This July, America turns 250. But how can we use this celebration to correct the record about the story of our country? Immigrants have always been the gracious hosts of American food. They welcomed the country into their kitchens, shared their recipes and techniques, and built what we now call American cuisine. And what did they get in return? That hospitality was used against them. Americanization programs turned immigrant generosity into an entry point for erasure—rebranding clay cookware as primitive, open-flame cooking as unsanitary, and traditional recipes as unfit for “modern” American life.

Still, those same traditions built American food as we know it. Immigrant communities continue to build it today—one adapted technique, one preserved recipe, one shared meal at a time. And that’s something I think about a lot, especially on the heels of June’s National Immigrant Heritage Month and as someone who loves and writes about food. Because food is more than nourishment. It’s a gateway into culture, and it tells us so much about people including what they grow, what they value, how they adapt, and how they survive.

Immigrant food traditions have heavily influenced how I look at food, and how I reset creatively when I feel uninspired. It’s never because I don’t have enough ingredients. It’s because I’ve stopped seeing possibilities. And nothing fixes that faster than studying how another culture takes something ordinary and turns it into a delicious tradition.

There was a point in my cooking journey where I went vegan, and it completely changed how I understood flavor. I had to rethink how I built food from the ground up. That’s when I started paying deeper attention to South American cooking traditions—how tomatoes and chilies weren’t just “ingredients,” but foundations used to build braising liquids, sauces, and bases that carried entire dishes.

I started cooking more beans and rice than I ever had before, but not in the way I grew up with them. I was trying to understand how different cultures were building flavor profiles from the same simple staples. It wasn’t about copying recipes. It was about learning perspective. What does it mean to build flavor without defaulting to butter, cream, or familiar seasoning blends?

Most of the time, that shift comes from immigrant food traditions in America. From communities who have always known how to stretch, build, season, and transform what was available to them in ways that are deeply tied to place, history, survival and joy.

Immigrant communities don’t just “influence” food culture in the United States. They build it. They preserve it. They adapt it under pressure. What we call American food is a living record of migration.

But that story gets more complicated when we look at what was happening in the early 1900s. During the era of Americanization programs, assimilation was not just a social expectation—it was an organized effort embedded into everyday life. Domestic educators were sent into Mexican and Mexican-American homes with a clear mission: to reshape domestic life in order to reshape identity. And the kitchen was the entry point.

Cooking methods that had been passed down for generations—beans cooked from scratch, tortillas made by hand, one-pot meals, open-flame cooking, grinding corn on stone metates, using clay cookware—were actively reframed as unsanitary, primitive, backward, or un-American. In their place, families were pushed toward “modern” American living: packaged foods, canned goods, factory-made bread, and standardized grocery store diets.

The goal was not simply to change diets. It was to reshape identity through food. There was a belief that Americanization began in the kitchen. And these ideas didn’t disappear—they evolved.

Over time, many of the same foods and practices that were once dismissed became rebranded. Beans, once labeled “poor people’s food,” are now praised as a superfood. Clay cookware, once seen as primitive, is now aestheticized and sold as artisanal. Cooking over open fire, once discouraged as backward, is now elevated as luxury dining. Slow cooking, once tied to necessity and survival, is now marketed as wellness and lifestyle.

But what often gets lost in that shift is context. Because when the cook changes, the meaning changes. When culture is separated from its origin story, it becomes faster to consume, but harder to understand.

This continues today. The way food is marketed and advertised still shapes how people understand health, nutrition, and culture. Black communities, for example, have long been disproportionately targeted with advertising for sugary drinks and heavily processed foods. That pattern is well documented.

But during Spanish-language programming, commercials sometimes contained more detailed and more accurate nutritional information compared to English-language programming:

“Hispanic Americans’ integration into mainstream, English-speaking US culture has been shown to increase exposure to food advertising that contains lower informational content about health and nutrition. Spanish-only promotions contained more and better information relating to nutrition and health.” (Abbatangelo-Gray, Byrd-Bredbenner, and Austin, 2008)

We often assume assimilation means access. That speaking the dominant language or consuming the dominant culture automatically means better information, better health outcomes, or better opportunities. But sometimes it raises a harder question: What are we actually gaining when we “fit in”? And what are we quietly losing?

Immigration is often discussed in political terms—debated, polarized, reduced to headlines. But food tells a different story. Food shows contribution, continuity, survival, and innovation. Immigrant communities are not outside of American food culture. They are a major reason it exists in the form we know today.

As we transition from National Immigrant Heritage Month and celebrate America’s 250th birthday, let it be a reminder that honoring the melting pot that is America can only be done if we honor all the ingredients. From the cup of Caribbean influence that feeds our soul, to the ladle of Latin culture that stirs our senses. Honoring immigrants means more than benefiting from their influence—it means acknowledging their foundational and lasting contributions to our collective table.