Reader's Digest - USA (2019-07)

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DEAR READER

I

n second grade, my son, Neil,

had to bring a food to class that

I had nothing to put forward. But

Susan sure did. She brought her

hard-boiled eggs pickled in beets.

No, Susan wasn’t raised in a Rust

Belt bar—or Moe’s Tavern from The

Simpsons, where a jar of pickled eggs

behind the bar is a recurring source

of comic relief.

Instead, she inherited the snack

from her sweet, determined mother,

Ruth, who’d been raised Pennsylva-

nia Dutch near the Gettysburg battle-

fields. There, beet-pickled eggs were

a part of her family’s prerefrigeration

existence, as they had been for

Hessian soldiers centuries before.

Dropping Grandma’s ancient

snack food into 21st-century

suburban California, however,

caused Neil’s snarky eight-year-

old classmates to react unkindly.

“I was confused and

hurt by several derogatory

comments toward the

purple-pink eggs,” he

says. “They’d always

been a staple in our

Bruce Kelley,

editor-in-chief

Pickled Pink

then. As he tells it, tongue only par-

tially in cheek, “I knew instinctively

that no other child within hundreds,

possibly thousands, of miles regularly

ate beet-flavored eggs. These eggs are

special, I thought, and so am I.”

That take-it-or-leave-it attitude

toward our local foods is essentially

what “America the Tasty,” on page 52,

is about. We love the most distinctive

food from our family heritage or

home region, no matter how others

react to it, because it is part of us.

“I decided those eggs were so

freaking weird they were (almost)

cool. And then I’m pretty sure

I went down to the schoolyard

and proceeded to teach the un-

cultured swine in my class a

lesson—about kickball.”

Write to me at

[email protected].