The Importance of a National Cuisine

Conversations That Matter

Jon Harris

Society & Culture

4.3 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2026

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today I'm sharing my article from December 26, 2025, "When Dinner Stops Being Ours: Cuisine, Immigration, and the Quiet Erosion of Belonging." I challenge the idea—pushed by folks like Piers Morgan—that mass immigration is worth it because it spices up "bland" Western food. While new flavors can be great, I argue through personal stories of smoking Southern barbecue in the Hudson Valley and connecting to my Mississippi roots that cuisine is far more than taste: it's a sensory anchor to identity, family, region, and nation. From Thanksgiving turkey to Fourth of July grills, shared foods build quiet solidarity. Yet fast food, global trade, and demographic shifts are quietly replacing our culinary inheritance, eroding belonging in the process. We should cherish and pass down our own traditions first—because when dinner stops being ours, a piece of home slips away.

https://jonharris.substack.com/p/when-dinner-stops-being-ours

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Mars Men: https://mengotomars.com

Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/conversations-that-matter8971/donations

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I want to ask you a question.
0:06.5	What forms your identity? How do you know who you are? What are the things about you that make you?
0:13.6	Obviously experiences play into that. You have DNA from your parents that makes you look a certain way.
0:19.3	You're born in a region. Perhaps most
0:22.9	importantly, if you're a Christian, you worship God, the Creator. All of these things play into
0:29.2	your identity. Well, one of the things that I think is often downplayed as somewhat superficial
0:34.5	is cuisine. And I want to talk to you briefly about that today. I wrote an
0:39.5	article on my substack. The link is in the info section called When Dinner Stopped Being Ours,
0:44.4	cuisine, immigration, and the quiet erosion of belonging. And I share a thought that I have had for a
0:51.2	long time. In fact, I remember at a men's retreat, we had a culinary
0:54.5	chef there. And I asked him this question. I said, is there any chance that liberals might be
1:03.8	trying to subvert our national cuisine? And it was a question I don't think he had ever received.
1:10.3	Because I don't think people think of cuisine in
1:12.4	those terms. cuisine is something that you choose based upon your personal taste. And that's all it is
1:19.7	personal taste. And so if you like Chinese food, then you eat Chinese food. If you like Indian food,
1:27.4	you eat Indian food, and Mexican food, and the list goes food. If you like Indian food, you eat Indian food,
1:28.3	and the list goes on. But you notice in each of those scenarios, those cuisines come from
1:34.6	certain regions. What's American cuisine? Well, I think there's a number of things we conjure up in our
1:41.0	minds. There's hot dogs and hamburgers. There's perhaps southern barbecue is American cuisine. You might think of some of the foreign cuisines that we have
1:50.6	Americanized. I mean, New York pizza is not the same as the pizza that you get in Italy. So there's
1:56.4	all kinds of things, regionally and then more broadly speaking, that go into an American cuisine.
2:03.3	But there was recently a clip that I saw of Pierce Morgan on a Tucker Carlson interview,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jon Harris, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jon Harris and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.