In Defense of Ketchup

‘Excuse me, could I have some ketchup?’

 

This is one of the most frequently used phrases in my life. I should probably learn to say it in other languages. 

 

‘Disculpe, ¿podría darme un poco de ketchup?’

 

But, increasingly, I am questioning whether I should ask for ketchup at all. Should I even commit to the humiliation-ritual that is outing myself as that American—the one who needs to drown their food in a blanket of red familiarity, instead of submitting politely to whatever is on their plate. The demanding American. The uncultured American. I certainly don’t think of myself that way. I’d like to think of myself as the cool, cultured New Yorker—and Manhattan, of course, is an island far removed from that kind of Americanness. But none of that matters. In reality, most people here will profile me within seconds of my mouth opening, and ketchup makes the identification immediate and undeniable. 

 

Yet it’s worth remembering that ketchup has not always been a categorically American phenomenon.

 

Ketchup feels so aggressively American that it’s easy to forget it began its life nowhere near a McDonalds. The story starts with kê-tsiap, a fermented fish sauce sloshing around Southeast Asian trade routes, which the British encountered, misunderstood, and recreated with whatever felt umami-adjacent—mushrooms, walnuts, anchovies, oysters—resulting in a dark, thin liquid Jane Austen apparently adored. Tomatoes didn’t crash the party until the early 19th century, when ‘love apples’ were blended with spices and alcohol, then slowly tamed with vinegar and sugar to survive longer than a single season. The real pivot came with industrial anxiety: spoiled batches, alarming preservatives, and a growing fear of what exactly was glowing red in those bottles. Enter Heinz, vinegar-forward and proudly preservative-free, who standardised the flavour so completely that homemade ketchup began to taste, to American tongues, simply wrong. What started as fishy, foreign, and improvisational hardened into a national constant. [1]

 

Here in England, it’s not hard to find. I usually don’t have to ask. Even in France, I had no trouble. 

 

Still, it was over here in the Isles, where I was most embarrassed. In Ireland—the home of my Gaelic ancestors—my fellow ketchup-loving (needless to say, American) friend and I had to plead for ketchup at every meal. Everywhere, we would spit out the request, and they’d present us with a few measly packets. Packets. The bane of my existence. Because even worse than asking for it initially, we’d have to get our waiter’s attention for more and more supply. A few packets don’t cut it. 

 

So the question is not just whether I should be ashamed when I ask for ketchup, but what exactly I am negotiating when I do. In spaces where ketchup signals childishness, American excess, or bad taste, requesting it becomes a choice between assimilation and self-trust.

 

There are many reasons, especially at this moment in time, that I am embarrassed to be American. For concision’s sake, I cannot list every reason why, and sometimes it’s not even explicable. I am sure you can think of a few. 

 

When people hear my voice, or ask where I am from, and I have to confess the secret pinned on my back, I watch how faces shift like a diagnosis. In Paris, all it took was me and my girlfriends talking amongst ourselves entering the Metro station when a man stopped me just to ask, ‘Do you think Trump is a good President?’ What happened to ‘Hi, hello?’ I’ve developed the reflex of preemptive clarification: no, I don’t support Trump; yes, I know exactly how racist and xenophobic my country can be; yes, I’m aware of how loud we are abroad, how confident we sound when we shouldn’t be, how often our certainty arrives before our understanding. It’s an equivalent of apologising for the ketchup before it’s even on the table.

 

Living abroad has made my American identity sharper and simultaneously harder to locate. In the most basic sense, I feel more American than ever. Here, it’s visible. It’s audible. It precedes me. I am suddenly aware of how much of my posture, my cadence, my expectations were shaped by a place that taught me to take up space and call it normal. And yet, paradoxically, I also feel un-American—not in a traitorous or performative way, but in a literal, spatial one. The Atlantic creates a massive gap. From this remove, the news is still alarming, but it’s less immediate; the crises feel constant but slightly out of focus. The distance is geographic, but the dislocation is emotional. Just a few weeks ago, I cried quietly at Reading train station after watching the footage of Alex Pretti’s murder. I was, and am, inconsolably sad. It’s at these moments I’m not sure what I feel, and the script goes blank. 

 

But I am, at times, also proud. I feel defensive when I hear murmurs on the street about The States. I am proud of our foundational principles of liberty and freedom, even if they are not being exercised in practice in the current moment. I cried again last Sunday night—this time from a pub. I was watching Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show at the Super Bowl—perhaps the most American event of the year—and was overwhelmed by an indescribable blend of pride and shame. Shame that some Americans need a reminder to love each other: ‘The only thing more powerful than hate is love.’   

 

There’s a difference between feeling American and feeling love for your country, and it’s a distinction I am still finding the language for. To love something without believing in its current behavior requires a strange loyalty. So maybe it’s not pride, but care. An unconditional, familial love. It’s like when your sibling fucks up in some way and you loudly reprimand them. It reads as anger, even hate, when really it is frustration, because you want the best for them. You want them to be the best version of themself.

 

Ketchup, in a way, is a manifestation of this motion sickness. A mix of sweet and savoury, embarrassment and pride. A part of me is humiliated to ask, but I am so comforted when the moment is over and the ketchup arrives on my plate. 

 

I will go back to America. It is where I’ll live, work, argue, vote. It’s my home; I will always be pulled there in a magnetic, childish way. Loving it doesn’t mean pretending it’s fine. Asking for ketchup doesn’t mean rejecting the meal. It means acknowledging hunger, history, and habit all at once; accepting that sometimes taste, like identity, is not something you outgrow so much as something you learn to negotiate.

 

[1] Source: national geographic https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/how-was-ketchup-invented

 

Words and image by Quinn Burke.