Oh, I know that; I’m just saying I don’t think white-bread Anglo-Americans had the word “pasta” and thus didn’t really have a word for that general category of foodstuff. They would say “I had spaghetti for dinner” or “I had ravioli,” but if you asked them for a word that describes the general substance, I think they would have been at a loss.
Strange thing is that barbecues would be another word used for sloppy joes in the Midwest. But then the Midwest isn’t exactly known for BBQ.
Your comment does indicate that name changes of food need not be done for marketing or health reasons, a bit of, um, distasteful sneakiness in my book. They can also be simply regionally influenced.
When Forrest Mars started Mars Limited in England in 1932, he changed the name of the chocolate Milky Way to Mars Bar. The chocolate 3 Musketeers became the Milky Way, and Snickers became Marathon.
Marathon has since become Snickers, and Milky Way has changed to vanilla flavour, but the bar that’s a Milky Way in the US is still a Mars Bar everywhere else (as far as I know – it do get confusing, don’t it?)
When my daughter became a Girl Scout this year, I discovered that a lot of the cookie names had changed from when I sold them.
Samoas -> Caramel DeLites
Do-si-dos -> Peanut Butter Sandwiches
Tagalongs -> Peanut Butter Patties
Trefoils -> Shortbread
Sure, the new names are more descriptive, but they lack poetry.
Funny Face drink mix originally had Chinese Cherry and Injun Orange. Protests about sterotyping lead to changing the names to Choo-Chho Cherry and Jolly Olly Orange.
Moo juice evolves into “milk” after third grade…
Aren’t most “wrap” type-sandwiches just essentially tacos or burritos?
At some point they stopped being waps and started beign called Italian Americans, but I don’t think we ever ATE them.
This has something to do with the manufacturer of the cookies. There’s two, and one uses the descriptive names while one uses the whimsical names.
I’ve never heard that. Perhaps you have it backwards: like Tethered Kite, I have heard of sloppy joes (a type of loose-meat sandwich) being called barbecue sandwiches, but I have never heard of pulled/chopped pork being called loose-meat sandwiches. A loose-meat sandwich is basically a sloppy joe without the tomato/barbecue sauce (although there are references that indicate in some places loose-meat sandwich was synonymous with sloppy joe.)
I am so glad you said that! I know I recently bought (and ate) a box of Samoas, so I started wondering just how old the cookies the Girl Scouts are selling around here really are. 
Sloppy Joes are browned hamburger in a tomato sauce.
As a kid, my mom bought Manwich. A sloppy joe sauce in a can. Brown the hamburger and stir in the sauce. The heartburn from this stuff would nearly kill me now. :eek:
I could be wrong on this, but I could have sworn that when I was a child, that Oscar Mayer’s braunschweiger was sold under the label “liverwurst.”
Ah, ignorance fought. So perhaps it has more to do with my geographical relocation since childhood.
So, speaking of sandwiches, who can tackle the puzzle of the differences among:
Po’ boy
Blimp
Hero
Submarine?
I can’t find a cite for this now, but I read once that “pizza” is simply Italian for “pie” and could refer to any kind of pie.
Don’t forget hoagie, grinder and torpedo.
During the 1980s, at least, all the Noo Yawkers called a complete pizza (as opposed to pizza slices) a “pie”, as in “Hey, wanna’ order a pie?”, while those from Upstate New York simply called it “pizza”.
Poboys are made on a French bread loaf…other than that they are just the same as the others (except when they have fried seafood and taste good enough to slap your mama).
The big sandwich on a long roll seems to have more different names than any other food.
I don’t know why.