This wildly misunderstands the US. The US is also like the EU. It is a union of independent states that have different dialects, different cuisines, different cultures, and different governments with different laws and different taxation rules and different resident ID cards, all under a unifying federation government that has overriding power in some areas but not others with a common currency and freedom of interstate transit.
That seems like trying to take the originalist arguments for returning to the 18th century, and trying to insist they are real. There are of course regional variations in culture - how could there not be in a place that large - but nothing like the differeces between France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, etc., and state borders have nothing to do with it. The federal government has far more power than you say, and far more than the EU government.
This would be more obvious to people if we didn't share a language.
It's also true of large countries like India.
What most people in the West think of as Indian food or Chinese food is usually cuisine from one to a handful of regions, but it's like lumping Swedish and Italian cuisines together as "European food".
And of course you can find ever more levels of culinary granularity down to the level of the town or village.
> Oh, so now we are talking about levels of political integration? I thought we were talking about cuisines.
If you wanted to talk about cuisines you would have been better served to talk about cuisines instead of mutual intelligibility in speech and writing. Maybe next time you should say the thing you want to say instead of something else, I guess.
