Reply to S/O: What explains the Midwestern palate?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Apparently there are lots of Reddit threads about this phenomenon.

“ So, in the 1800s there were two big things that moved people towards eating bland food in the Midwest. The first was a little xenophobia. There were a lot of eastern and southern Europeans moving to the US at this time. The paler, and more importantly Protestant, descendants of English and German settlers looked at these new comers as sensual slaves to the pope and to their own bodies. Prejudice against Italians was high on the east coast, and that extended to the way they cooked. Highly spiced dishes were thought of as unrefined and likely to heat the blood too much.

The next and arguably bigger deal was a religious movement that swept the nation in the 1800s. People were going to revivals constantly to renew their faith. These preachers were very strict about the pleasures of the flesh. They weren't very keen on any pleasures outside of reading the Bible and occasionally having children. Food was a big deal for these people. Several of the religious sects that showed up after the great disappointment in 1844 (the Seventh Day Adventists being the largest and longest lasting) had tons of guidelines about what to eat.

Ellen White the prophet of the Adventist Church declared even black pepper to be bad for you as she considered it an irritant. She recommended a vegan diet with very few spices. She believed that animal products, tea, coffee, powerful spices, and basically anything other than seeds, beans, and fruit, would be both physically and emotionally unhealthy.

John Harvey Kellogg, another Adventist, also advocated lots of bland foods, mostly whole grains and plain yogurt. He invented the first breakfast cereal as a bland sort of grain bar that shattered into little flakes in the oven. He even recommend yogurt enemas, though sadly this practice did not catch on in the Midwest at large nearly as well as extremely bland cereal did.

The inventor of the Graham cracker made it bland on purpose as well… Basically, all of these strange extremely Protestant religious movements swept through the Midwest for the better part of 100 years preaching anti worldly pleasure messages and telling everyone bland foods were the best thing you could eat.”
[/quote]

None of this has to do with meat and potatoes. Meat especially is a pretty much non-negotiable staple in Midwest.

Eating other living beings when there is access to other foods is about as wordly pleasure as one can get. [/quote]

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