on it, turn it over, let it crisp, and serve it with a cup full of that cooking liquid which, now that you’re eating it, will be called consommé, and you dip the taco into the consommé. It’s extraordinary.
To see David's full interview,
watch his episode!
When it comes to David’s favorite dishes, his preferences may surprise you. He has a distinct taste, and his top choices reflect his unique culinary palette and experiences in the world of food.
David’s Favorite Recipes:
- Steak Selection. David’s favorite cut of beef is the New York Strip. While some may argue in favor of the ribeye or filet mignon, David prefers the New York Strip for its robust flavor and texture.
- Pizza Preference. David’s go-to pizza is the classic Margarita. However, he acknowledges that the true Italian Margarita, with its less crunchy crust, is superior to what is commonly found in the United States. He credits Tony Geminiani, a renowned pizza maker, for enlightening him about the exquisite taste of authentic Margarita pizza.
- Burger Love. When it comes to burgers, David is a fan. Although he doesn’t specify a particular favorite joint, he enjoys a good burger, possibly even one from his own kitchen.
- Side Dish Selection. David’s choice between french fries and onion rings is clear—fries all the way. He pairs them with ketchup but reserves mustard for hotdogs, firmly following the culinary tradition that hotdogs don’t get ketchup.
- Chicago Dog Enthusiast. Having lived in Chicago for a couple of years, David developed a deep appreciation for the overloaded Chicago dog, complete with all its delightful toppings.
- Morning Delight. In the battle between pancakes and waffles, David leans towards pancakes as his preferred breakfast option.
About Our Guest
David Page is a long-time journalist with two decades in foreign and domestic coverage on ABC News and NBC News, until he transitioned to food television and writing. Find more about David and read his full bio here.
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