Or recognize that foods evolve differently in different cultures? If I go to Chicago as an Italian and eat pizza there, I might think that their weird thick pi

Or recognize that foods evolve differently in different cultures? If I go to Chicago as an Italian and eat pizza there, I might think that their weird thick pies are an "unholy deviation from the original," but I won't deny them the right to call it "pizza." Even in Italy we have one word ("pizza") but recognize it means very different things in different regions. (It's quite possible that whatever middle eastern food you ate was actually cooked in a traditional manner for a specific locale, but it simply wasn't the version you'd ever had before.)