What do you eat?

For some reason, this question never fails to stump me. I've gotten it a lot since living in Taiwan, in different variations--"What do you eat for dinner here?" "What did you eat at home?" "What do Americans usually eat?"--and I never know how to answer.

I had the same problem at home--I would say I cooked for myself, and when people asked what, I would answer with an oh-so-dignified "Uhhhhh...." followed by something equally inane, like "chicken?"

Obviously, I eat. I would even go so far as to say that I eat pretty well, with a decent, though not chef-worthy, level of variety of meats and veggies and cuisines. But what are they, exactly? That, I couldn't say.

Some categories are easy: spaghetti, stir fry, meat and potatoes, salads, breads, tacos, soups, sandwiches. Beyond that, I often rely on a few steady cuisines: Italian, Thai, Mexican, some sort of "fusion" American (though I'll be the first to admit I have no idea what that means).

The problem, especially here, is that when I'm asked what I eat at home and the first things that come to mind are spaghetti and stir fry (which, in all honesty, I eat maybe once every two weeks), I'm then hard-pressed to explain to my Taiwanese friends why, exactly, I miss food from home. After all, most brunch shops here offer spaghetti, as do numerous other Western restaurants; as for stir fry, you'd be hard-pressed to go more than a few blocks here without hitting a dedicated restaurant. So why, they ask, and rightly so, do I miss food from home?

And that's where I get stuck. Why is it so hard to explain that everything, from the raw materials to the seasonings to the preparation methods, are different here? Or to mention how vastly the absence of things like convection ovens and non-American cheese (ironically the local favorite) affect one's ability to cook? Even now, I have a Taiwanese chocolate pudding in my fridge--a "pudding" the preparation for which required only water, not milk, and whose final consistency is closer to that of strawberry Jell-O than real, American-style pudding.

And what do Americans eat at home? As I tell my questioners, the answer to that is simply too vast for me to touch on. Americans eat everything. Every cuisine, tweaked a bit and catered to the American palate, shows up on American plates on a regular basis. Sure, here people may frequently treat themselves to other cuisines, but I don't think they realize just how prevalent other cuisines are in American foods.

One reason for this, of course, is that without other cuisines America doesn't have one--we have, after all, defined ourselves as a nation of internal immigrants, each of whom brought their own unique flavors with them when they moved. It's what makes American cuisine so nebulous and hard to pin down as anything other than diverse--and what makes answering "what do you eat?" such a ticklish task.

Unless, of course, you narrow it down to a simpler question, like "what did you eat today?" And that one, today, was a fun one for me to answer, as well as one that highlights America's culinary diversity. Today, I celebrated my aunt and uncle's family by cooking a dish that originated in their adoptive country of Bolivia. I didn't have potatoes today to round out the dish, but I did have the other component parts (beef, rice, eggs, salsa) that make up the wonderfulness that is SILPANCHO!

(The rice is under the meat patty, which is under the egg)

So yes, I miss the deliciously bad for you and fantastically diverse cuisine of America. And what do I eat? Well, today, I eat silpancho!