Shitake mushrooms, basmati rice and sashimi style tuna became commonplace, and stir frying became almost as popular in America as grilling. France and Italy still provided much of the basic vocabulary for the foods Americans ate, but the accents were increasingly on China, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, India and above all, Thailand. Of a sudden, America has discovered the charms of the Mediterranean. In America, where fashions sometimes change as rapidly as the sun sets, that will be quite an accomplishment. These terms are badly chosen and misleading, however.
Cuisines are the result of evolution, an intermingling of forces over centuries or even millennia.
A national or regional cuisine develops and changes as part of a living culture. Affected by historical forces, geography, geology, climate and technology as well as by the raw materials that are available. True cuisines are such that a scholar who understands a nation's history, geography, topography and sociology can describe that nation's cuisine by projection from this knowledge, just as a paleontologist can reconstruct the appearance of a dinosaur from a single bone. Even in more modern times, intelligent French chefs have always acknowledged their debt to Italian cuisine and the greatest Italian chefs freely admit that without the influence of North Africa their cooking would be a mere shadow of itself. Perhaps the silliest claim of those most deeply involved with fusion cuisine is that they and they alone are active in seeking out the freshest and best quality raw materials and preparing them in ways that will best highlight their natural flavors is exclusive to them.