I think this just applies to the commercialized versions of those foods in the foreign countries. The pizza you linked to from Mexico looks like something you would get from any fast food pizza place in America and the Italian one looks like a margherita slice from any half decent pizza place in NYC. Same goes for the tacos. The "American" one just looks like something you get from Taco Bell while the "Original" looks like something I would get from a local taco truck.

The burrito is an interesting case. I do think that's evolved a bit in America to the point where everyone is copying Chipotle and Qdoba and trying to make the biggest burritos.

In many parts of the United States, well into the nineties, there were no Taco Bell tacos. I didn't get to try Taco Bell until 1995.

Growing up, Burritos were these frozen bean-paste wraps, with "meat" included sometimes, that you got from the super market and microwaved in multiple passes, until years later when Taco Bell appeared. Then after The Year 2000, some truly incredible Big Burrito shacks started popping up, with these gigantic, incredible 1.5 pound burritos, right before Chipotle began its massive expansion.

Otherwise, there were some rare Spanish restaurant chains like Meson, Olé! (still around), which were sit down affairs, with what seemed like (nearly extravagant) gourmet foreign cuisine, when stood next to the frozen burritos. Their freebie table nachos were these amazing and decadent snacks as a kid.

Pizza looked like neither, and gambling on pizza beyond the New York tri-state area was certainly taking a chance. I remember eating a pizza in Pennsylvania in the late 80's on one occasion, and it was hard/crunchy, almost stale-ish, cardboard-style flatbread, with "sauce" and "cheese" on top. That's the most memorable incident, but the prevailing wisdom was true: don't get Pizza outside of New York. Plain cheese brick oven pizza comes close to what people view(ed) as New York style pizza, even if you might find lots of the "original" example in NYC. Otherwise, mass produced Pizza Hut or Little Ceaser's were the only two consistent regional options for a long time, and while edible, each was a variation of "pizza" and not Pizza.

> ... with these massive, incredible 1.5 pound burritos...

This is the "Mission-style Burrito" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_burrito). I first encountered them in San Francisco in 1997, where I found them to be quite a novelty, even though I was coming from Texas and had a more than passing familiarity with burritos.

Chipotle has now popularized them nation-wide, of course.

I personally love the burrito variations up and down California.

I grew up on Mission burritos in SF. With Taqueria Cancun being a personal favorite.

But - holy moly - San Diego burritos are out of of this world. Burritos with meat, avocado and french fries. Heaven.

All food which is being sold is "commercialized". Don't try to smuggle in the "small companies are good, big ones are bad" premise. If you believe that, state it honestly.

c'mon. It's really hard to talk about anything if we can't use shorthand at all. We all know what he means.

I don't like dishonesty and smuggled premises.

No dairy at all in real tacos? That's a surprise. That said, my friend's wife (from mexico) made made offal tacos once (kidney & tongue I think) that were dressed exactly like that^. They had sour cream on the table though.

Anyway, I think you're onto something! Internationalizing^ food does seem to go hand-in-hand with more ingredients and complexity. Maybe this is like how very knowledgeable people can give simpler answers, really well designed products have fewer features. The "didn't have time to write a short letter" effect, for cuisine.

I think it's harder to mess things up with more ingredients. Add enough ingredients and you just end up with the statistical average "food." You're international versions of onigiri, tacos, burritos and pizza are remarkably similar to one another. The originals are more distinct.

*rockostrich blames commercialization which makes sense too. It's hard to pick that apart from Internationalisation though, since the two are so intertwined.

^delicious

> really well designed products have fewer features.

Well-designed products have more effective features, because they allow users to add features.

But that's probably too far afield for the people here.

I find original tacos and burritos available in the states often on the same menu where they are available in other manners. Maybe it's a regional thing, places where there is a large Hispanic community?

When you take the food out of it's original context I think there's a freedom to experiment because there are fewer expectations.

Also, Americans do this with everything, especially our own food. Like the recent proliferation of hamburger joints that do all manner of things to the burger, stretching its very definition.

>Also, Americans do this with everything

A lot of Indian restaurants and street food vendors do it too, ha ha. E.g. Gobi Manchurian (a cauliflower version of Chicken Manchurian) is a real dish you can get in "Chinese" restaurants, or rather restaurants serving (Indianized) Chinese food in India. And Chinese Bhel (a made-up "Chinese" version of the Indian snack bhelpuri [1] - a sort of reverse adaptation, is found at street food vendor's carts or stands).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhelpuri

The picture of an original burrito looks more like a quesadilla. Quesadillas in the U.S., even at Taco Bell, are still similar to the Mexican quesadilla. In California you can also get quesadillas stuffed with meats and vegetables, and they're definitely _not_ considered burritos even though you're most likely to find such an item at a burrito shop.

I think the burrito is a Mexican-American invention. A few restaurants in the San Francisco Mission District claim to be the inventor. There are obvious similarities to traditional Mexican food, but it's not derivative of anything in particular. When I stayed in Guadalajara I had something called a burrito at a festival, but like the "burrito" I had in Ecuador it seemed like a really bad imitation of the American food item. Indeed, I found no actual authentic Mexican food in Ecuador whatsoever, so it was telling to me that the burritos I had in both Mexico and Ecuador were nearly identical and also both horrible--basically knock-offs of American microwave burritos.

The "typical" American taco is probably meat, lettuce and cheese in a U shell. Sour cream and extra vegetables is "deluxe" or whatever.

I guess most grocers devote more shelf space to uncooked tortillas these days than to the shells though.

This is definitely the case with "Chinese food" in different countries. Its interesting to see how it has evolved though:

* In the US, its more sweet and spicy stuff, like Orange chicken, General Tso chicken and such

* In India, there are incredibly spicy variations of all kinds of Chinese food e.g. Chicken Manchurian, Chicken Lollypop etc.

So I agree; chefs and cooks probably add their own spin on foreign foods to make it more palatable to their clients.

I remember hearing somewhere that the US had a large influx of Chinese immigrants earlier than the UK, so the Chinese food in the UK is a more modern Chinese cuisine compared to the US.

I suspect this happens because what makes the original dish special is the delicate balance of local ingredients, expert skills, and local taste which evolved together over centuries. Take the dish to a new context, with different quality of ingredients and less skilled cooks, and you lose that balance. You then have to compensate by piling on other flavors – ideally popular local ones – to make the dish interesting again.

So your thesis is that experts are local, then the dish moves non-local, where there aren’t any experts, so they just pile on local ingredients to make up for it?

This comes across as kind of a silly view.

How can folk dishes require "expert skills" if everyone makes them?

Could be because the locals making them are experts, having made them for centuries - not the same people living for centuries, obviously, but the skills transferred from parents to children over many generations, and refined as years go by, etc.

Italian food is simple in general. Purchase the best ingredients, allowing the flavors to emerge. A general rule, if a dish has more than 6 ingredients it probably isn't Italian, and if it has more than 10 ingredients it certainly isn't Italian.

I think what you are seeing is that American food has a the same bunch of generic ingredients added to lots of dishes, since USA is a large country with good food-transportation infrastructure, and that Mexican pizza is American-inspired.

That version of onigiri looks pretty delicious, would love to try it.