Politics & Power Quote by Luigi Barzini

A compliment that lands like a slap: Barzini grants America its progress, then needles it with a single, greasy exception. The line works because it’s structured as a diplomatic concession followed by a perfectly chosen tell. “Public and private food” is not just restaurants versus home cooking; it’s the entire civic ecosystem of eating - hotels, diners, households, institutions - the places a traveler actually encounters a country. America, in his view, has learned the surface art of taste. It can produce meals that are “extremely good,” even impressively so.

Then come the fried potatoes, stubbornly “unchanged.” Barzini isn’t litigating side dishes. He’s isolating a national habit that resists refinement precisely because it’s ubiquitous, cheap, and emotionally comforting. French fries are the perfect symbol: standardized, industrial, reliable in the way mass culture is reliable. That they remain “deadly” suggests more than bad cooking; it hints at the hidden costs of modern abundance - uniformity, excess, and the casual self-harm that can hide inside pleasure.

As a journalist and chronic observer of national character, Barzini is also performing a subtle power move common to European commentary on America in the early 20th century: praise the New World’s dynamism, then reassert Old World discernment by pinpointing where America’s speed and scale flatten nuance. The joke’s bite is that the fries “go unchanged” even as everything else improves, implying that modernization doesn’t automatically mean better living - sometimes it just perfects the main course while leaving the poison on the side.