I tried to think of foods that you only get in the mid-west and southerners would think were silly, but can't really unless you talk about fair food... But then, most fair food is just over the top and silly. I mean... Deep fried butter on a stick? The lines were always too long for me to get one. I've heard it tastes a bit like french toast.
So, Iowa food...
There is the pork tenderloin sandwich, which just got out of hand in Iowa... Each place trying to make the biggest sandwich. While they ARE delicious, yikes. Any ma and pa type restaurant will serve them and there are plenty around. yay!
Iowa chops, which are super thick cut pork chops from corn fed hogs. Fresh grilled. Yummm...
And that brings me to sweet corn sold on the street corners. I grew up on a hobby farm. My parents purchased 14 acres just before I was in 2nd grade because my older brother wanted to be a farmer and Dad jumped at the chance to help Mark fulfill that dream. Dad had grown up on a dairy farm and loved being back on a farm and able to tinker with tractors in his free time. Home was just a few miles from the nearest Shopko, so all was good.
During the summers, Dad planted corn or alfalfa in the two small fields the farm provided. My sisters and I would sit on the back ledge of the tractor when Dad plowed and we'd jump off and yank out milk weeds whenever we saw one. I can still feel the soft warm dirt as my feet were dragged through it. mmmm....
I learned how to drive a tractor before I could drive a car. Stick shift? No PROBLEM!!! Well, after the first several hops of the car, no problem... I figured it out. Cars ARE a little different than tractors.
But Dad would need someone to drive the tractor while he picked up the bales of hay after the baler had been there and we all fought for the chance to do the driving instead of picking up bales.
And the worse part of baling hay is finding half a snake. yuck. Actually the very worse part would be to find a whole live snake... and there were several of those on the farm.
When I was a little older, my sisters and I would camp out on top of the hay bale stack. Spread out some sleeping bags and talk under the stars. It never lasted very long into the night though.
Oh back to the corn. My mom was a school teacher so she had the summers off. EARLY on a weekday morning, she would wake us up and head us out to the corn field to pick the corn. I remember walking through the wet corn leaves and filling a five gallon bucket with ears of corn and then emptying it in either the back end of the station wagon or the trunk of sedan. Once it was full, we would pick up paper sacks at a local grocery store, then sit at a corner somewhere in my home city, sort the corn, pull off smut and sell the sweetcorn during the rest of the world's lunch hour and into the afternoon until it was all gone.
If it wasn't gone by supper time, I remember us filling a dozen per bag and selling it discounted door to door, asking people if they would like some sweet corn to go with their dinner.
Then we'd go home and eat sweet corn for supper ourselves.
If our field was just doing alfalfa, then my uncle would hire us to help him with his corn field and sell his sweetcorn. Never a dull summer!
Another thing that you just don't do outside of the midwest. Detassel. Every summer, a crew foreman would get together a group of young kids, roughly the age of 14 when they don't know any better and hire them for, usually, a three week stint of detasseling or walking beans.
Detasseling - is where you walk through a certain number of rows of field corn (not to be confused with sweet corn!! Because field corn is mainly feed for cattle or made into corn oil, and other corn based products) but you pull off the top tassels.
Then skip two rows and then the next set of rows get detasseled. If you've seen fields of corn, one row can go on for a mile. It's a hike and you WILL wreck whatever shoes you're wearing. As well as the shirt, so wear an old long sleeved shirt because the corn whip will make your arms sting for days. Your parents will drop you off at the break of dawn by a Piggly Wiggly where the foreman will pick you up in his borrowed school bus. Bring a small cooler for your lunch and drink! Then he'd bring you back by a certain time and your folks would pick you up. I was only able to hack it as a 14 year old for a few days, if that. SO miserable!!! BUT it paid well! Each of my kids did it and could make around 800 for three weeks of work if you don't skip days.
The purpose of detasseling is not just to give young people haunting dreams of their youth, but mostly for making hybrid corn. You're basically helping the corn with reproduction. ewwww... There are a lot of seed companies in Iowa and other midwestern states. It's big money.
Walking beans - is basically what it says. A crew is hired to walk the thousands of rows of beans and cut down any weeds you see.
Some kids get machetes, so THAT'S cool! That's actually how Robb got a scar above one of his knees. He was pretending it was a lightsaber and a friend was throwing dirt clods at him. *thunk*
Some farms have money and will have a trailer where kids with umbrellas over them sit and spray the weeds. SOME farms skip the kids entirely and use machines to zap any weed that is taller than the bean plants. But back in the day, 35 years ago, those machines didn't exist or you didn't see them often.
So. Those are some items that you might never have heard of if you didn't live in the midwest.
YOUR turn! Tell about something that is in your part of the country that no one outside of that region would have any idea of what you're talking about.
