Gabby Pike
Take a bite out of the often hearty, sometimes humble, always heartfelt cuisine of flyover country
If you’re looking for the American heartland, an amorphous term for the center of the country, you might start at 35,000 feet, the only way many travelers ever experience the so-called flyover states.
From a plane window, you’ll see plenty of farms, as you might expect. But that view reduces the region’s monumental agricultural production to a series of jigsaw pieces, a geometrical abstraction obscuring the diverse stories that fill in the crevices between the crop rows, not to mention millions of urban residents. On the ground, those neat farm plots explode into prairies, woodlands, mountains, cities, small towns, Native reservations, and a variety of other landscapes that seem to contradict the notion of a single, cohesive region, just as the nuanced lives of residents defy neat generalizations about Middle American culture.
These viewpoints hint at emotional truths that course through the region, but neither gets you much closer to finding the mythic American heartland. That’s partly because, despite its nickname, the best view of the area isn’t through its heart, but rather its stomach — ironic since the region’s cuisine is outright ignored by much of the nation.
Once you look beyond the heartland’s famed barbecue and fair food, you’ll find burgers prized like gold in the Oklahoma foothills; pho that restores weary meatpackers in an Iowa factory town; venison chops redefining Native-led tourism; James Beard-winning tacos fueling women’s sports in Kansas City; and sweet potato vodka adding a redemptive chapter to Arkansas’s history of Black sharecropping. Like the land itself, these homegrown foods form a type of connective tissue, tying together flavors, cultures, and values from the surrounding South, Upper Midwest, and West.
Whether or not you choose to touch down here, there’s no denying that the heartland is a literal and metaphorical keystone of the U.S. — particularly every four years, when those who live in the country’s peripheries come face-to-face with the center’s political influence. And while it’s not particularly novel to endorse tasting the foods of a place to better understand it, Americans would do well to take this land, and its food, a lot more seriously.
If you’re still wondering where the heartland is, stop flying over. Start eating. — Nick Mancall-Bitel
But really, where’s the heartland?
We think the heartland transcends borders (and ideologies, political parties, identities, and lifestyles). But to be specific, the stories here mostly focus on Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Oklahoma. They shy away from Minnesota and Wisconsin (too Upper Midwest), Wyoming and Montana (too Rocky Mountains), and Texas (too… Texas). What is not negotiable, though, is that this entire region was home to a patchwork of Indigenous communities long before these states were named and divided. Today, dozens of federally recognized Native American tribes live in the area, and their foodways are integral to all of the stories here.
The geographic edges of the heartland are fuzzy and subjective. Disagree with our choices? Let us know at travel@eater.com.
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Credits
Editorial lead: Nick Mancall-Bitel
Project manager: Lesley B. Suter
Creative director: Nat Belkov
Contributors: Mary Andino, Anna Archibald, Asonta Benetti, Emily Blackshear, Mecca Bos, JP Brammer, Jess Brent, Monica Burton, Dave Cathey, Liz Cook, Joel Crespo, Xiao daCunha, Holly Fann, Autumn Fourkiller, Trisha Gopal, Sarah Baker Hansen, Matt Kirouac, Aimee Levitt, Amy McCarthy, Sono Motoyama, Meera Nagarajan, Sean Sherman, Tony Tran, Carlos Velasco, Karla Walsh,
Editors: Talia Baiocchi, Monica Burton, Erin DeJesus
Illustrator: Morgan Thompson
Copy editors: Nadia Q. Ahmad, Leilah Bernstein, Laura Michelle Davis, Amanda Luansing, Catherine Sweet
Fact checker: Kelsey Lannin
Engagement editors: Kaitlin Bray, Frances Dumlao, E Jamar
Photographers: Connor Cockrell, Haines Eason, Jesse Edgar, Tyrel Iron Eyes, Eric Ginnard, Chris McDuffie, Miranda Munguia, Nathan Papes, Gabby Pike
Additional photography by: Nancy Bundt, Delta Dirt Distillery, Hunter Brothers, Bill Phelps, Tony Tran, Shutterstock
Designers: Lille Allen, Marcello Bevilacqua, Lizzie Munro
Special thanks: Brent Cunningham, Tina Casagrand Foss, Chloe Frechette, Ellie Krupnick, Mary Anne Porto, Theordore Ross, and Stephanie Wu, plus the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN)
