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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].
Free download pdf