Japanese food and Indian food are as different from each other as Indian food and Italian food.

I'm not sure how you arrive at that opinion. Take the example of Punjabi food. It's heavily based around ghee and dairy. Does anything in Thai cuisine use butter except European style pastries?

The only major similarities I see uniting the national cuisines you listed (not regional ones) are things like curries and rice. The former arrived in Japan with European influence (where it's also common in colonial countries) and the latter isn't a feature common to all Asian cuisines (e.g. Mongolian).

Asian countries developed with more overlap in basic ingredients, cooking techniques, and historical influence networks than Europe did. Historically there were 3 influence zones in Asia. There is a lot of pickling, fermenting, salting, drying. In Asia of these techniques were more or less unified. Fish sauces from different countries are Pepsi vs Coca-Cola level of difference.

> Polish and Spanish is closer to each other than to most other asian cuisine.

I'd say Polish has a lot of similarities with Asian cuisine. Sure, both have stews and sausages, but flavor profiles are very different: acidic vs sour.

I won't be able to tell difference between gyoza & wonton if they shaped the same, but surely I can tell difference between ravioli & uszka. Uszka is IMO closer to any dumpling from Asia than to anything European.

American food contains maize, obviously. This works for multiple understandings of the word "American" :)

Pretty much, but not exactly. There is also a cooking technique (so American will be deep-fried).

Most national dishes are nothing more than adaptation of dishes from another country. Sometimes tweaks to ingredients, sometimes tweaks to techniques.

American food = contains corn (maize), in all its glorious (ex. nixtamalized, unprocessed, flour, etc.) and unholy (ex. high fructose corn syrup) forms.

Oddly enough, many Canadians use the word "American" to refer to Unitedstatesians, so presumably they'd use it to describe cuisine that same way (as in, poutine is Canadian but disco fries are American). This is extremely analogous to the Asia conversation, in that of course people know the term comes from the continental scale, but using that scale is less common, so it must be specifically invoked.

And then you've got Puerto Ricans, who are definitely US'ian but eat more like the non-US'ian Americans, so who knows what they would think of if you ask about American food, but it wouldn't surprise me if Contiguousunitedstatesian is the default (i.e., the same cuisine the Canadians would be referring to).

> I feel like as Europeans, we're as good at importing American food as America is about importing European.

What you call European food is a direct result of importing American food. Just different Americans...

American food is things like beef jerky, pemmican, maize breads.

European food is things like hamburgers, French fries, hotdogs, and apple pie.

This is getting silly

Edit: added a missing comma

Ah, a fan of Korean fried chicken, I see.

Europe does not have a parliament. The EU does, but it is not even sovereign over the EU countries.

Not really, it's not sovereign. The EU can pass laws that each European country chooses to implement. If they don't implement enough EU laws, they can get kicked out, which means more pieces of paper are written and some European countries might choose to afford them less privileges.

I often wondered about that.

We hosted an exchange student for a few weeks, and he was from Nanjing. Before he left the country, we took him to a Chinese restaurant and warned him that it was likely going to be more like American-Chinese.

He went through the menu and pointed out the dishes which were authentic and those which were not. I was surprised at how many were actually authentic -- it was about half of the menu. Maybe we were at a more authentic Chinese restaurant, as the menu was in both English and Chinese.

He was a great kid, and I really enjoyed the experience. He loved peanut butter and jelly, had to spit out ranch dressing, and did not care at all for pumpkin pie.

Sure. And most people I knew are able to differentiate between "sushi" and "Thai curry".

>I now believe China’s actual population may be as low as 300–400 million

that we now live in a world where people are confident enough to make claims this stupid in front of a camera should frighten anyone.

Some basic logic, if China had the population of the United States it would have magically acquired the per capita economic output of the US in ~30 years, consume several times the energy and food it imports and somehow have produced several cities the size of Tokyo. The fact that China produces ~50% of the world's ships and has the manufacturing output of of the G7 combined is impressive with over a billion people, but hey they must have some space age technology to do it with 3% of the world's population!

In philosophy there's a concept called the coherence theory of truth, if you want to know if something is true check if it doesn't defy basic logic or other facts you know, great tool instead of believing what youtubers say

Youtube videos are always a poor quality source - the UN doesn’t accept China’s numbers exactly but they believe the total number is broadly correct due to cross referenced data, and expert independent demographers largely agree. The figure of 1.4 billion is likely within the ballpark and the idea that this is off by hundreds of millions is considered a fairly fringe theory, almost a conspiracy theory.