Damn yea i forgot . I looked good on mobile <| sep |> but if you look at Europe those same countries , peoples and customs more or less exist , same for AsiaI . would strongly argue that is not the case . Like , one of my focus areas of study is the 15 th 17 th centuries in Britain , and believe me , this country is drastically culturally different now to how it was then , to the point that it can sometimes feel very alien . Even go back to , say , the Victorian era in England and it ' s drastically different . I think that ' s part of why people from other countries , particularly European ones , get so irritated by Americans saying they ' re of that nationality because the country and the nation is not the same as it was when the American ' s ancestors emigrated , and it ' s quite insulting to suggest that the country has remained static throughout all that time . I really don ' t mean this in an insulting or condemning way , but it does rather suggest a lack of cultural sensitivity or internationalhistorical awareness ! However , I do get where you ' re coming from about how very new America is as a nation . I just think that America is now at a weird turning point where it ' s starting to be old enough that it has its own culture and national identity , but people aren ' t quite ready to let go of their attachments to other places , even though those attachments are to the idealised , historical versions of those places . I completely agree with you about all the food stuff , as well as about how fascinating cultural and national identity is as a subject . It ' s one of those weird , nebulous ideas that everybody understands but is tricky to pin down and break into specifics . My best friend is French , currently living in Germany , and sometimes it ' s quite startling how different our cultural frameworks and conceptions are . Cultural paradigms are constantly shifting and evolving and always have done nothing about culture is stable or fixed , and that is both comforting and disturbing .