I’m a Midwesterner, but I spent sixteen years in the west, ashamed of the giant block of cheese and butter cow of state fair fame. Ah, the state fair, where every foodstuff is served “on a stick” as if that were a regional translation of a la carte.  But the state fair is a microcosm of Midwestern cuisine: we joke about chocolate-covered bacon on a stick while we buy enough to make it a caloric homerun. It also demonstrates our sense of community and food.  We work together, we eat together, and in the company of our neighbors, we modestly accept our blue ribbons.

This cuisine we love is called “comfort food,” a predictable warm quilt. Rather than look at this cuisine quilt as fatty squares of ethnic food, it makes more sense to me to divide our cuisines into two sides, the plain side loved by the country mouse and the fancy side favored by the city cousin.

 In this fable, I’m solidly country. I grew up in the poorest county in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula where “eating local” and “farm-to-table” did not exist as labels for the hunter-gatherer behaviors in which we engaged. I grew up eating more venison than beef because the former was essentially free--free but for our Midwestern labor…another source of our self-effacing pride.

The change of rural seasons meant labor in the form of strawberry picking, blueberry season, blackberry pie, and apples from homesteads that my grandmother found though they’d ceased to exist years before I was born. As a child, my canning season job was to count the pop of the sealing jars, and all summer, to weed a row in the garden before going anywhere.

And now, back in the Midwest, I go to the state fair, eat the whatever-on-a-stick,  and am modestly proud that we were a community before slow food was cool.