Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Midwestern Defensiveness / Food Chain / Media / Food & Drink Meatheads
Posted by Sam Worley on 01.11.12 at 11:51 AM
- Jeremy van Bedijk
A few things:
1) The area Sulzberger covers, “the Midwest,” “stretches from Oklahoma to North Dakota,” he notes.Oklahoma? Are Illinois and Indiana covered by the Times’'s east-coast bureau? 2) Somebody tried to put lard, which Sulzberger's server didn't realize constituted "meat," in some pintos at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Kansas cattle country. Leaving aside the fact that everybody knows that refried beans frequently aren’t vegetarian, this anecdote seems mostly to the point of making an ignorant-waitress joke—these people eat meat even when they don’t think they’re eating meat! In the sense that it’s more embarrassing to the teller than the subject, this story is not unlike one that I once heard a relative tell, about a backwoods waitress who mispronounced “pinot noir.” 3) At a Kansas City restaurant Sulzberger can’t even order the fries, which are “lard-bathed.” Who’s heard of "lard-bathed" fries? That sounds awesome.
Comments (5)
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Sam beat me to this post. And aside from the note about "lard-bathed" fries sounding awesome, I'm so on board with his assessment.
The article exudes an east-coast favoritism, big time.
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Hilarious. I just wrote to Sulzburger telling him to don the kevlar and prepare for a barrage of midwestern defensiveness and recs for ok-to-appalling veg/vegan restaurants which he'll never be able to say publicly are lousy. He should've just gone in guns blazing, instead of trying to be nice with the decency and friendliness & like that. OMG OBESE LAWN-OBSESSED CARNIVORES LOOK OUT THEY VOTE, etc.
It's like a party game: stand near a midwesterner, murmur "flyover", and watch the fun begin. I totally don't get it, btw. Midwest has nothing to apologize for. Must be a genetic variant that produces the touchiness.
"At a Kansas City restaurant Sulzberger can’t even order the fries, which are “lard-bathed.” Who’s heard of "lard-bathed" fries? That sounds awesome."
Amusingly, I did take a vegetarian to Arthur Bryant's (which I assume is what he's referring to) once and all she could order was fries; neither of us realized at the time that they were fried in lard. Anyway, there's plenty of Indian and Thai food in Johnson County, I really don't think eating vegetarian is THAT hard. He could also base himself out of Lawrence, which surely has college town vegetarian, if you can stand to eat that horse feed.
As for lard-fried fries (more commonly referred to as fried in beef tallow) locally, try Top Notch Beefburger in Beverly, Jimmy's Red Hots (though I had doubts on one visit a couple of years back) or Wiener & Still Champion in Evanston.
