Great episode. I just wanted to mention that part of the reason Americans eat what they do is due to early English taxes on the colonies for many essentials, like sugar, tea, glass, paper, paint, etc.
I wondered why every American cooking video started out like “Today we’re going to cook pasta. Start by melting the first pound of butter.” A food historian explained that their recipes are still like this due to early oil scarcity. Every village had chooks, a pig, a goat, maybe a cow, etc, but there was much they couldn’t get regularly