Pop-Tarts in Switzerland

When Scott Bessent joked in Switzerland that next time he would bring Pop-Tarts, after dismissing Swiss and German food, the comment was widely treated as harmless banter. A moment of cultural clumsiness. An anecdote not worth lingering on. It deserves lingering.

Bessent was not in Switzerland as the typical American tourist passing through. He was there as one of the most powerful economic figures in the United States, participating in high-level meetings at the very heart of the global financial system. Switzerland, whatever one thinks of it, is not a neutral backdrop. It is a country whose identity has long been built around discipline, continuity, institutional care and a deep respect for form. To speak lightly there is already to speak loudly.

What was expressed was not a personal preference. It was a worldview. The same worldview appears, carefully normalized, in Emily in Paris, in a scene set inside the U.S. embassy where “American food” is represented by Pop-Tarts, sugary cereals and ultra-processed snacks. The moment is not framed as satire. There is no embarrassment, no self-reflection, no tension. It is presented as charming, confident, even endearing. This matters because cultural representation is never neutral. An embassy is not a kitchen. It is a statement. What is placed on the table is what a nation believes it has to say about itself.

How America chooses to see itself is not, in itself, the issue. Every culture has the right to define its own language, its own symbols, its own comforts. Simplicity is not a flaw. Informality is not a failure. No civilization owes refinement as performance. The problem begins when that simplification becomes a demand.

Food, in every mature civilization, is more than nourishment. It is technique passed down, time accumulated, geography made edible. Even the humblest cuisines understand this. Bread, soup, rice, cheese—simplicity can still carry memory, place and care. Ultra-processed food does not. It is food without origin, without season, without hands. It is commodity, not preparation. When it becomes emblematic—when it is offered not merely as convenience but as cultural shorthand—it signals a renunciation. Not of luxury, but of meaning. What both the Pop-Tarts remark in Switzerland and the embassy scene in Emily in Paris quietly assert is that culture is optional, curiosity unnecessary, adaptation a weakness. The message is subtle but unmistakable: this is who we are; if there is friction, the world will adjust. This is not culinary arrogance. It is cultural unilateralism.

The pride on display is not pride in tradition, but pride in its absence. Pride in not knowing. Pride in not needing to learn. Pride in flattening complexity rather than engaging with it. It is anti-intellectualism dressed as authenticity, provincialism backed by global power. Gastronomy has always been a bellwether. When care disappears from the table, it soon disappears from language, from institutions, from law. Meals once functioned as bridges in diplomacy—not to impress, but to acknowledge the other. To say: we see you, we are willing to meet you where you are.

Pop-Tarts in Switzerland invert that logic. They say: we do not need to listen. And listening, ultimately, is the minimum requirement for coexistence. The scene in Emily in Paris is not offensive because it is kitsch. It is revealing because it is sincere. It shows how America increasingly imagines itself: frictionless, unserious, immune to depth, and convinced that this self-image is not only sufficient, but exportable.

Civilizations do not decline because they simplify. They decline when they insist that everyone else must simplify with them. Pop-Tarts in Switzerland are not a joke. They are a confession. A confession that culture has been reduced to convenience, identity to consumption, and respect to something optional. For The Epicurer, this is not nostalgia. It is diagnosis. Because when a society stops believing that anything deserves care, the first thing it loses is taste. What follows is always far more difficult to digest.