I realize that I’m writing about television for the second time this week, but this simply could not be ignored:

Tonight on Iron Chef (the Japanese version) the challenger was “Japan’s only chef trained in Mexico,” who runs a Mexican restaurant in Tokyo.

“Well!” said the announcer, “in order to make this a true, mano-a-mano Latin challenge, we shall choose for him to face…Iron Chef Italian!”

Thus began several minutes of commentary talking about how similar Italian and Mexican foods are! How much alike! Because they’re both Latin!

And John and I are sitting on the couch, mouths agape, like “really? Is there perhaps some fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of foods were talking about here?”  It is true that both the Italian and Spanish languages derived from Latin, but…well, so is French. And Romanian.  It just doesn’t seem like “language of origin” is a terrifically precise mechanism for identifying similarity in foods.

Watching an entirely foreign culture address two cuisines that are very familiar to Americans was a hoot.  The trash talk from the Iron Chef Italian was HILARIOUS.  (“That’s tortellini, and tortellini is better than tortilla!”  “Italian food has complexity and nuance, unlike Mexican food!” “Our flags may look similar but Italian food is light years better than Mexican!”)

The commentary of the Japanese commentators/judges as they watched the chefs prepare was even better. “Is he making pasta?” “No, that’s a tortilla, it’s like the Mexican version of pasta, it’s just sort of…there.” “That’s a mole sauce, it’s used pretty much the same way as chicken broth is used in Western cooking.”  “What is THAT?”  “That’s a chili.”  “But it’s so BIG, how on earth could someone use THAT in cooking?”

This from a culture that considers highly poisonous blowfish a delicacy.