May 03, 2018, by
I was immediately drawn in by Sante bringing up the idea of the melting pot. This is a concept that is frequently tossed around without much thought. In New York, do we actually receive an authentic view of a variety of people? Or do we create something out of others that represents our ideal?
This idea also made me think of how New York presents things like cuisine, art, and entertainment. Do people actually want to experience a melting pot that consists of an authentic variety of things? In some ways it seems that people just want to experience a spectrum of what they already know. Many popular restaurants in the city nowadays claim to fuse together different cuisines, while really just presenting an exotic twist on American favorites. Also, at a certain point, people have a hard time expanding their tastes into things completely unfamiliar.
It makes me consider what parts of the melting pot are actually evident in the pulse of New York now and how they got there. Everywhere you turn, there is evidence of different people in their experience with the city.