International game of 'Food Telephone'

French is actually the language of the fries.

Curious, so why is it I never heard them talk in French?
- You don't listen.
- Well, have you given them any reason to want to talk to you? Or are you just murdering them all slowly with your mastication?
  See, if you just sat there and killed a large stack of my friends and countrymen, I wouldn't want to talk to you either.
  I'm not telling you anything you murderer!

2003 Americans: "Freedom made this"

That was in 2001 iirc
- 2003 was the Iraq invasion that France rightly opposed and led to the creation of freedom fries.
America... Fuck Yeah!

The term "frenching" is also a culinary term that means preparing food for even cooking and to make it visually appealing.

Man, we did that in middle school too
- Even though we werent visually appealing...

Isn't it short for french-cut fried potatoes and had nothing to do with France at all?

Well, France developed the cut. No?
- Eh, they just liked it a lot. But they definitely popularized it and detailed usages of it in books. They didn't invent "cut it long and thin" though, since that's just basic knife work whose origin is lost to time.

Potatoes are a food native to the Americas and the Belgians claiming them is cultural appropriation. French fries are Chilean.

This is a joke, right?
- Spaghetti is an Asian-Native American fusion dish.
- Kinda but also, it's true. Potatoes come from the Incan Empire

Fun fact: what's known in the US as "Danish pastries" are known in Denmark as wienerbrød (Vienna bread) and it turns out that both terms have some merit:

It was invented in Copenhagen by immigrants from Vienna

WIENER BREAD
- 🌭❔

I was curious about French Toast the other day. Turns out it was invented by someone with the last name French and the intention was to call it French's Toast. But when he printed the name, he forgot the apostrophe and 'S'!

Similar story with German chocolate cake. It was German's chocolate cake. A guy named German.
- And Black Forest cake was actually created by Forest Whitaker.
That's a legend; the name was used in England before the mythical Mr. French existed in the US!
(also French Toast was invented at least before the 6th Century)

Who wants to claim our Brussels Sprouts? Go ahead, take them. Nobody? Well well well.

Brussels sprouts look and taste like little green brains. I have no idea what brain actually tastes like, but I imagine it's brussels sprouts.
- Brussel sprouts are delicious. Modern versions have had their bitterness bred out. Roasted until crispy with olive oil and garlic and salt and they're fantastic.
  Problem is the fools that boil or steam them. That way lies little green brains.
- Btw, you can cook and taste brain. It's not the most common thing to find, but you can sometimes find it at a butcher shop, along with the insides of other animals

In Poland we have Greek style fish, Ukrainian borscht and Russian pierogi. None of which have anything to do with the place they are named after.

I forgot about French pastry. Which I just puff pastry, but we call it French pastry for some reason. Doesn't it come from Ireland?

A little correction, the name "ruskie pierogi" comes not from Russia but from Red Ruthenia/Red Rus, or Ruś Czerwona in Polish, a region in western Ukraine.
I thought pierogi was polish 🤔
- As all dishes, it's not from a specific country, but from a region of the world. Eastern Europ in this case. When we fill them with potatoes, we call it russian style. Apparently Russians like carbs.

But... alliteration is always awesome.

We could have called them Flemish fries.
- Even as a homophone, I don't want the word phlegm associated with my salty snacks.
  Don't call me homophonobic though, I support phonemes of all stars, stripes, and identities.
Alternatively, alliteration am always awesome

Hot dogs are bastardized from three separate Germanic names. Frankfurt sausages sounded a bit formal, so you got "hot dachshunds," except Americans could neither spell nor pronounce the name of that breed, so you get "hot dogs." If you asked what a hot dog was you'd probably be told it's a wiener on a bun, where the English word "wiener" is a loanword from the German conjugation of "from Vienna." And we've come full circle by routinely referring to dachshunds as wiener dogs.

The less-fun tangent about the prominence of German food in American culture is that New York was famed for its wealthy German-American families until all their wives and children were on a boat that sank. I am not joking.

Quick note, just to be a pedantic arsehole: conjugation is specific to verbs. The general term is declension, which includes conjugation, but more broadly refers to the changing of a word depending on its semantical context
- You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.
- This is incorrect btw. Conjugation is not a special form of declension. Declension does not apply to verbs. The general term for both is morphology.
Survivors reported that the life preservers were useless and fell apart in their hands, while desperate mothers placed life jackets on their children and tossed them into the water, only to watch in horror as their children sank instead of floating. Most of those on board were women and children who, like most Americans of the time, could not swim; victims found that their heavy wool clothing absorbed water and weighed them down in the river.[9]: 108–113
t was discovered that Nonpareil Cork Works, supplier of cork materials to manufacturers of life preservers, placed 8 oz (230 g) iron bars inside the cork materials to meet minimum content requirements (6 lb (2.7 kg) of "good cork") at the time. Nonpareil's deception was revealed by David Kahnweiler's Sons, who inspected a shipment of 300 cork blocks.[5]: 71–72 Many of the life preservers had been filled with cheap and less effective granulated cork and brought up to proper weight by the inclusion of the iron weights. Canvas covers, rotted with age, split and scattered the powdered cork. Managers of the company (Nonpareil Cork Works) were indicted but not convicted. The life preservers on the Slocum had been manufactured in 1891 and had hung above the deck, unprotected from the elements, for 13 years.[9]: 118–119
What a disaster, fuck
- "capitalism makes the best product for the lowest cost because of the invisible hand of the child drowning monster"
On the plus side they didn't have to live to see their home country get fucked twice in a row.
- I know what you're saying, but their home country was America.
Well, we have Wiener Würstchen made from pork and beef, and we have Frankfurter Würstchen which are made from pork and are smoked :)
I always found it funny that it is called "dachshund" in English. In German it is called "Dackel" and "dachshund" would be translated as "badger dog". I don't think that a badger is really meant here, but that the language has just developed a bit strangely (like with the word ampersand).
- We call them that because they were meant to drive badgers from dens. It's why they are so inclined to be aggressive little shits when not properly trained
- They don't look like badgers - they hunt badgers. They were bred specifically to hunt in burrows.

It has been established that the earliest recorded recipes of fries are French.

Which is debated as there are signs that point towards Spain having done it first. Then there's the fact that Belgium says they developed it first, not the French, and that remains hotly debated.
It's almost like people aren't entirely sure where French fries came from yet north America insists on calling them French anyway. Wonder if a meme can be made from that?
- @Stamets
  I’ll simplify things for you. I invented french fries. Anyone who says otherwise is a dirty liar
- Without knowing anything at all about the subject, except for where potatoes come from: Can we even be sure that native Americans didn't do them first?
- I always thought they were called French fries because they're French style, as in cut into long thing pieces. Til!
- In Finland they're just called French. Plural.
- Sounds like everyone invented it
Belgians: And I took that personally…
- I did though
It doesn't matter, Belgians are making much better fries than French. They deserve the recognition.
- I love those meatballs they do in Belgian and Dutch frite shops that come in segments like a Terry's chocolate orange.

No, Freedom made this.

Germany is French, right?

That's the Belgian flag. But don't worry, they are so rare and tiny, that it doesn't make a difference. We eat more Pommes in Germany anyway!
- belgium is waffle france
- But still, Germany is French right?

Finally, an explanation for the universality of Swedish meatballs.

We call them pommes frites in Denmark

It's papa fritas in Spanish
- Tot poles in the US

Oh hey, OpenDyslexic font.

Then the French play the Uno reverse card and invent "Le sandwich américain"

To be fair, I just looked that up and it does seem like something we would come up with...
- Yss it does. It looks delicious.
  https://www.sandwichtribunal.com/2022/05/le-sandwich-americain/

America had just bad eyesight or the belgian flag was already faded. So black became more blueish and yellow became white.

Oh not this black-yellow or blue-white game again!
- Oh, I know this one! I hear Yanny

I really don't understand why Belgium is so upset about this. They're literally fried potatoes. Choose something else.

THEY'RE NOT JUST FRIED POTATOES THEY ARE A CULINARY MASTERPIECE! THEY'RE CRISPY ON THE OUTSIDE, FLUFFY ON THE INSIDE, AND SERVED WITH A DIZZYING ARRAY OF SAUCES AND TOPPINGS THAT ELEVATE THEM TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL OF DELICIOUSNESS!!
I don't know why you think the entire country of Belgium has anything to do with this and it's not just a joke to laugh about language in the US.
- I had a Belgian roommate one time, and he was very upset about it.
I'll never get over Polandball calling them "made-up waffle country."
Especially since they didn't invent the fried potato. The French did. They invented cutting the potato in sticks instead of disks to fry them...
- Especially since they didn’t invent the fried potato. The French did.
  Can we really say that with any certainty? Frying is a pretty basic cooking technique, and potatoes became a very common ingredient. Maybe it really caught on in France, but I'm sure just about anybody who was eating potatoes must have tried them fried on occasion.
- froid potato

The real question is "why do every other country calls this infamous sweet sauce 'French Mustard'?" It's a disgrace to french gastronomy.

They don't. It's "French's mustard" -- "French's" is a brand.
Edit: unless you're talking about Dijon mustard, which was created in France, so no real mystery there.
- The French's brand has a tough time weathering the political divisiveness of the early Iraq war. They had to put out a statement because they were worried about dumbass Americans boycotting their products during the Iraq War because France opposed joining the Coalition of the Willing.
- Wow! You changed my vision of this, I didn't know. thanks man!
French's mustard was made by a man named French. Similar to Caesar salad being Mexican, because the dude's name was Cesar.
"It's named after a guy" causes a lot of this confusion in STEM fields. It's always a misleading coincidence. Airy discs, the soft concentric rings of diffracted light, were documentary by one Dr. Airy. Dove prisms, resembling a dovetail joint, are pronounced doh-vay, after Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. Radon transforms are crucial to nuclear medicine and 3D imaging, but there's no radon involved, just one Johann Radon. Metropolis light transport in raytracing has nothing to do with New York City, but everything to do with the Manhattan Project, and one Greek mathematician. Bloom filters, spreading points of data into smooth coverage, have a perfectly fitting name that happens to be surname of their creator... Burton Howard Filter.
- Great comment.
- Makes the "This is Mt. Mountain, it was discovered by John Mountain!" jokes you see in a lot of media actually funny.

i laughed, i cried, i died. RIP.

I got hungy :(

Next panel: I made these Freedom Fries.

The next Word should be turkey.

What kind of savage puts their freedom fries in a bowl?

Were they invented when Belgium was a part of France?

See, as someone who doesn't live in Europe, I honestly have a hard time telling which horizontal/vertical striped lines of red/white/orange/blue/black/brown/whatever, represent which countries. All I know is: that's not the flag of France. I have no idea which country it's for.

I also have trouble with all but a few of the country codes (the two letter notation for a country), and states by their letter codes, with few exceptions... for countries, I know like.... CA is Canada, US is the USA, UK is England/United Kingdom (and I know those are two different things, but I don't know why or how they're different). For States I know like... NY for new York and CA for California.... and like DC for Washington DC (which is different from the state of Washington).

Apart from that and maybe a few others, idfk. And yes, I did not do very well in geography class....

In any case, this joke almost went over my head and I'm still not sure whose flag that is.

It's the Belgian flag