24 Hour Pancake People

Like a good friend, American food is always there for you

Saturday mornings in small-town Wisconsin were always special. Unburdened by thoughts of the working week just passed, or the next one yet to come, there was a lightness and peaceful energy in the air. We’d roll out of bed, one by one, and gather around the table, still in our pajamas, for Dad’s famous pancakes. Dad didn’t cook during the week – Mom had that down to a science, regular as clockwork. But he relished his role as our designated pancake person on Saturdays, cheerily churning out stacks and stacks of them – stacks that, as a six-year-old, seemed to tower high above my head.

Dad’s recipe (which he knew by heart) was based on the old German pfannkuchen his grandmama used to make, passed down through generations. He used fresh eggs that Mrs. Olsen sold at the side of the road, and a certain type of local heritage flour called ‘Sturdiwheat’ that gave them a special bounce and a bit of chew. Each stack was topped with a generous pat of organic Wisconsin creamery butter and floods of maple syrup from our Canadian neighbors. Often we’d have them with the choicest fruit of the season, like honeycrisp apples stewed with cloves in the fall, or rhubarb and strawberries in that precious early-summer moment when both could be found at Borzynski’s, our local farm shop. Growing up Wisconsin, it didn’t get much more exciting than Dad’s pancake Saturdays. But it didn’t need to be.

Ah! Memories.

Too bad none of them are true.

In reality, I spent most Saturday mornings parked in front of the TV with my brother, watching cut-rate cartoons like Captain Planet while eating cereal sugary enough to cause irrevocable nerve damage. Only in America could someone have said, “You know what would be a good thing to put into breakfast food for children? Marshmallows!” and then have basically the entire nation enthusiastically agree with them.

Wouldn’t it have been nice to grow up eating traditional farmhouse preserves, hickory-smoked trout from Lake Superior, and glistening, hand-picked orchard fruits? Wouldn’t it be lovely to recall a sip of warm, creamy milk, freshly squeezed from a picturesque Holstein on some distant cousin’s farm? Wouldn’t I just love to have had those rustic food experiences, so deeply rooted in the land and the lakes and the melting-pot culture of a place affectionately known as America’s Dairyland?

Maybe. But I didn’t. Pasta sauce came from a jar. Broccoli was boiled. Salads were slicked with a deluge of ranch dressing. None of it was ‘gourmet.’ Not much of it was healthy. And most of it was covered in cheese – mountains and mountains of glorious orange cheese.

And I loved it. Honest to God, I thought most of what we ate was just the best. I loved macaroni and cheese from a box, I loved Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast, and I loved chilli cheese burritos from Taco Bell even though they invariably gave me diarrhea. I loved peanut butter and jelly on white bread (no crusts), I loved chicken strips and mozzarella sticks and the palm-oily fake butter they’d squirt onto popcorn at the movies. And to be honest, I still love that all of that stuff. Especially whenever I’m bored and lonely, and feel like I need a little excitement. (In other words, most of the time.)¹

Call it nostalgia. But for what? I had a happy childhood, but I don’t look back at Wisconsin with rose-tinted fondness. Hell, I wasn’t even fond of it when I lived there. I loved my inner circle of family and close friends, but I loathed everyone else. Wisconsin was (still is) full of all kinds of purple-state assholes,² maladjusted ‘boys-will-be-boys’ Brett Kavanaugh dads and Sarah Palin soccer moms on Prozac. There was nothing to do in my hometown but to hang out in parking lots and pull cruel pranks on shopping mall security guards and eventually develop a barely-managed drinking problem.

As soon as I knew Somewhere Else existed, I wanted to go Somewhere Else. Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, wherever. I thought all my problems could be solved by getting far away from Wisconsin. And in many ways, I was right.

So why do I feel nostalgic?

In the 17th and 18th centuries, nostalgia was diagnosed as a disease – a mental imbalance, a dangerous and debilitating obsession that needed to be cured.³ Sometimes I think this is still the best to understand it, and it’s a sickness that seems to be particularly virulent in midwestern man-children like me. We dreamed the American dream. It didn’t come true. We want a do-over; we need to go back. Deep down, does ‘Make America great again’ really mean ‘make me feel happy again’?

This isn’t nostalgia for an actual time or a place, it’s for a feeling – for childlike happiness, youthful optimism and the unbridled candy-shop glee we felt long before we ever learned that terrible phrase guilty pleasure. Because the inverse of a guilty pleasure is, of course, an innocent pleasure: pure joy, experienced without shame or self-consciousness, a feeling that can seem impossibly out of reach as we get older. Proust famously relived his childhood by eating madeleines and drinking tea, but by the third sip, he admits: ‘the potion is losing its magic.’ Americans don’t drink tea. We chucked it in the harbour long ago. But the moral of the story still applies: you can’t eat your way out of this.

The past is a foreign country, and the borders are closed. We can’t get there through food. Food just reminds us it existed, and that reminder can cause frustration just as easily as it can bring comfort. Ah! Memories.Things were better before. Which means they’re worse now. And so the cycle of nostalgia repeats itself, and those feelings of loss and frustration are never resolved – feelings that drive me to eat too many cheeseburgers, but may drive some men to vote for Donald Trump. (A lot of men do both.)

Both coping strategies lead to their own kind of ruin. Neither will make America great again. But if it’s happiness we’re after – and surely, we are – then clearly we’ve got much better chances with cheeseburgers. Or pancakes. Or pie. Or whatever you fancy. You want it, we got it, 24-seven. That’s the American way, our birthright: immediate and unfettered satisfaction of any craving, any demand. Have it your way!

Who can resist? We all want it our way. But the pursuit of ‘our way’ is exactly how we’ve wound up in this mess, through Veruca Salt levels of self-indulgence and self-importance. American men: we are all just throwing tantrums, fighting for our right to be a baby.

1. Deliveroo and Uber Eats have made this problem way, way worse. Lukewarm beef injections, delivered in minutes, at the tap of a screen.

2. But what’s that they say about running into assholes all day?

3. Required reading: The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym.