Neal Stephenson's 2011 mega-novel Reamde - IMO, his best (or at least
most accessible) in some time - features the following crash of cultures:


"She had approached Zula and struck up a conversation yesterday
afternoon. [They] had found their way to a street where a number of tea
sellers had their shops, and Zula had been eyeing them, trying to decide
which one she would approach, psyching herself up for another round of
bargaining. And then suddenly this woman had been in front of her, blue
boots planted, smiling confidently, and striking up a conversation in
oddly colloquial English. And after a minute or two she had produced
this huge bolus of green tea, seemingly from nowhere, and told Zula a
story about it. How she and her people€”Zula had forgotten the name of
the group, but Blue Boots wanted it understood that it was a separate
ethnicity€”lived way up in the mountains of western Fujian. They had been
chased up there a zillion years ago and lived in forts on misty
mountaintops. Consequently, no one was upstream of them€”the water ran
clean from the sky, there was no industrial runoff contaminating their
soil, and there never would be. Blue Boots had gone on to enumerate
several other virtues of the place and to explain how these superlative
qualities had been impregnated into the tea leaves at the molecular
level and could be transferred into the bodies, minds, and souls of
people condemned to live in not-so-blessed realms simply by drinking
vast quantities of said tea. A kilogram of the stuff would vanish in no
time and Zula would be begging for more. But it would be hard to buy
more in America. Speaking of which, Blue Boots was keen on finding a
Western Hemisphere distributor for this product, and Zula seemed like a
fine candidate€¦"


For those who enjoy a certain kind of gastronomic-obsessive writing, I
recommend as possibly canonical Stephenson's "Cap'n Crunch" passage from
Ch. 56 of the earlier Cryptonomicon. To understand this passage is to
understand the soul of the otaku. And for video fans, the
chadao-parodying "ramen master" play-within-a-play-within-a-play scene
from Tampopo, and Gorodish's diving gear-clad exquisition on zen in the
art of baguette-buttering from Diva. Latter two currently available on
YouTube.

Other such gems invited.

-DM