A Global Dinner Party

The world came to North America for the 2026 World Cup, and so much of the joy is happening over food.

A German guy named Freddy has spent the World Cup eating his way across America. He gave a Waffle House at one in the morning a ten out of ten.

He is not the only one. A group of Japanese fans tried Texas barbecue and were floored. A Norwegian raved about his first In-N-Out. A deli guy in Jersey took care of some Scotland fans with free sandwiches. I honestly wasn’t much of a soccer fan before, but these videos of all these nations getting along have pulled me into the tournament and now I can’t get enough.

I have been trying, and failing, to be nonchalant about it. It has been a brutal few years to be a fan of America. Our leaders have been a disgrace, the daily news a churn of cruelty, bad faith and stupidity, and I am not naive about any of it.

Then more than a million people showed up from everywhere, and the first uncomplicated joy I have felt about this country in ages started scrolling down my feeds in fifteen-second clips. Out of habit I went looking for the catch. Then I let it go. I am choosing the joy.

The tournament is spread across the continent, eleven American host cities plus stops in Canada and Mexico, and the teams keep moving. The 1.24 million visitors chase their squads from city to city. Everyone has to eat, so the chase becomes one meal after another in an unfamiliar place, a crash course in how we feed ourselves.

Strangers share food before they share a language. It is the kind of thing that’s easy to say yet your rarely get to watch happen in real time.

Strangers at the Same Tables

Almost all of it reaches me through a screen. Most of what social media serves up is staged or selling something, and you can fake one guy’s reaction, even use AI to fake the whole street. Some of that is happening here. But a lot more of it feels true.

What’s harder to fake is the volume of it, the same celebration shot from a hundred phones at once, a bar where Koreans and Mexicans drink at the same tables. That much is real, and in a year with very little of it, I am choosing to hold onto the clips, not invent some conspiracy theory that the whole thing is staged.

The clips that get me are the regional ones. A Scotsman said one plate of Carolina ribs ruined his old life with meat. The Tartan Army turned Boston into New Scotland and drank the Sam Adams taproom dry, three thousand pints in four days. And down in Guadalajara, Korea’s captain Son Heung-min stopped at a taco stand for arrachera, and now Korean fans line up at the same counter to eat where their hero ate.

Then there is the world discovering American junk food. A Swede crowned ranch dressing the discovery of her life and told Europe to arrange an airlift. A Korean walked out of a Buc-ee’s evangelizing for Beaver Nuggets. Part of me winces that the junkiest thing we sell is what lands hardest. But if a hardened Texan and an Iranian fan can pass a bag of Beaver Nuggets back and forth in a parking lot, each walking away a little surprised the other is nothing like the headlines promised, then I will take it, processed ingredients and all.

For a few weeks, food like that is turning strangers into friends. And that counts for something, as nutritionally suspect as it might be. These happy clips are nowhere near the whole country. There is a lot of racism here right now, the opposite of two strangers sharing a snack. These bonds are small and might not outlast the summer. But they show what we are capable of when we let ourselves.

Eating another person’s food takes a wall down. I will not pretend a plate of food brings world peace, but it is a hell of a start, and these visitors are showing us how. They do not flinch, and they do not ask for it to be more like home. The Koreans are not asking the pitmaster for kimchi on their brisket, even though that would be delicious, and they want to eat it like the locals do.

The harder question is whether we would return the favor, whether we would land in Lagos or Hanoi and hunt for the real thing the way a Korean fan hunts for Texas barbecue. Anthony Bourdain spent a career talking Americans into eating where the locals actually eat, before anyone softens it for a Western palate. We have gotten better at it, but we are not there yet, and my hope is that we can pack this same curiosity onto a plane going the other way.

Welcome Home, Algeria

It is not only the big coastal cities, either. The warmest story of the whole tournament has come out of Lawrence, Kansas. Kansas is deep red country, Republican in every presidential election since 1968, and Lawrence is the blue college town sitting inside it. Most people there could not have told you much about Algeria a month earlier. Then Algeria made the town its base camp, and they learned.

When the team rolled in past midnight on June 8 in a thunderstorm, flag-waving locals stood in the rain for a squad they barely knew. The university’s marching band learned the Algerian national anthem and played it back to the players. The artist Stan Herd carved a quarter-acre Algerian flag into a hillside, and the eight hundred people who came to the unveiling had goosebumps. What got him, he said, was not the art. It was the embrace.

The players signed autographs and ran a clinic for local kids. A restaurant in town rebuilt its menu around halal meat so the team and its fans would have somewhere to eat. The welcome ran straight through the kitchen. Algerians who had built lives in the Kansas City metro for years suddenly had a home crowd.

Algeria lost to Argentina three to nothing and it did not dent a thing. These are ordinary, kind people who were glad someone came all this way, not the hardened MAGA caricature looking to own somebody.

That is the model for how you treat people who come from somewhere else: assume the best of them, not the worst. They fed them, learned their anthem, and treated them like family for a month. It is the exact reverse of what ICE has done all year, masked agents and arrests in restaurant parking lots, treating people who came here to cook and clean and build as prey.

Lawrence threw a parade for strangers. Yet, the same country put people in unmarked vans. Both are us, and I want a lot more of Lawrence. If a deep red state’s college town can throw its arms around a country it barely knew a month ago, the rest of us can manage it too.

Spare Me the Cynics

I can hear the objections coming, and most of them are fair. FIFA is a bloated, corrupt institution that spent decades pulling money out of the game and looking away on bribery and worse. The tickets are obscene, three thousand dollars to watch Korea play Mexico, with thirty-dollar beers once you are through the gates and pricing tuned to squeeze the diehards hardest. Mexico went into its own opener with teachers toppling World Cup statues over their wages. All of it is real, and I am not going to pretend it away.

And the people running my country are doing their damnedest to wreck the mood. They would not let Iran’s team stay overnight on American soil, so the players sleep in Tijuana and fly in on game days. Visiting fans got a welcome and a warning not to overstay or get sent home. Supporters from thirty-nine countries were banned outright, so Haiti, back in the World Cup after fifty years, mostly cannot bring its own. That is the spirit our leadership carried into a global party.

There is a smaller, pettier kind of cynic, the guy who watches a thousand people from twelve countries singing in a Boston pub and goes looking for the rot to hold up like treasure. Plenty in the world is worth criticizing. Constant anger is not the answer, and strangers trading bites of each other's food are not the problem.

What I cannot stand is the reflex, the people whose factory setting is contempt, who meet every good thing by hunting for the flaw. If somebody else’s happiness reads as a personal affront, it is worth asking what in your life turned joy into a threat. Cynicism is a cancer, and I catch it in myself sometimes too. But I would rather be the sucker who teared up at a Waffle House video than the clever guy explaining why it did not matter. The clever guy is always, somehow, alone.

The Concept Car for a Country

Longtime readers know I have a soft spot for concept cars. Every so often a carmaker builds a wild, impractical machine that will never reach a showroom, made only to show what is possible. I have spent years building the food version, concept products that sit on no shelf, there to give people something concrete to aim at.

The best concept car I have seen this year is the postive vibes between humans during the World Cup so far. People throwing their arms around a stranger while screaming at him from across a soccer pitch, that is the prototype of the country I actually want, where welcome is the default and curiosity gets there before fear. It runs dead against the contempt for outsiders this government keeps pumping into the water.

There are serious problems in the world and in our food, and I will get back to them. But this is the reason to bother with any of it. The whole point of fixing what is broken is so that this warmth between strangers stops being a special occasion and starts being the ordinary texture of how we live. We should not need a global tournament to import it once every four years.

A lot of this is clustering in big blue host cities and a stubborn college town in red Kansas, where the door already opens a little easier.It is the whole hope, that the warmth keeps spreading until it reaches the places that need it most. People got here from all over the planet, our leaders stepped out of the frame for a few weeks, and look what we did with the room.

So I am leaning all the way in, and you should too. Eat the strange food. Learn the words to the stranger’s song. Be glad they showed up. This is the whole human project, parked out in the open for anyone willing to see it.

Let the cynics stay home. The rest of us have somewhere to be.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

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