America’s culinary underdog finally gets its due

A photo-collage shows various Heartland culinary staples, like the bowl-and-a-roll combo, which is a hearty bowl of chili served beside a hot cinnamon for a savory-sweet combo that feels like home.

Photo: Lille Allen; see site for full credits

We first tossed around the idea for the Eater Guide to the Heartland back in 2019. America was on the cusp of another heated presidential election, as countless media outlets scrambled to predict the country’s political future, interpreting polling data and interviews with major media pundits like horoscopes. Three years prior, my Oklahoma-based father-in-law had been the only person I knew who had accurately predicted the outcome of the 2016 election (even if it didn’t align with his own vote). He wasn’t binging C-Span. “You could just feel it in the air in Oklahoma,” he said.

Then, I wondered, What else was in that Oklahoma air that the rest of the country and I had also missed? (Other than the roar of cicadas and tornadoes and cedarwood and the smell of barbecue.) A lifelong Californian, I realize I am the definition of the so-called coastal media elite, criticized for not spending long enough in states that are often overlooked in national news. How could the winds drifting through the Great Plains, over the Black Hills, and throughout mining towns be so different from the salty, smoggy stuff I’d been breathing in LA? And is there any real way to get out from behind the windscreen of algorithms and geography and feel it for myself? And so, as the 2020 election approached, I found myself longing to better understand this place that so many (including my own in-laws) call home, but which remains largely ignored by so much of the country — particularly when it comes to food.

The heartland is America’s undisputed culinary underdog. There’s no way, I figured, that a region made up of half a dozen varied states, each rich with their own unique histories, Indigenous peoples, immigrant communities, and world-renowned agricultural industries could not have some exceptionally good eating hiding beneath that bland, beige blanket that’s long been the stereotype, among the few already-known specialties like hot dish and hamburgers and burnt ends.

But then, as we know, the pandemic hit, which halted everything that would make reporting a regional food guide possible, let alone satisfying. It would take another four years — and the talented vision of package editor Nick Mancall-Bitel — before the time felt right for Eater to once again take a long, hard, hungry look at the influential, underrated, enigmatic expanse we’ve come to call the Heartland.

This week, as two vice presidential candidates hashed it out on stage, Mancall-Bitel and a team of local contributors carefully shepherded a massive collection of 21 stories, maps, and guides that explore the foodways of Middle America. Together, they serve as part-explainer, part-travel plan, and part infallible argument that the core of our country is as key a part of America’s culinary — and cultural — landscape as any place.

It’s not a new idea that food can be a means to understanding, nor is it always that simple. But in the spirit of optimism and appetite, let us all fry up a Cheese Frenchee, pour a glass of Arkansas sweet potato moonshine, and hope that as we fill our bellies, we might also begin to fill in the divides that geographically and ideologically cleave this country. And please, don’t forget to vote. —Lesley Suter, special projects director