Illustration by Jan A. Igoe
Bad news, South Carolina. We’re officially fat.
In fact, according to the latest report issued by some scrawny tattletale, we are the fifth fattest state in the nation. Almost 30 percent of us are obese. That means for every handful of people you pass on the street, at least one is impersonating a whale. If you were at the beach, concerned tourists from Ohio would be rolling that person back out to sea as we speak.
We’re not alone. Ten of the 15 fattest states are our warm-weather neighbors. The skinniest place to live is Colorado, because residents there are too busy shoveling snow to eat. And it’s too cold to fry anything.
But we don’t have that problem here. Fine southern cuisine revolves around the core belief that most food isn’t edible until it swims a few laps in boiling grease.
Of course, fresh fruits and vegetables are very popular here and many South Carolinians grow a fabulous array of produce in their home gardens. But if somebody invents a way to raise okra that’s already fried, count us in.
We have our own food pyramid here, unlike the silly one the government recommends that doesn’t even regard hush puppies as a separate food group. Southern chefs endorse a unique set of culinary guidelines:
- Bananas taste better in pudding than peels
- Blueberries store best in fluted pie crust
- “Strawberry” is an adjective that precedes “jam” or “cobbler”
- Never grill or bake what should rightfully be fried
- Unsweet tea is a poisonous beverage invented by Yankees
If you should happen to order the dreaded unsweet tea in a local restaurant, do it quietly. Take the waiter outside and whisper. Any local who overhears you will gasp in horror, like you demanded raw snail juice or something. They’ll think you’re nuttier than a squirrel. (That’s a southern expression.)
My friend Mandy is one of those “give me sweet tea or give me death” girls. She was doing pretty well on her perpetual diet until she encountered the local lunch special: Fried pork chops with a side of mac ’n’ cheese or a glob of sweet potato casserole topped with candied pecans.
As a woman true to her G.R.I.T.S.—Girl Raised in the South—Mandy was obliged to order both with a large sweet-tea chaser.
According to my calculations, it should only take about three weeks on the treadmill (assuming she gives up sleeping and eating) to burn that off. Mandy, who is still licking her lips, swears those chops were worth every saturated fat gram.
What gets me is that none of these dietary rules seem to apply to the animal kingdom. You almost never see a four-ton hippopotamus ordering sausage biscuits and gravy. Hippos become morbidly obese eating nothing but grass. But poor Mandy could swear off fried food and spend a year grazing on her own lawn without losing a single pork chop.
And she may still have to move to Colorado.
Jan A. Igoe is a wife, mother, newspaper editor, humorist and illustrator. She lives in Horry County.