I'm actually not surprised. Lutefisk sounds like one of those ideas that was adopted out of sheer necessity and abandoned in the old world when people didn't have to suffer it any more, but seems quaint and ethnic to us in America. Sort of like how we took academic regalia and ran with it, or have grad students print their final products on rag paper (well, we switched to Electronic Theses, Dissertations, and Reports recently, but you get the idea).

There's also the "Americanization" craze: we all love kung pao chicken, moo goo gai pan, and fried rice, but you don't see a whole lot of these in restaurants over in China (especially fried rice). I don't think lutefisk qualifies, though.

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Banazir