Culture of what?

Prince Charles said that a culture is defined by its religion, its language and its cuisine.  I don't know about you, but I have felt cultureless for a long time.  Being a white girl who grew up in just-barely-middle class America, I felt like our culture was so bleached out that I grabbed for anything that felt like culture.  Much of what was available, though was out of context so I could not really feel like I was a part of something.  Experiencing others' cultures is only useful when a person has their own sense of what their culture feels like.  Otherwise, it is a noncontextual glimpse of something that feels random to the onlooker.

It is my surmise, though, that when a person is firmly grounded in their own culture, they are better able to understand others' cultures.  Look at the humble tomato.  Juicy and delicious, it is a native to Mexico.  We all think of Italian food as being steeped in tomato sauce and cheese at every turn.  Tomatoes did not become a part of their cuisine until Columbus discovered the New World and brought tomatoes back.  Because the Italians were firmly grounded in their own cusine, they were able to incorporate this new fruit into something that we view to be Italian.

So what of America?  What is our culture?  There is a part of me that wants to say we are too geographically large to have one culture.  I can tell you how I grew up.  My food was ramen noodles, mac and cheese, and fresh vegetables.  We had honey ginger chicken a lot, and occasionally meat loaf or casseroles for dinner.  Lunch was usually sandwiches (and for awhile, pizza), and as my years went on my parents began as staunch low-sugar breakfast cereal promoters (if we had sugary cereals, it was always mixed with a healthy one) to we don't like it, but we are too tired to fight you on this issue, and we are happy to have breakfast with you.

As for religion, we were very Christian.  We hid in the back while getting dressed for Halloween, hoping that the trick-or-treaters would see our dark house and skip it.  We then drove to church where they had what they called the "joy jamboree."  I have never really heard jamboree be used in a serious sense since.  I can remember the part during church between worship and the message, where from the awaiting silence a prophesy would speak out some kind of heartwarming or horrifying thought.

My language was predominately English because that's what my mom spoke.  My father is deaf, so he signed to us quite a bit, though he was very good at speaking.

But I always felt we were not normal.  That there was something out there that was more normal or cultural than us.  Maybe I was searching for an idealized cultural normal that I thought existed.  Something to the effect of "getting the chip."  Maybe I made it hard for myself to be accepted into the culture because I kept telling myself that I was different, and then my self-fulfilling prophesy was fulfilled.

I don't know if America has a culture, but it certainly contains a lot of them and blanket-sweeping some type of cultural norms across the entire country snuffs out the beautiful variation that we have.  Naturally-and conciously-minded people do this too.  We say "we do thus and so (insert breastfeeding, cloth diapering/EC, homebirthing here)," and the rest of the world does "blah, blah, blah (insert formula-feeding, disposable diapering, or epidural-sporting comment here)."  I know a lot of people do respect the microculture that is our day-to-day life, which is a dynamic, ever-changing set of actions that become our mark on the earth and on humanity.  Sometimes we need to turn around and put the spotlight on ourselves with this conscious living.  Is it really conscious, or is it just anti-perceived culture?