Some European visitors are gushing about America being awesome? The New York Times had to break out the hose to spray cold water on that. Times “food and culture” reporter Pete Wells played Fact Checker in a June 18 article headlined:
Those World Cup Tourists Loving American Food? They’re Not All What They Seem.
Visiting soccer fans enraptured by free refills and salsa have become the feel-good story of the summer, even when the facts don’t fit.
Wells began:
Last week, the governor of New Jersey and the state’s official account both retweeted an X post with a video of “World Cup tourists” at a deli in Bergen County, discovering the glories of a chicken parm hero. The clip has been watched millions of times since then, one of many examples of foreign soccer fans greeting their first tastes of American cuisine with childlike wonder.
There’s one problem with the story. The traveler in the video, an Englishman named Daniel Tooke, ate the hero in April. By June 11, when the World Cup began, Mr. Tooke had been back home in Norwich for weeks.
At least Mr. Tooke is a real person. The same can’t be said for some other supposed World Cup tourists whose reactions to the eating and drinking rituals of the United States have beguiled the country.
Beware! Some pro-America content is being made by TikTok comedians and fake Samurai warriors:
The Italian man whose awe-struck reaction to free Coke refills (“I can refill this 1,000 times!”) has become one of the most popular examples of the trope is a persona played by a TikTok comedian named Fabio Farati. His video, first posted last year, is one of hundreds along the same lines that he’s produced since 2018, dramatizing his encounters with ranch dressing on pizza and fried chicken on pasta.
Nobunaga, the Japanese wanderer whose reverential written meditations on X about bottomless baskets of chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant in the United States, isn’t quite what some observers have taken him for, either. He is a pseudonymous character. He isn’t on his way to any World Cup games, either.
Wells briefly stipulated: “Of course, many of the overseas soccer fans loose in the States this month are genuine.” But he wanted to highlight the “ersatz.” Because uberpatriotic Americans are all suckers for a pro-America spin:
As charmed as they are by the United States, the United States is even more charmed by them. For the past week or two, the country has been gazing with delight at its own reflection in the cracked mirror of social media. World Cup tourists going gaga over gas-station cuisine and Big Gulps has become the feel-good story of the deep-fried American summer….
Many Americans seem willing to take their reassurance in any form they can get, even if it comes from fake German tourists, imaginary samurai and Englishmen whose timelines don’t quite sync up with the World Cup schedule.
If it became a viral trend for European tourists to trash America as a horrible place (with horrible cuisine), let's guess the Times wouldn't "fact check" that.
