There’s a curious transformation that tends to afflict foods upon their passage into the New World, a form of steroidal expansion in which a joyously bountiful “more of everything!” aesthetic is paired with a parallel uptick in Americanized (often processed) ingredients (often cheese). Now, as the steady creep of modern industrialization spreads this sort of beefy maximalism around the globe, the practice has reverted to other countries, threading its way back across our inter-continental foodways. This means that things which appear to have been born here, nurtured in the hothouse cultural ferment of an uptown bodega or a downtown tea shop, may have actually been hatched back in the old country, creating another complex set of variables for charting how such transformations develop.
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Following a recent visit to the Bronx Zoo, I ventured into the wilds of Van Nest, a small, diverse neighborhood just outside the southeast gate. The western fringe of this area, dominated by the Cross Bronx Expressway and the city’s last remaining stretch of NYW&B tracks, seems to firmly prove Jane Jacobs’ theory of border vacuums, a depressed stretch of boundary wasteland marring the appearance of a place better known as the childhood home of Regis Philbin and Stokely Carmichel, and which boasts what may be the most ornate station in the subway system, or at least the one most resembling the property of a Spanish landowner.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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