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THE OTHER DAY MY SON JASPER ASKED ME WHAT sounded like a simple question: "Dad," he said, "what is American food?"

THE OTHER DAY MY SON JASPER ASKED ME WHAT sounded like a simple question: "Dad," he said, "what is American food?"

Jasper is six years old, and we live in southern California, which meant that in the course of the preceding week he and his twin brother had encountered Sonoran-style tacos, Lebanese kebabs, Vietnamese spring rolls, and several iterations of pizza. It's customary for first-time visitors in Los Angeles to remark on the multicultural multitude of the city's restaurant landscape, but only when you live here do you realize (as did the late California food critic Jonathan Gold) that the scope of its globe-hopping is immeasurable, that you can roll along miles and miles of boulevards such as Pico and Venice marveling at shopping centers that read like culinary maps of the world.

To some, the richness of that mix might constitute a threat. We're in a political moment when demagogues want to narrow the definition of what American is. The recent presidential election was, among many other things, a showdown between a candidate with a kitchen full of multicultural cookbooks-Indian, African, Latino-and a candidate for whom the apex of American gastronomy is a Big Mac.

But the truth is that there never really has been any fixed, singular definition of American food, because the country and its cuisines-influenced by wave after wave of new arrivals-have remained in a state of perpetual transformation. Los Angeles isn't an anomaly; it's a mirror.