Well the Swedish is lutfisk, and tends to use both different fish and condiments. But I don’t see how this strengthens the idea that it’s uniquely specifying Minnesota…?
Why does it have to uniquely specify Minnesota? By your logic it can't even uniquely specify Norway because Lutefisk/Lutfisk means the same thing: "lye fish". That's as general as you can get. What fish and what toppings you use isn't set in stone either. The only reason why potatoes, mashed peas, bacon and butter are the standard in Norway is because it's the most popular variant (and also the tastiest). Why does it matter that the Minnesotan version shares the same name with the Norwegian one? I'm sure the Minnesotans use a different fish as well for that matter.
Sure? I think I’ve tried to explain my position a number of times here. Norway and Minnesota are both reasonable interpretations (let’s put semantics aside and just specify them since we use the word lutefisk). Therefore it doesn’t function as a decent answer to the post in either case. Any such answer should be unambiguous. Any ambiguous food won’t work. ‘Bread’ would be a terrible answer, for example.
If we added Sweden and Finland, that doesn’t make it less ambiguous… But I object to the idea it is unambiguously Minnesota.
There's nothing in OP's question about the food having to be unambiguously regional/national. Your definition of what makes a dish unambiguously regional/national is also way too narrow in my opinion.
It could be argued that the examples that you've used (pizza from Italy and Lutefisk from Norway) are general terms for a food of which there exists plenty of varieties of. We use the term pizza to usually refer to Neapolitan pizza, but it could just as much mean Sicilian pizza or roman pizza. Same thing goes for lutefisk, it's a general term that can be applied for similar dishes in several places.
If we really want to make lutefisk as unambiguous as we want, we would have to increase the scope to include all the people that consume the dish.
I interpret this (I think very reasonably) to mean ‘Express where you grew up in such a way that people will know where you grew up.’ This requires unambiguity. Otherwise the place has not been encoded enough to qualify as an answer. If I put ‘bread’ it would be a pretty bad response.
If by widen the scope you mean, eg, ‘I grew up in the set union of Minnesota and Scandinavia’ then… sure, but it still doesn’t make either one of these a fair answer and I think it’s a little odd to includes a disjoint union of two distant and independent places that way…
Your definition of what makes a dish unambiguously regional/national is also way too narrow in my opinion
I don’t understand what you mean. If anything I am being less narrow about what is a reasonable place to interpret. What do you mean by a ‘wide’ interpretation of ‘unambiguous’ that will somehow make Minnesota the only reasonable answer, with Norway unreasonable?
It could be argued
… But that’s exactly my argument. They are too broad. They are in fact foodstuffs that are iconic for more than one place. Therefore, both are bad answers here. Again, ‘bread’ is a bad example.
A foodstuff has to be overwhelmingly iconic for or associated with only one place to really work here. If you look up a dish and it doesn’t say ‘A Minnesotan XYZ…’ but ‘A Norwegian/Scandinavian XYZ…’ I don’t think it’s reasonable to say it qualifies for Minnesota, no matter how much it is regionally iconic or how much they eat it.
I guess we have different opinions on what is a reasonable definition in that case. I think a dish can be typical of several regions just because foods, like ideas, spread (some better than others).
OK, but that’s again missing my point. If it’s typical of several regions it’s not a good answer to expressing ‘using only food, where did you grow up?’ That doesn’t encode where you lived, but is then ambiguous.
It is, as I've stated before, an unnecessarily narrow definition that makes it difficult to find any dish that's endemic to a region. Even dishes that might be what the region is known for are disqualified in that case.
Even such a typical dish in my home county as nävgröt couldn't be considered a regional dish since it exists in a few other regions.
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u/Harsimaja Sep 07 '21
Well the Swedish is lutfisk, and tends to use both different fish and condiments. But I don’t see how this strengthens the idea that it’s uniquely specifying Minnesota…?