I’ve been living in the U.S. for over three years now, and have attempted to assimilate as best I can with American culture and society while remaining English in character. It’s a tricky balancing act sometimes. As any English ex-pat in America can tell you, you begin to translate yourself pretty quickly — the bother of having to repeat yourself every time you say “trousers” or “aubergine” tends to drum those words out of your vocabulary. It’s harder to adjust to certain shared American experiences that you have never been privy to. The example I always reach for is Dr Seuss, whose books are so ingrained in the collective American childhood that his characters have entered the slang. I never read a Dr Seuss book, so far as I can recall, so references to Sneetches, Grinches and the like float over my head. I do feel, however, as if I’ve inwardly digested a hefty portion of Americana since 2009. Linguistically I go all the way — it’s all soccer, pants, and soda for me, now — while I’ve happily learned to enjoy American holidays and pastimes from Thanksgiving to baseball.
But some parts of American life will forever remain incomprehensible to me. I will never say the word “Graham” as anything other than Gray-am despite the American diminution to Gram. I use the word infrequently enough that I don’t feel the need to conform just to be understood first time. I’m happy to repeat myself for Gray-am. My girlfriend is baffled by my dislike of coke floats. I just can’t understand why anyone would put ice cream in a glass of coke. Have one or the other, fine, but don’t spoil them both by combining them. To me, it makes about as much sense as dunking a burrito in a pint of beer.
This column, then, is the first in a series dedicated — as the title so subtly suggests — to American Things I Just Don’t Understand. I’d like to begin by writing about Seamless. To those of you unfamiliar with Seamless, it is a website/app which acts as a portal to order food from local restaurants in city centers like New York, Washington D.C, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The idea is you can browse menus on a single website rather than having to scour the internet to actually find a restaurant yourself, then order through them and not go straight to the source. It’s a one-stop-shop for ordering “take out” food, and makes money by taking a small cut from each transaction. And it makes a lot of it; Seamless generated an extraordinary $85 million in revenue last year, and is expected to top $100 million this year. All for doing what, exactly? Saving customers what can only be a few minutes of their time to order food without the hassle of speaking to anyone. How is this one of America’s few businesses successes of the past few years?
Seamless exists for people who can’t be bothered to cook; can’t be bothered to spend time finding a restaurant they like; and order food so often they don’t want to think about it. On all three counts, I am not one of those people. I cook almost every night. I enjoy it. On the rare occasions I do order in food, I want to spend time finding a place I like. And once I’ve found it, I’ll use it again. I also don’t mind spending a few minutes on the phone ordering it myself. Maybe it’s not Seamless I don’t understand, but the very concept of “convenience food” as it exists in America. In England, an entire market exists for “ready meals” you can prepare yourself in minutes. It runs from low-end frozen meals in Tesco and Asda to do-it-yourself duck a l'orange and shrimp jalfrezi in Waitrose or Marks and Spencer. That upmarket, costly segment of the market does not really exist here; microwaveable or ready meals are nearly always strictly junk. Evidently, to much of the American middle class, convenience food means having your food cooked and brought to your door. So popular is it that an entire sub-industry exists to service it. That’s a level of convenience my penny-pinching English soul just can’t comprehend.