friet

Some of our readership may remember how, once upon a time -- oh, five or six years ago -- some members of the United States Congress got cranky with the French government, and administered it what somebody apparently considered a stinging rebuke by changing the name of the dish "French fries", in the Congressional cafeterias, to "Freedom Fries".

This kind of thing has happened fairly frequently in recent history -- as for example during World War II, when many foods with German names in the USA had new and more politically correct names slapped on them for the duration. Sauerkraut, for example, became "liberty cabbage", and even the innocent and theoretically all-American hamburger got turned into "victory steak". But this maneuver is at its funniest when there's enough confusion about the origin of the food for the gesture to be meaningless -- in the most recent case, because "French fries" are actually from Belgium.

Unfortunately, in our short-attention-span world, there are too few people who're either familiar with or concerned about the details of such events as World War I. In that war, American and Canadian soldiers assisting in the liberation of Belgium arrived in a French-speaking part of the country and were served extremely tasty fried potatoes, which they promptly started calling "French fries" even though they weren't particularly close to France at the time. By the time anyone noticed the error, it was too late: the name was stuck.