Have you met our Lord and savior hakarl?

That just gets a bad reputation because of non AI slop on social media.

Yes it's quite novel. Most national identities and stereotypes are from the latter half of the nineteenth century. Read Eric Hobsbawns 'the invention of tradition'' for example.

The Italian cuisine and it's staples are very much a construction from the post war period, look at the history of the spaghetti carbonara, which was wiped up by an American army cook, but was later elevated to an supposedly 'ancient' recipe.

But before the era of nationalism most people didn't think in terms of nations and national stereotypes.

Novel and widespread have nothing to do with aech other.

From the wikipedia article about nations:

The broad consensus amongst scholars of nationalism is that nations are a recent phenomenon. However, some historians argue that their existence can be traced to the medieval period, or a minority believe even to antiquity.