History GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff / Food

China is an atypical case, however, in that pizza as it is eaten in North America or Europe, has historically been largely considered unappealing and unpalatable, as it contains cheese and tomato. While tomato is relatively common in the modern Chinese kitchen--tomato-and-egg stir fry and tomato-and-egg soup are very popular, southern China has had all kinds of interesting uses for tomatoes (especially pickled) for centuries, and tomato ketchup is ubiquitous (having been introduced in the late 19th century)[[note]]As an aside, this means that anyone saying that "authentic" sweet and sour pork/chicken/what have you does not have ketchup is deeply mistaken: in modern China, most recipes for the "classic" Cantonese ''gulu'' sauce call for ketchup, and have done since no later than the 1950s. The quantity is admittedly a bit less than seen in Westernized Chinese cuisine, but it's still definitely a primary ingredient: it stands in for a jam made from Chinese hawberries that makes up about a quarter of the traditional sauce. The hawberry jam is substantially more expensive, even in China, and so only the most obsessively traditionalist cooks in the country bother with it. Additionally, chefs in China making other regions' versions of sweet-and-sour sauce (like Northeastern ''guobao'' sauce--traditionally made of just vinegar, sugar, and salt) will often add a touch of ketchup for color.[[/note]]--cheese is less so,[[note]]Except for a few areas. Setting aside the dairy-eating Mongols and Turks of the north and northwest, there's a small tradition of cheesemaking in the area around Shunde in Guangdong, which centers around a kind of pressed water buffalo farmer's cheese not unlike Indian paneer. Also, Western cheeses are known in Hong Kong, where melting cheeses are ubiquitous in chachaantengs, but we're getting ahead of ourselves[[/note]] and the combination is thus seen as kind of weird. Pizza Hut, before expanding to China, was warned that selling pizza to Chinese would have a high chance of failure for these reasons, so the company produced special Chinese-oriented recipes, which had less cheese and tomato or substituted them for other ingredients (such as the more familiar mayonnaise in place of cheese), as well as toppings based on foods more familiar to the Chinese, such as soy sauce or fish. Pizza Hut also made the pizzas smaller as fast food in China is commonly eaten while walking around outside and the large American pizzas are unwieldy.[[note]]Of course, in the "homeland" of American pizza on the East Coast, pizza is ''also'' commonly eaten walking around (or at least standing around) outside, and is therefore commonly sold by the slice rather than/as well as the whole pie. "Dollar slices" (these days more likely to be $2 or even $3) to be bought at the shop and eaten on the go are a veritable NYC institution, and the other Northeastern cities from Boston to DC have plenty of similar shops. It's also common in Italy; Rome in particular is famous for ''pizza al taglio'' ("pizza by the slice", where said slice is sold, interestingly, by ''weight''), especially on the beach at Ostia (Rome's port/seaside area on the Tyrrhenian coast), where beachgoers will buy from the shop and walk over to their spot on the beach to enjoy the snack (often with a cold beer). Why this (relatively obvious) method of selling pizza as a hand-portable street food wasn't brought to China is unclear; either the possibility of selling by the slice never occurred to the major chains (which are all based in the U.S. Midwest, where the pizza business is oriented around whole pies for family sit-down dinner or delivery) or the economics of trying that model (which does rely heavily on predicting what toppings will be in demand and baking pies ahead accordingly) in China rather than making smaller pizzas didn't pencil out.[[/note]] Nowhere was this market research more valuable than the counter-example of Domino's, which sold pizzas unchanged from the American style: They were only able to sell mainly to Americanophiles and those who had lived in the US for some time and were thus used to foods with a lot of cheese and tomato in them. To everyone else, it was ForeignQueasine.\\

China is an atypical case, however, in that pizza as it is eaten in North America or Europe, has historically been largely considered unappealing and unpalatable, as it contains cheese and tomato. While tomato is relatively common in the modern Chinese kitchen--tomato-and-egg stir fry and tomato-and-egg soup are very popular, southern China has had all kinds of interesting uses for tomatoes (especially pickled) for centuries, and tomato ketchup is ubiquitous (having been introduced in the late 19th century)[[note]]As an aside, this means that anyone saying that "authentic" sweet and sour pork/chicken/what have you does not have ketchup is deeply mistaken: in modern China, most recipes for the "classic" Cantonese ''gulu'' sauce call for ketchup, and have done since no later than the 1950s. The quantity is admittedly a bit less than seen in Westernized Chinese cuisine, but it's still definitely a primary ingredient: it stands in for a jam made from Chinese hawberries that makes up about a quarter of the traditional sauce. The hawberry jam is substantially more expensive, even in China, and so only the most obsessively traditionalist cooks in the country bother with it. Additionally, chefs in China making other regions' versions of sweet-and-sour sauce (like Northeastern ''guobao'' sauce--traditionally made of just vinegar, sugar, and salt) will often add a touch of ketchup for color.[[/note]]--cheese is less so,[[note]]Except for a few areas. Setting aside the dairy-eating Mongols and Turks of the north and northwest, there's a small tradition of cheesemaking in the area around Shunde in Guangdong, which centers around a kind of pressed water buffalo farmer's cheese not unlike Indian paneer. Also, Western cheeses are known in Hong Kong, where melting cheeses are ubiquitous in chachaantengs, but we're getting ahead of ourselves[[/note]] and the combination is thus seen as kind of weird. Pizza Hut, before expanding to China, was warned that selling pizza to Chinese would have a high chance of failure for these reasons, so the company produced special Chinese-oriented recipes, which had less cheese and tomato or substituted them for other ingredients (such as the more familiar mayonnaise in place of cheese), as well as toppings based on foods more familiar to the Chinese, such as soy sauce or fish. Pizza Hut also made the pizzas smaller as fast food in China is commonly eaten while walking around outside and the large American pizzas are unwieldy.[[note]]Of course, in the "homeland" of American pizza on the East Coast, pizza is ''also'' commonly eaten walking around (or at least standing around) outside, and is therefore commonly sold by the slice rather than/as well as the whole pie. "Dollar slices" (these days more likely to be $2 or even $3) to be bought at the shop and eaten on the go are a veritable NYC institution, and the other Northeastern cities from Boston to DC have plenty of similar shops. It's also common in Italy; Rome in particular is famous for ''pizza al taglio'' ("pizza by the slice", where said slice is sold, interestingly, by ''weight''), especially on the beach at Ostia (Rome's port/seaside area on the Tyrrhenian coast), where beachgoers will buy from the shop and walk over to their spot on the beach to enjoy the snack (often with a cold beer). Why this (relatively obvious) method of selling pizza as a hand-portable street food wasn't brought to China is unclear; either the possibility of selling by the slice never occurred to the (whole-pie-oriented) chains or the economics of trying that model (which does rely heavily on predicting what toppings will be in demand and baking pies ahead accordingly) in China rather than making smaller pizzas didn't pencil out.[[/note]] Nowhere was this market research more valuable than the counter-example of Domino's, which sold pizzas unchanged from the American style: They were only able to sell mainly to Americanophiles and those who had lived in the US for some time and were thus used to foods with a lot of cheese and tomato in them. To everyone else, it was ForeignQueasine.\\

* Spin a globe and point and you'll likely land on a country whose local cuisine loves and heavily incorporates garlic. From its origins in Southern Asia, this humble little bulb's perfect combination of easy to grow, flavorful and tasty, and containing possible health benefits have led it to proliferate pretty much everywhere, with multiple Asian, Latin American, and European dishes (it's a staple in the sauce of the aforementioned wildly-popular pizza,) all heavily featuring it. It's cousins in the ''allium'' family of plants... leeks, scallions, and '''especially''' onions... are also popular. Sauteeing onions and garlic is the backbone and first step of countless recipes the world over.

* Heinz Baked Beans are very popular in the United Kingdom, where they're considered an essential part of the "full English breakfast". It's also used in the staple dish "beans on toast", [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin which is baked beans served on toast]], considered a ComfortFood the way a grilled cheese sandwich is stateside. As with Kraft Dinner in Canada, Heinz Baked Beans' popularity, and beans on toast's, is largely a legacy of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII-era rationing. This is in direct contrast to the product's home country, the United States, where they haven't been sold since ''1928'' outside of specialty stores focusing on British goods and the odd supermarket with a "British food" aisle catering to expatriates and the occasional anglophile (and even then, it's imported from Britain).[[note]]Baked beans are still made and sold in the US, of course, but other companies chased Heinz out of the market in 1928.[[/note]] The product's popularity has been immortalized in pop culture, most notably by Music/TheWho. It's also stereotyped outside the U.K. as an example of "inedible British cuisine." We should also note that the British mania for tinned baked beans in general also represents this trope: baked beans originated in 17th-century colonial New England as a way of using the beans--a crop indigenous to the Americas--that the Natives had taught the immigrant Europeans to grow, in a manner that the immigrants found tasty and used ingredients New Englanders found plentiful (hence the use of molasses and salt pork; salt pork was relatively inexpensive, owing to good pig-raising land and the industry in salt pork for the shipping trade, and New England was also a major depot for molasses coming from the Caribbean).[[note]]Remember, "[[Theatre/SeventeenSeventySix Molaaaassess, to rummm, to slaaaaaves]]"....[[/note]] The dish was (and remains) a traditional New England meal,[[note]]The Boston version in particular was invented by the Puritans as a way of avoiding doing work on the Sabbath, as you could dump everything in the pot on Saturday evening and not have to worry about food on Sunday[[/note]] but preserved in cans it first made its way to Old England in the 1880s as a foreign delicacy.

* Heinz Baked Beans are very popular in the United Kingdom, where they're considered an essential part of the "full English breakfast". It's also used in the staple dish "beans on toast", [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin which is baked beans served on toast]], considered a ComfortFood the way a grilled cheese sandwich is stateside. This is in direct contrast to the product's home country, the United States, where they haven't been sold since ''1928'' outside of specialty stores focusing on British goods and the odd supermarket with a "British food" aisle catering to expatriates and the occasional anglophile (and even then, it's imported from Britain).[[note]]Baked beans are still made and sold in the US, of course, but other companies chased Heinz out of the market in 1928.[[/note]] The product's popularity has been immortalized in pop culture, most notably by Music/TheWho. It's also stereotyped outside the U.K. as an example of "inedible British cuisine." We should also note that the British mania for tinned baked beans in general also represents this trope: baked beans originated in 17th-century colonial New England as a way of using the beans--a crop indigenous to the Americas--that the Natives had taught the immigrant Europeans to grow, in a manner that the immigrants found tasty and used ingredients New Englanders found plentiful (hence the use of molasses and salt pork; salt pork was relatively inexpensive, owing to good pig-raising land and the industry in salt pork for the shipping trade, and New England was also a major depot for molasses coming from the Caribbean).[[note]]Remember, "[[Theatre/SeventeenSeventySix Molaaaassess, to rummm, to slaaaaaves]]"....[[/note]] The dish was (and remains) a traditional New England meal,[[note]]The Boston version in particular was invented by the Puritans as a way of avoiding doing work on the Sabbath, as you could dump everything in the pot on Saturday evening and not have to worry about food on Sunday[[/note]] but preserved in cans it first made its way to Old England in the 1880s as a foreign delicacy.

** In the same vein, the Indonesian brand Indomie is synonymous with instant ramen in several Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East, e.g. Egypt, as well as West African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. In Nigeria specifically, the brand got so popular that the company that produces it built ''the largest noodle factory in Africa'' to cater with the astronomical demand.

** Similarly, the Indonesian brand Indomie is synonymous with instant ramen in several Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East, e.g. Egypt.

** Ethiopian cuisine is a staple in UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC due to the city's large Ethiopian community; several Ethiopian and Ethiopian-run restaurants are DC institutions. Outside DC, West and Southwest Philadelphia have Ethiopian communities large enough to maintain restaurants that stand as mainstays of the city's culinary scene (more so than in New York or indeed any other U.S. metro besides D.C.).

* It is debatable how much this trope applies between the United States and Canada due to there already being so much cultural crossover between the two countries, but the Canadian frozen food company Maxi, under the brand name Yummy, had struck gold in the US with its Dino Buddies, chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs, which are higher-quality than one might expect for dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and keep their flavor incredibly well when microwaved. Also qualifies as PeripheryDemographic, as the packaging makes it clear Yummy aimed Dino Buddies at kids but it found its American niche with college students instead due to their convenience both in cooking and in eating.

** Currently, 77% of coffee consumed in the UK at home is instant. This probably is due to the tea culture dominating, meaning that everyone has a kettle (which can be used to make instant coffee) and relatively few own coffee makers. This percentage is falling as more people are exposed to the cheaper coffee makers and the growth of continental-style espresso-based coffeehouse culture, or rather [[PopularityPolynomial its reintroduction to Britain]] after its initial popularity in TheFifties and TheSixties. As in Japan and Russia, coffee was more often viewed as a quick source of caffeine rather than as a beverage in itself before high-quality coffee started showing up. Kitchens are also smaller in Britain--and the rest of Europe, for that matter--with less room for American-style drip machines.

** The inventor of instant coffee,[[note]]Well, one of several; contemporary freeze-dried instant coffee was independently invented several times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries[[/note]] Satori Kato, was Japanese (though living in the United States at the time). Naturally, Japan is essentially a tea culture; coffee is far less of a mainstay than it is in the U.S. and other coffee cultures. Much as in Russia, coffee is mostly used as a quick, concentrated source of caffeine. That said, to the extent that the Japanese ''do'' drink coffee at home, it is instant coffee, and for the same reason as in Britain--in a country where everybody has a relatively small kitchen and has an electric kettle for making tea, instant coffee starts to make a lot of sense. On the other hand, (again much like in Russia), there is a small class of Japanese coffee connoisseurs who take the drink very seriously. These guys (like the Russians) will have nothing to do with instant, and their [[SeriousBusiness obsessive commitment to quality]] in both bean and technique have strongly influenced non-Japanese "Third Wave" coffee (the use of the labor-intensive pourover technique was revived in Japan after being invented by Mellita Bentz in Germany and eventually overtaken by automatic drip coffee makers).

* Tomatoes were introduced to Europe from South America in the 16th century (about 500 years ago) but are such an important part of so many cultures' cuisines you'd think they'd been there for thousands of years. A particularly extreme example is the Eastern Mediterranean, which only got tomatoes in the late 18th-early 19th century (highly delayed, and via Europe--the first confirmed report of a tomato in the Middle East was when the British consul in Aleppo in what is now Syria brought one sometime between 1799 and 1825). Ask a Turk or Lebanese or Egyptian or Iraqi (and particularly an Egyptian, whose cuisine today [[HollywoodCuisine stereotypically consists]] of drowning vegetables and meat in a tomato sauce flavored with cumin and onions)[[note]]Egypt regularly punches above its weight in tomato production ''and'' consumption, growing and eating way more tomatoes per capita than its (admittedly very large) population might suggest. In 2012, Egypt was the world's fifth-largest tomato producer, with a harvest of 8.6 million metric tons. As the Egyptian industry for processing food for export is, if not in its infancy, then certainly in its childhood, the ''vast'' majority of this production was for domestic consumption. Note also that in 2010-11, there had been a tomato ''shortage'' in Egypt that made national headlines when production dipped not that far below the levels achieved in 2012. The spike in tomato prices over the winter 2010-11 are commonly understood to have contributed to the general discontent that led to the [[UsefulNotes/TheArabSpring Egyptian Revolution]] of January 2011. Yeah, Egyptians ''love'' tomatoes.[[/note]] to imagine their cuisine without tomatoes...they will have a very hard time indeed.

** While in Liège (Belgium) they came up with frying strips of potato in oil (according to tradition originally as a cheap substitute for fried fish, or a way to cool down dangerously hot oil/fat), a method that soon became very popular in France, other parts of Europe and of course America...and from these bases, "French fried potatoes" went on to conquer the world (or at least Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia).

* An oddly specific one: Vietnamese tourists on package tours to the U.S. East Coast tend to focus on visiting D.C. and New York. They skip Baltimore completely, rarely make it as far as Boston, and generally only hit the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia...but while in Philly, they [[https://www.inquirer.com/news/vietnamese-tourists-philadelphia-nam-phuong-20190617.html make a point of visiting one South Philly Vietnamese restaurant]] that they say makes Vietnamese food just like they get back home.

** Several regions in the U.S. are noted for their Mexican food scenes. Most of these are extremely unsurprising, since they are regions that used to be ''part'' of Mexico and are still near the border--Oh, Texas and Southern California have great Mexican food? Tell us, is the sky still blue at noon on a clear summer's day?[[note]]In all seriousness, ''do'' try to have Mexican food if you are ever in Texas, Southern California, Arizona, or New Mexico, and to a lesser extent Colorado and even Nevada and Utah. It really is quite excellent.[[/note]] The really interesting "good place for Mexican food" in the U.S. is actually Chicago, which one doesn't normally associate with Mexican anything, being 1,200 miles from the border and, well, Chicago--it's Midwestern and cold. But the Mexican community in Chicago is ''massive'' through decades of immigration,[[note]]A little over 20% of Chicagoans claim Mexican ancestry.[[/note]] to the point where the city stands still on Mexican Independence Day every September. (The only other ethnic group that stops the Windy City like this is the Irish, who shut the city down for St. Patrick's Day.)[[note]]The Poles ''probably'' could do the same but for whatever reason never have. There's probably a Polack joke in there somewhere, but we won't go looking for it.[[/note]] There is thus a large population both of cooks who know what they're doing and customers who demand high-quality and authentic Mexican cooking, making Chicago a destination for aficionados of Mexican cookery. An important caveat: Because Chicago's Mexican restaurant scene caters heavily to the largely working-class Mexican community of the city, the cuisine in question runs towards street food and simple, hearty working-people fare--stuff like elote,[[note]]Corn on the cob in the Mexican style, coated in lime-flavored mayonnaise and chili powder[[/note]] tortas de milanesa de pollo,[[note]]Chicken cutlet sandwiches with all the Mexican fixin's[[/note]] menudo,[[note]]Tripe soup/stew[[/note]] and tacos de lengua[[note]]Tacos filled with slow-cooked beef tongue with (different) Mexican fixin's[[/note]] rather than the more elaborate, arty dishes you might find in, say, L.A. (or for that matter in Mexico City).

** Several regions in the U.S. are noted for their Mexican food scenes. Most of these are extremely unsurprising, since they are regions that used to be ''part'' of Mexico and are still near the border--Oh, Texas and Southern California have great Mexican food? Tell us, is the sky still blue at noon on a clear summer's day?[[note]]In all seriousness, ''do'' try to have Mexican food if you are ever in Texas, Southern California, Arizona, or New Mexico, and to a lesser extent Colorado and even Nevada and Utah. It really is quite excellent.[[/note]] The really interesting "good place for Mexican food" in the U.S. is actually Chicago, which one doesn't normally associate with Mexican anything, being 1,200 miles from the border and, well, Chicago--it's Midwestern and cold. But the Mexican community in Chicago is ''massive'' through decades of immigration,[[note]]A little over 20% of Chicagoans claim Mexican ancestry.[[/note]] to the point where the city stands still on Mexican Independence Day every September. (The only other ethnic group that stops the Windy City like this is the Irish, who shut the city down for St. Patrick's Day.)[[note]]The Poles ''probably'' could do the same but for whatever reason never have. There's probably a Polack joke in there somewhere, but we won't go looking for it.[[/note]] There is thus a large population both of cooks who know what they're doing and customers who demand high-quality and authentic Mexican cooking, making Chicago a destination for aficionados of Mexican cookery. An important caveat: Because Chicago's Mexican restaurant scene caters heavily to the largely working-class Mexican community of the city, the cuisine in question runs towards street food and simple, hearty working-people fare rather than the more elaborate, arty dishes you might find in, say, L.A. (or for that matter in Mexico City).

** As for the more authentic stuff, anglos in regions with large Mexican populations (e.g. Chicagoland) have learned to appreciate it themselves. Particularly popular in the U.S. are "street tacos", authentic Mexican tacos with meat cooked on a griddle with corn tortillas placed next to the meat and topped with diced onions and cilantro. Names of cooked meat previously unknown to non-Mexicans like ''cabeza'', ''buche'', ''lengua'', ''machaca'' and the elsewhere-mentioned ''al pastor'' are gradually becoming part of the American lexicon. The ''birria'' craze of the early 2020s is an example of this: ''birria'' is a rich, spicy traditional stew from Jalisco traditionally made with goat but today often made with beef, and it became something of a huge deal in he U.S. around 2020 thanks to Internet videos. While it did so in a somewhat untraditional form—made from beef, in tacos--this form was actually reasonably common and longstanding in Mexico itself before making its way north (it seems to originate from 1950s Tijuana) and captures the flavor of the traditional dish well. (Traditional goat birria in Jalisco is served in a bowl, and would be eaten either with a spoon or by using bits of tortilla as a utensil. That said the Jaliscienses aren’t about to complain about the taco form factor.)

** Curry''wurst'' was likely invented in Berlin during the early occupation period before the erection of the UsefulNotes/BerlinWall; moreover given both the key ingredient (curry powder) and the subsequent history of the dish (popuar in West Berlin and UsefulNotes/WestGermany, not so much in the East), it probably arose in one of the Western occupation sectors, and most likely the British one. The most common story is thus that the owner of a food kiosk in Berlin received some curry powder and other ingredients from a British occupation soldier in the late 1940s, and she applied these to a traditional German pork sausage to make a new snack/lunch for the capital's workers. It's still quite popular in the capital, but has also captured the stomach of the Ruhr area, Germany's erstwhile industrial heart and economic engine, so much so that some there try to find "proof" that it was actually invented there and not in Berlin. From the Ruhr, the dish became popular with blue-collar workers across Germany (well, West Germany at first). This has led to Volkswagen actually producing their own Currywurst for their plant in Wolfsburg, which has neither a connection to Berlin nor to the Ruhr area (it's in Lower Saxony, maybe about halfway between the two). They also (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) assigned it a VW part number (199 398 500 A) and call it a "Volkswagen Original Part" (as though it were one of their OEM head gaskets or something). VW currywurst is now sold in supermarkets throughout Germany, and the company's European dealers regularly give packages of the stuff to buyers of new cars.

China is an atypical case, however, in that pizza as it is eaten in North America or Europe, has historically been largely considered unappealing and unpalatable, as it contains cheese and tomato. While tomato is relatively common in the modern Chinese kitchen--tomato-and-egg stir fry and tomato-and-egg soup are very popular, southern China has had all kinds of interesting uses for tomatoes (especially pickled) for centuries, and tomato ketchup is ubiquitous (having been introduced in the late 19th century)[[note]]As an aside, this means that anyone saying that "authentic" sweet and sour pork/chicken/what have you does not have ketchup is deeply mistaken: in modern China, most recipes for the "classic" Cantonese ''gulu'' sauce call for ketchup, and have done since no later than the 1950s. The quantity is admittedly a bit less than seen in Westernized Chinese cuisine, but it's still definitely a primary ingredient: it stands in for a jam made from Chinese hawberries that makes up about a quarter of the traditional sauce. The hawberry jam is substantially more expensive, even in China, and so only the most obsessively traditionalist cooks in the country bother with it. Additionally, chefs in China making other regions' versions of sweet-and-sour sauce (like Northeastern ''guobao'' sauce--traditionally made of just vinegar, sugar, and salt) will often add a touch of ketchup for color.[[/note]]--cheese is less so,[[note]]Except for a few areas. Setting aside the dairy-eating Mongols and Turks of the north and northwest, there's a small tradition of cheesemaking in the area around Shunde in Guangdong, which centers around a kind of pressed water buffalo farmer's cheese not unlike Indian paneer. Also, Western cheeses are known in Hong Kong, where melting cheeses are ubiquitous in chachaantengs, but we're getting ahead of ourselves[[/note]] and the combination is thus seen as kind of weird. Pizza Hut, before expanding to China, was warned that selling pizza to Chinese would have a high chance of failure for these reasons, so the company produced special Chinese-oriented recipes, which had less cheese and tomato or substituted them for other ingredients (such as the more familiar mayonnaise in place of cheese), as well as toppings based on foods more familiar to the Chinese, such as soy sauce or fish. Pizza Hut also made the pizzas smaller as fast food in China is commonly eaten while walking around outside and the large American pizzas are unwieldy.[[note]]Of course, in the "homeland" of American pizza on the East Coast, pizza is ''also'' commonly eaten walking around (or at least standing around) outside, and is therefore commonly sold by the slice rather than/as well as the whole pie. "Dollar slices" (these days more likely to be $2 or even $3) to be bought at the shop and eaten on the go are a veritable NYC institution, and the other Northeastern cities from Boston to DC have plenty of similar shops. It's also common in Italy; Rome in particular is famous for ''pizza al taglio'' ("pizza by the slice", where said slice is sold, interestingly, by ''weight''), especially on the beach at Ostia (Rome's port/seaside area on the Tyrrhenian coast). Why this (relatively obvious) method of selling pizza as a hand-portable street food wasn't brought to China is unclear; either the possibility of selling by the slice never occurred to the (whole-pie-oriented) chains or the economics of trying that model (which does rely heavily on predicting what toppings will be in demand and baking pies ahead accordingly) in China rather than making smaller pizzas didn't pencil out.[[/note]] Nowhere was this market research more valuable than the counter-example of Domino's, which sold pizzas unchanged from the American style: They were only able to sell mainly to Americanophiles and those who had lived in the US for some time and were thus used to foods with a lot of cheese and tomato in them. To everyone else, it was ForeignQueasine.\\

** Faygo. An inexpensive pop, also from Detroit, with a wide variety of flavors. Also the TrademarkFavoriteFood of the Music/InsaneClownPosse and {{Juggalo}}s.

* Rounding out the "Easternized" Western cuisines of East Asia, mainland Cantonese cuisine from Guangzhou and surrounding parts has "soy sauce Western cuisine". This cuisine looks a lot like Japanese ''yoshoku'' in some ways, with dishes that blend Western with traditional Cantonese technique. For instance, the "Swiss wings" (they have [[NonindicativeName nothing to do with Switzerland]] and nobody knows why they're called that) of this style use both soy sauce and a Western-style roasted and reduced aromatic stock to give a savory flavor--with the added Canto twist that instead of roasting the meat for the stock, it's actually ''stir fried'' in a wok. The dishes are traditionally eaten from plates with forks (as opposed to bowls with chopsticks), but they are also thoroughly Chinese, with the tradition going back over a century (Zhou Enlai had his wedding reception at a famous soy-sauce Western restaurant in Guangzhou that was already seen as a stalwart establishment in ''1925'').

** Surge is on sale in Norway, something Americans often get misty eyed over.

* Pepsi Max, a low-calorie, sugar-free alternative to Pepsi, is more popular in the UK than regular Pepsi, thanks to extensive marketing throughout its lifespan that mainly appealed to more active customers. Meanwhile, 9% of [=PepsiCo=]'s total worldwide production of Pepsi Max is purchased in Norway ''alone'' (the country has a population of about 5.3 million--more people live in ''Minnesota'' than live in Norway), where it easily outsells regular Pepsi and is a fierce competitor to the ''regular'' Coca-Cola (not Coca-Cola Zero, a sugar-free alternative). Pepsi ''[[{{Pun}}Max]]'' indeed.