The Land of Iceberg Lettuce

July 06, 2009

Filed in: North Dakota

First, the positive: If you like beef, or other kinds of red meat like elk or bison, ND is the place for you. We wound up eating more beef than we usually do, for reasons I will elucidate below, and it was all excellent, even the lowliest burger in the smallest town. (Washburn, I’m looking at you.) And everywhere we drove, we saw healthy, happy-looking cows eating acre upon acre of waving grass. You sure get the impression the whole movement toward “grass-fed beef” didn’t have to catch on in ND because it never went away in the first place.

That said: Vegetables? Any kind of vegetables? Or fruit, seasonal fruit? Anything other than an “airport apple”? MIA, at least for us, at least on this trip through ND.

To be fair, nearly all of this is not North Dakota’s fault or confined in any way to ND: We were eating the way Americans now eat on the road (and lots of them eat that way even when they’re not traveling): at chain restaurants and hotel free-breakfast bars. When we could, we chose diners (they call them cafes out west, but they’re not French-like cafes, they’re diners or truck stops or both), and, just like anywhere else, including back East, they’re not big on seasonal vegetables either.

Which brings us to the worst meal I have ever been served in my life, which came from the Dakota Diner in Dickinson, N.D. – chicken-fried steak with white “gravy,” creamed corned, Texas toast, French fries, and a “salad” of literally nothing but brown-tipped iceberg. I had imagined I was being unsnobby and adventurous by eating authentically, a la Jane and Michael Stern, but the entire meal was literally unswallowable.

Even the fairly upscale, pretty pricey, local, non-chain restaurants we tried (one each in Bismarck and Medora) had zip in the way of regular, summer produce – asparagus was as close as we got. At the Bismarck restaurant, we had “baby greens,” but I’ve worked at a farm, I know the diff between a bagged green (like the ones we’ve been reluctantly choking down all winter) and a real, seasonal leaf. Hell, the best salad I had all week was at the airport in Chicago.

We could easily have broken out of this trap by buying fruit and veggies at the supermarket, as I’m sure North Dakotans do (the cherries we bought wound up mostly rotting and getting thrown away; it’s hard eating cherries in a car or a hotel room without making a mess), but still, it’s striking that a state with so much land plowed and harvested should have so few choices for seasonal fruits and vegetables. We saw far more local stuff in Alaska than ND!

I admit I could be dead wrong here: every Bizmartian, as we fondly began referring to them, could have a full-blown garden in his/her backyard, but I looked pretty hard and I saw no evidence of such. And we covered a good deal of ground in the state, 350 miles or so, at least half of that off the highway – nothing. No farmers’ market notices pinned up anywhere, nobody selling eggs or flowers or basil by the side of the road, as they do even here in Swellville. Maybe it’s just an issue of the ratio of people-to-land – how many people drive by in a day vs. how many eggs you have, or whatever.

Google tells me there is indeed a Farmer’s Market at the Capital, so that’s all good, but it’s equally true that organic is not part of the local ethos, at least not in a way that’s strong enough to have bubbled up into mainstream consciousness from whatever sub-sub-culture it’s started out in.

Maybe people are burned out on farming, or too busy tending to the crops that are going to make them money. Maybe they have no problem with big agriculture. Maybe they’re already working hard physical jobs and don’t have time for such East Coast Liberal pursuits (though the majority of Bizmartians work in health care and high-tech, not agriculture), but for whatever reason, it’s safe to say the locavore movement has not yet reached the shores of the high Prairie in any significant way.

That’s okay; we didn’t go to North Dakota to eat well. Just … don’t ask me ever again to eat “chicken-friend” anything.