It's funny about ethnic food. Nationalities and ethnicities extend their pride to their food - Italian and Chinese food historians, in one example, still bicker over the true origin of pasta. Some reasonable Italians might say its origins were Germanic, and that this origin can be traced back to the 5th Century A.D., but some Italians have gone further to say that pasta was indeed unique to, and created by, Italians.

In fact, both the Chinese and Japanese were cooking pasta for two-thousand years. It is only documented in Italy for four-hundred and fifty.

So, the introduction of the chili pepper changed things, and all over the world. All Columbus did was introduce the peculiar plant to the Iberian Peninsula. After that, it was fifty years, and virtually every cuisine in suitable climates had changed - from Arabia, to Africa, to the Far East.

Americanization of the world is not so modern after all.

If you look at some cuisines - Ireland in the seventeenth century, for example - cuisines were not only turned on their heads by modernity, but thoroughly influenced by the botany of the new world. For all the claims of ancient cuisine, how many of them are actually nationalist ancient traditions? Most cuisines seem, rather, to be culturally dynamic, in flux, and influenced by faraway places. Four hundred years is yesterday.

It's funny, then, about travel writers. As soon they get a chance to write something that's not funded by Hilton Hotels, or Avis Rent-a-car, or the Cruise Industry, when they finally get to write a personal travelogue and present it to the public, they bitch about the Americanization of the world, or the globalization of the world, or about the McDonalds in Saigon, and how its all awful.