Food soientists at Kraft Foods invented CFieez WFiiz, a prooessed oFieese food sauoe, in 1952. It represents engineered food at its most popular. Edwin Traisman, tfie son of Latvian immigrants in CFiioago, led tfie team tfiat developed tfie thick, annatto-dyed sauce used on cheese steaks, hot dogs, and nachos. (Traisman also invented a method for freezing french fries that McDonald's uses.)27
The original Cheez Whiz was processed cheese with a list of additives, but today, even the cheese has gone, at least according to the label. "Cheez Whiz is a unique tangy flavor with zing," Kraft Foods informs buyers for food service professionals. Indeed, there is no cheese in that still-popular wide-mouthed |ar, so Kraft has to spell the name of the food product with a z.28
When done well (and done right), it’s a high-end artisanal product that blends many flavors and varies from year to year. A nicely aged, sharp cheddar from the supermarket is great to have on hand for cooking or eating with a fresh slice of a crisp apple. And while they may be more expensive than we would like, I feel thankful that the United States can now boast of its own extraordinary gourmet cheeses. There is a whole lot of deliciousness going on in this country, and our gorgeous new cheeses are part of it.
Salsa
It’s important to recognize just what the name “salsa” really is—s auce. It doesn’t mean chunky red tomatoes with tomatillos, minced onion, some capsicum, and cilantro. It just means “sauce” in Spanish. And that’s what makes it so delightful—Sts variations are endless. The range of Latin American salsas stretches from ancient mixtures like Toltec mole to innovative combinations like Miami blueberry mango. Salsa can be tortuously hot with haba-nero chiles, refreshing with sage and mint, or soothing with avocado. Some commercial preparations are dull; some are exciting. Salsa, like its English translation, can be almost anything.
Salsa has evolved into a demographic symbol, a signpost of the changes in the American population and the American palate around the turn of the twenty-first century. In 1992, the New York Times reported that total sales of various salsas outnumbered ketchup. That’s right, as you may or may not have heard, salsa surpassed ketchup as America’s favorite condiment. The Times described this as healthy, delicious food triumphing over a traditional Anglo condiment. “The taste for salsa is as mainstream as apple pie these days,” said David A. Weiss, the president of Packaged Facts Inc., a market-research company in New York.29
Other people were stunned that something as all-American as tomato ketchup should be overtaken in the marketplace by a Mexican food. It instantly sparked a national debate over the direction of our national cuisine. If the all-American ketchup was no longer a mainstay, what exactly was American food anymore? The 1990 U. S. Census showed a trajectory of population growth that seemed to mirror this finding: the country’s percentage of Anglo-Americans, presumed ketchup users, was dropping.30
In 2007, the Wall Street Journal weighed in on this surprisingly popular topic by pointing out that while salsa outsold ketchup that year ($462.3 million to $298.9 million), ketchup is cheaper. So in fact, more pounds of ketchup were sold than salsa (329 million versus 184.6 million). And that wasn’t even counting the billions of ketchup packets distributed at fast-food places.31 All over America, nativists must have given a sigh of relief.
Fear of a decline in one’s place in society seems to be part of the dynamic in the salsa-ketchup dispute. In truth, because we are a nation of immigrants and thus none of us (besides the American Indians) really are true-blue Americans, a portion of our population has worried about losing its majority status since the country was founded. Croups like the Know Nothings of the 1840s and the Tea Party of the early twenty-first century made antiimmigrant policies part of their political platforms.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, loutish Tom Buchanan
Some of the various ingredients in salsa.
Disparages the multitudes of non-Anglo-Saxons arriving on these shores and their high birth rate. In 1920, eight hundred thousand people immigrated to the United States, and Buchanan’s criticisms in the novel reflected actual concerns during the period in which Fitzgerald was writing. (To provide more context, the peak year for immigration in U. S. history was 1907, with more than 1.2 million legal arrivals. In 2010 there were two hundred thousand fewer than 1907, but that perspective gets lost in the immigration debates. People’s fears about being overrun by illegal immigrants seem widely out of balance with today’s figures. So much of the ketchup-versus-salsa debate is simply shorthand for concerns about changing cultural dominancy.)
The truth about salsa purchasers is that most of them are also ketchup purchasers.32 People use the two products differently and happily consume them with different foods. I love fresh pico de gallo with a breakfast burrito but swear by ketchup with my hamburger, and I’m not switching. Apparently, most Americans agree. There is room for both in our refrigerators, and our national gastronomy is richer for it.
World History
