The LA Years: If Midwesterners are so stupid, then how do you explain Hotdish?

I think there are a lot of ways you can examine the political divide in America right now. I don’t want to dive into allllll of that. But when I lived in LA, this subject really felt like the root cause of a lot of the division.

To make it clear, I am no stranger to culture shock and being around people from lots of different places – I went to middle school at an international school in Germany. By the age of 18, I’d been to 25+ countries. I’d learned a lot about cultural differences and how to be respectful. And while I was in middle school, going to school with friends from Germany, Malaysia, South Korea, England, and America, not one person ever said anything sweepingly insensitive.

And yet, when I moved to a different city within my own country, suddenly I was hearing flippant comments that completely wrote off my home state and called everyone who lived there stupid. Truly, the number of comments that were either said to my face or said off-hand in conversation astounded me. When a friend from Indy came to visit me, we visited her aunt who lived in the area, and that aunt said to me, “Oh, it’s so good you escaped.” In reference to… moving from Indiana to LA for school. So good I ESCAPED? Escaped what?! Your niece is sitting here too, and she’s going to school in Indianapolis??

I also heard a conversation had (loudly) at work, in which people were dissecting the 2016 election (in 2022.) and describing, “all the lawyers and doctors in New York who LA voted for Hillary.” The implication was that… lawyers and doctors don’t exist in the entire middle of the country. The middle of the country is just entirely uneducated bums? They’re just idiots there. It was exclusively smart people on the coasts who voted for Hillary, and then exclusively people in middle of the country with IQs below 100 who voted for Trump. Their political outlook was astoundingly reductive, and frankly concerning. Something tells me they’ve never been any of the places they were making sweeping assumptions about. I know a lot of Midwestern liberals… I wonder if they know how people are talking about them on the coasts? I have to imagine I knew some coastal conservatives too, but… they would never openly admit it.

In my freshman year of school, a friend in band had the audacity to try and explain chorizo to me. As if we did not have spiced sausage in Indiana. As if I had never left the farm that they envisioned I grew up on. As if I had not been to 26 countries by that point. As if I was not going to that school with a merit scholarship that I earned for scoring in the top 1% of the nation on a standardized test. This person had left the country maybe once in their life. She couldn’t place my home state on a map. She couldn’t name more than 20 states of the country she was raised in. (Really… concerning for the CA school system!) But… yeah… just being from suburban Indiana meant I needed chorizo explained to me. I was clearly the naive and stupid one.

The attitude that the middle of the country was full of idiots was just widely accepted and allowed. It was just what everyone said. Saying anything about where I was from was met with derision – a simple “Oh, it’s so good you don’t live there anymore!” Anything I said about my home state needed to be a joke. No one was embarrassed by the fact that they couldn’t point out any state other than their own on a map. Frankly, that is embarrassing. It’s also embarrassing to speak about places you’ve never been with such condescension. To say things like, “Oh yeah, there’s nothing to do there,” when you’ve.. never been there.

I knew this well before I left for college, but it was driven home to me when I lived in LA: the fact that my parents chose to raise me and my siblings in Indiana is the smartest decision they could have made. Living in an affordable state, in a suburb of a medium sized city, meant that they could spend money on things like a private K-12 education, a four bedroom house, international vacations, and three college tuitions. I knew that my childhood was pretty cushy as I was living it – I knew we were rich! But we were Midwest rich. It would not have been as comfortable or adventurous if my parents had chosen to live in a more expensive area. I was able to be more “cultured” than the kids who had grown up in LA because my parents could afford vacations and top-notch education. I met people who were California rich in college, and that meant something entirely different ($3 million homes and yacht vacations). I also met people who had very standard middle class upbringings… in homes three times as expensive as mine, that their parents couldn’t actually afford.

Of course, explaining this to anyone from LA was like speaking to a brick wall. And the idea that I didn’t hate where I grew up, and saw some very obvious flaws with LA, were concepts that their minds couldn’t comprehend. The idea that maybe you could live elsewhere and your money would go further, and you would actually live amongst very kind and intelligent people was unfathomable.

I’m realizing this all sounds a bit harsh? Okay, maybe. Turning it around on them doesn’t solve any issue. But by the time I was leaving, I felt so much anger about it. I guess I don’t like being called stupid! I don’t like these assumptions being made about the places and people I love! Sue me.

I think this pervasive attitude is a really core part of the division in our country right now. I just cannot imagine any other place in which people would declare entire swaths of their own country “stupid” based on the part of the country they live in. Also – can you imagine someone saying that another country’s inhabitants were just… stupid? “Oh yeah, those Germans are idiots. They don’t know anything. Nothing ever happens there. No culture, and they vote differently than me.” No?? You wouldn’t say that?? But it’s fine to say that about their own country? It all really grinds my gears. I’m not aligned with Democrats or Republicans, and the comments I was on the receiving end of were really revealing the ugliest parts of that division. It’s not even about politics – it’s a sense of superiority.

So today’s recipe is one of the greatest inventions to come out of the Midwest: hotdish. Sorry, no chorizo in it. But we do have chorizo here too, I promise.

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