The beauty within
Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner in America are already a massive decentralized food network. The difference is that it exists inside the household instead of through commercial storefronts.
Every family becomes a temporary restaurant.
Every home becomes a production center.
Everyone has their own recipe, standards, traditions, timing, and execution.
It’s the same DIY impulse.
The Chinese version scaled outward into restaurants and small business networks.
The American version stayed embedded inside the home through holiday culture.
If Americans commercialized holiday dinner the same way Chinese immigrants commercialized cuisine, you would probably see “turkey houses” and Christmas dinner chains everywhere.
Instead, Americans internalized it culturally.
That’s why the logic is broken when people compare restaurant count to household traditions as if they are the same category. They are measuring two different forms of distribution:
centralized/commercialized food culture
decentralized/domestic food culture