What the World’s Kitchens Know About Immigration and Diversity in Food

In this clip from a Turning Point USA event, JD Vance claims that too much immigration erodes social trust — the idea this essay challenges through the history of food and culture.

If you want to see how diversity really works, don’t look to politics — look to the plate. Every cuisine is a living map of migration, trade, and curiosity. The history of immigration and diversity in food tells us that flavor has always been born from movement — from people mixing ideas, ingredients, and traditions across borders.

Yet some politicians, like JD Vance, claim that too much immigration erodes social trust, making people too different to cooperate. But history tells another story — one of dough that rises higher when it’s mixed.

Bread and Solidarity

Immigration and Diversity in Food: A Recipe for Solidarity

At the end of the 19th century, while American bakers were organizing for fair pay and safer conditions, their Italian counterparts in Buenos Aires were doing the same. The city’s first bakers’ union was founded by immigrants — anarchists, socialists, idealists — who spoke with thick accents and kneaded dough from dusk till dawn.

Facturas — the sweet pastries of Buenos Aires — were created by immigrant bakers in the late 1800s. Many carried cheeky anarchist names like bolas de fraile and vigilantes, a mix of rebellion and humor baked into everyday life.

They didn’t distrust one another because they came from different villages or spoke different dialects. They bonded over yeast and sweat. They knew what every baker knows: dough only rises when it’s mixed.

Across the Atlantic, immigrant labor was also shaping the United States — building railroads, canning vegetables, laying bricks, and baking the bread. The union halls of Chicago and the panaderías of Buenos Aires pulsed with the same belief: diversity wasn’t a threat to solidarity; it was its fuel.

“Nations rise the same way bread does — by mixing, by patience, by heat, and by trust.”

The Myth of Purity

Vance’s argument — that a nation needs cultural homogeneity to build trust — ignores how nations actually form. Both the U.S. and Argentina were experiments in mixture. Italians, Spaniards, Jews, Germans, Africans, Arabs, and Indigenous peoples all left fingerprints on Argentina’s national table.

Homemade Argentine empanadas I baked during COVID — a return to the basics of comfort, patience, and shared flavors at home.

Empanadas, fugazzetta, and asado aren’t symbols of purity; they’re recipes for coexistence. To strip immigration from Argentine cuisine would be like removing fermentation from wine — the soul would vanish, leaving something flat and lifeless.

The Birth of the Gaucho

Argentina may have been born from Spanish immigration, but it was forged by the meeting of worlds. When Spanish settlers arrived, they brought livestock, language, and religion — but survival on the vast Pampas demanded something else: adaptation.

Over time, Indigenous knowledge of the land, African horsemanship brought by enslaved peoples, and European cattle culture merged into something entirely new.

Out of that fusion came the gaucho — the quintessential Argentine cowboy, equal parts Indigenous, African, and European. He spoke a creole of tongues, lived by his own code, and carried a deep sense of independence that shaped the national character.

Historic photo of Argentine gauchos on horseback, courtesy of Camino Pampa. The gauchos emerged from the blend of Indigenous, African, and European roots that shaped Argentina’s identity and its asado tradition.

When it came to food, the gaucho did what humans always do when cultures meet — he invented. His open-fire roasting of beef over leña (wood fire) and glowing embers became the foundation of the asado, the ritual that defines Argentine hospitality today.

The country’s most cherished tradition was born not from purity, but from mixture.

The Fire Teaches Us

In the Argentine asado, trust takes another form. There’s usually one person in charge of the fire — the asador — who watches the wood burn down to glowing embers, salts the meat, and decides when it’s ready. No one hovers, no one rushes him. The rest of the group talks, laughs, keeps his glass full, and waits.

Frank Almeida tending the fire during an AsadoAdventure event in Buenos Aires. The quiet trust around the asado reflects Argentina’s deep culinary traditions — patience, heat, and shared connection.

That quiet faith — the collective patience around one person’s craft — is its own kind of social glue. Everyone has a role, even if it’s just to pour another round or share a story. When the food finally comes off the grill, it isn’t just meat that’s shared; it’s trust, built slowly over heat and time.

Even mollejas (sweetbreads), adopted from European kitchens, became a national delicacy precisely because Argentina absorbed and transformed what came from elsewhere. A dish born in Old World poverty found new dignity here, kissed by wood smoke and lemon.

Grilled mollejas — Argentine sweetbreads kissed by fire and lemon. Once a European delicacy, they became a national favorite through the country’s asado tradition.

A Living Continuation

The story of immigration and creativity in Argentina didn’t end with the gauchos or the bakers. I’m part of that story too.

When I arrived in Buenos Aires in 1999, I didn’t come as a tourist — I came to stay. I settled down, married, and started a family. Together with my wife, we built something that didn’t exist in the market at the time: a brand of gourmet cookies and biscotti. Back then, there wasn’t a single company in Argentina offering anything like it. We baked, we learned, we grew — another small chapter in a much larger history of people who came from elsewhere and decided to contribute something new.

Sugar and Spice — the gourmet cookie and biscotti brand my wife and I created after arriving in Buenos Aires. At the time, Argentina had nothing like it, and our small bakery helped introduce a new kind of local indulgence.

Today, I carry that same spirit in my work with AsadoAdventure — inviting visitors to experience Argentine culture the way it’s meant to be shared: at home, around the fire. When I began, no one else was offering an asado experience like this. Travelers could visit restaurants and steakhouses, but they would never see the intimate ritual that defines local life unless someone opened their door.

That’s what I try to do — open the door, pour the wine, and keep the fire going. Because that’s what immigrants have always done: added another flavor to the table.

What the Kitchen Knows

If diversity really bred distrust, no kitchen on earth would survive a dinner rush. Yet every night, from Buenos Aires to Chicago, you’ll find cooks from everywhere—Ecuador, Nigeria, Italy, Korea—moving like one body, sweating through the same heat, chasing the same rhythm. Immigration didn’t divide us. It fed us. It’s the secret ingredient in every country that ever learned how to reinvent itself.

“The people who do the actual cooking in America, the really good cooking, are almost all immigrants... They’re the backbone of the industry.” — Anthony Bourdain

And I’ll tell you something else: JD Vance knows that. His own home proves it. He’s not confused—he’s counting on you to be. He’s betting that fear tastes better than truth. But anyone who’s ever stood in a kitchen knows different. The real flavor comes from the mix, from the mess, from learning to trust the hands beside you.