Christopher Rovira
HUC106
Professor Heppner
Tour Guide Speech
Who here likes food? If you walk through almost any supermarket you will see the impact
that waves of immigrants have had on American cuisine: for example: papayas from Ecuador, pierogi
from Eastern Europe and tortillas from Mexico. Food is an expression of culture and, like other
aspects of their lives; immigrants adapted the foods of their homelands to the United States. They
created the wide variety of cuisines available in America today, such as: Greek, Chinese, Italian, Thai,
Mexican and many more.
America offered a surprising abundance of food to the new arrivals. Most immigrants were
able to buy foods that they could not have afforded in the old country. In Italy, most poor people
could not afford fruits that only the rich had eaten. But in America, they were able to afford it easily.
Immigrants provided a market for foods from the homeland, often giving them their first
business opportunities, developing restaurants and grocery stores around their ethnic foods. Today,
Caribbean foods are plentiful in Brooklyn. Queens also houses many different foods like Chinese,
Greek, Viet, Indian and many more. Eventually many “ethnic” foods find their way to restaurants and
supermarkets and become popular with a wider population.