Food culture has evolved over the years in many different countries. Immigrants who have arrived in America have brought in many aspects of their own culture to create the melting pot or ethnic stew we have today in America. The food culture they have brought over here has slowly evolved and has incorporated American preferences into their cuisines as well as in their cooking style. However, while these ethnic foods have become more acquired to American tastes, a variety of ethnic foods have become part of American culture. These ethnic foods vary from all over the world, from the Americas to the Mediterranean to the Southern and Eastern Asian lands, and have contributed to America’s food palate.

This culture has become an ethnic stew and melting pot in both ways in that America has embraced ethnic foods and how ethnic foods evolved within American tastes. We have created food that is new and different from its authentic counterparts. In one way we have created a melting pot where all these different ethnic foods have come into our American food culture and come out reflected into something new, something Americanized, a common culture for all immigrants and citizens to share. However, at the same time we are starting to lean more towards the ethnic stew, a theory by Laura Laubeov, where these ethnic foods integrate within our society and evolve with America’s tastes but also maintain a cultural distinctiveness as can be seen with the awareness of other types of cuisines and other branches of the big cuisines we know in America. It’s a compromise of assimilation and multiculturalism (Gloor 2006).

So as of now we may be a melting pot but as we go more into the future hopefully we can become not just one identity but several identities in one cohesive society, or in other words this “ethnic stew”.