The Immigrant Grape and the American Stew

A recipe for celebration on America's Independence Day

Independence Day is among my favorite if not my very favorite, holiday. I chalk this up to never having been too religious (sorry Christmas, Easter, Passover) and to Thanksgiving (a really great holiday in its own right) not being as important in my parents’ home as it should have been. But more importantly, I’ve developed a feeling of reverence for the United States born of study and experience. Independence Day is a celebration of the birth of a country built on values and ideas.

When you survey the 247-year stretch of American history, it becomes clear that immigration is nearly as fundamentally part of the story of America as is the idea of liberty. It is the idea of individual liberty that is essential to the meaning of America and that is the root cause of the wave after wave of immigrants who have come to the United States. Without the principle of individual liberty and freedom at the heart of the radical experiment that is the United States, you don’t have the immigrants streaming into the country over the past two and half centuries.

And so it should be no surprise that “America’s Grape” is not American at all but rather an immigrant grape.