I don’t know how to say this without sounding condescending and judgmental: Middle America is not as bad as you would think. In fact, it’s actually pretty great.Boring. Flat. Godbothering. Culture-void. Meat and potatoes. This is how you think of the Midwest when you grow up on the elitist east coast. But it’s not called the Heartland for nothing.
We grow up aspiring to be doctors and lawyers and bankers, but why aren’t we yearning to be farmers? Farming is a noble profession – when did it start to lose our respect? I read that our nation’s farmers are getting older – the average age is now 57. Who is going to replace them? Today’s farmers are not hicks – they are university educated (ever notice the Agriculture majors at some of the most prestigious universities?) scientists and managers who are jacks of all trades on their farms – one part horticulturist, one part mechanic, one part hedge fund manager. There has to be more nobility in farming than banking. It can’t be long before my generation realizes that our working hours are unsustainable and sitting at a desk 12 hours a day is not what life is about. I’m told farming may turn to the fully automated…but I suspect that there will be a huge movement in organic artisanal farming. It’s already started, but I really think this will be one of the next big trends in how we live and how we eat. A couple of serious food scares and I’m sure we’ll put much more thought into where and how our food is sourced.
We visited Lawrence, KS, St Louis, MO and Hillsboro Il over a busy thanksgiving week ultimately covering 1500 miles from Santa Fe to Nashville. The route took us through the farming communities of northeastern New Mexico, the Oklahoma pan handle, diagonally across Kansas, across the middle of Missouri and diagonally down through southern Illinois with a small corner of Kentucky. Phew….that was tiring just typing it out. We ate at local restaurants, historic cultural institutions, family homes and even a handful of trendy posh restaurants. The food was amazing. The service was exemplary. You are just so well taken care of out here. We keep saying how we’d love to take all those snooty London waitstaff to the Midwest for a week to see how it really should be done. They seem to have taken the free refill concept even farther – asking if I wanted to top up my sweet tea for the road. Wow.
Lawrence, KS was a really great surprise for us. We were told it was the coolest part of Kansas and with no experience elsewhere in Kansas, we might just have to agree with that. My trusty trulia app told me that houses, within the university limits and close to great bars and restaurants were often selling around the 100,000 dollar mark. That wasn’t a typo, I didn’t miss a zero, and yes, Londoners, that’s about 60,000 quid. And the people are smart, well travelled and foodie. What’s not to like?
There is one thing not to like in the Midwest – or maybe broadly America – and that’s the fact that all bars and eating establishments must show at east 3 or 4 different sports games. You want to enjoy your meal but blasting from every speaker is football and basketball and hockey and then, on top of that, music. Yikes. Definitely not my cuppa.
St Louis is bigger than you would think. And the St Louis arch is waaaaaaay bigger than you think. In fact, you can go up it. And we did. It was built to honor the Jefferson Expansion of the US moving west and only opened in the 1960s. Using 1960s space age technology you ascend the arch in these tiny space capsules which are part ferris wheel, part funicular, part elevator and many parts scary as hell. At the top they tell you today’s sway ‘isn’t too bad today…only a couple of inches” as you feel your legs go this way and that. Yikes. But you have to do it once, right?
We went for dinner in the revitalized garment district of St Louis at a place called Lucas Park Bistro and had a wonderful meal of shared small plates. One of these was flash fried spinach with sesame. Yummy yum yum. Another was macadamia crusted fish in a passionfruit beurre blanc. Not so meat and potatoes is it, afterall?
Our last stop in the Midwest was at Sarah’s parents house in Hillsboro. Sarah and her parents collectively built the house ‘by committee’ and we were dying to see it after years of talking about tile choices, and cement pouring, etc. It was so nice to be ‘home’ even for a short visit. The house looks great. We spent a lunch, dinner and a breakfast harassing sarah’s dad with farming questions like ‘how do they get the grain in the top of the siloes’ and ‘how, exactly, does a combine work?’ I swear Lynn must have lost weight so unable was he to eat with our barrage of questions. Andy turned to me in the car as we were heading out and admitted that as embarrassing as it was that I asked all those questions, he now knew more about farming after a 12 hour intensive than he had ever learned in his life.
We left the Midwest with much more respect about this vital part of the economy and our food source. But more than that we realized that when we start complaining about not being able to afford a house on the coasts and craving space, there is some very good real estate available in the Heartland of America.
