Butter on the hashbrowns at Lou's Rustic Diner

The country around Barnum, Moose Lake, and Kettle River Minnesota is Appalachian. Lots of boarded-up buildings, and rusting farm and logging equipment in the fields. The woods are early second-growth scrub. Logging is gone, farming was never really here in this area of glacial washout rock and short seasons.  Kettle River is pretty much gone except for the bar, and it sells pull-tabs. There's a meat auction scheduled for Saturday.

In Barnum, Lou's marks the center of the town—pretty much deserted except for all the cars parked around it.  There's a pawnshop across the street.   Barnum calls itself the 'gateway to the North Woods,' but in fact it's 12 miles off the interstate in the wrong direction and nobody much passes through—except to go to find Lou's famous pancakes.

Robin and Lou

Yes, to a critical Marxist—and maybe to anybody—this is depressing country.  'Used-to-be,' and harsh.  Driving over, I ask Mike, 'how do people live up here? Poach deer and fish?  Salvage pulpwood logging?  Work in the truckstop?'  I really don't know....

But inside Lou's its absolutely warm and happy. Mike introduces me to Robin, the owner as 'his other favorite Robin.'  It's packed on a Saturday morning, and nobody is looking at their phone on the table. Families with generations of people. Grandpa has no teeth, but he's beaming as he tells stories and everybody listens. Everybody is heavy, and often really heavy. Literally: everybody. Mike's a physician and worries about public health, and we talk about poverty, food and body size, solidarity, community and happiness. Also about food fats, sugar, endorphins, insulin cycles, epigenetics, and contentment. And systems of addiction.

Robin tells me I need more than one of the famous pancakes (the size of a hubcap, and really, the BEST EVER), so I add a couple of eggs, bacon and hashbrowns.  And toast—'wheat,' I say. Do I want butter on the pancakes? Yes, I do. Robin walks with that gait that heavy people develop—rocking from side to side and swinging her whole body to advance each leg.  But she doesn't seem to be in pain—and as she passes, people reach out and touch her warmly.  When she brings my order, she puts her hand on my shoulder and says 'there you go, honey.'  There's a big gob of butter—more than a tablespoon—on the pancake.  Also on the hashbrowns.  I transfer it to the stack of toast, thinking 'I'll deal with that later.' A big bottle of standard-issue Sysco syrup, and the little trivet of Smucker's jams (also Sysco-issued and consistent in every little cafe in the country).

It's SOME GOOD!  I feel SO good as we eat and talk.  I could stay there all day, and clearly others have the same idea.  Always the anthropologist, I listen to what's going on around me, and it's largely stories.  Some are—what? —fiction? Jokes and 'yarns.'  But a lot are just standard 'what happened to me this week' stories, woven into really tight narratives and delivered for effect. They have a willing and honest audience; people are listening.

My breakfast, as near as I can tell, had about 2100 calories.  I did not feel stuffed, but didn't eat anything else all day. Breakfast took an hour and a half, lingering over coffee and the New York Times on Mike's I-Pad.

Why are so many people so heavy—in Barnum, but in general?

IMHO:

The Big One: Food makes us happy. Poverty and desperation make us really, really sad. Class matters.

To nuance this a bit:

• fat and sugar release endorphins and bring 'satiation' which is a form of contentment
• familiar foods (and food rituals), like Proust's cookie, bring us back to our familiar past. They recall good times—beyond words or conscious thought.  All's I need do is 'ding' the bowl on my ancient Mixmaster food mixer, and I'm a little kid standing in the kitchen helping Grandma bake.  The smell of baking bread. Or bacon. The taste of Kraft Mac-N-cheese.  Cinnamon toast.  All coded memories, keyed to tastes and smells, stored in my body.  Food can make me a kid again.
• with Herbert Marcuse: we eat what we're supplied (Single dimensional man), and if Sysco controls almost all restaurant supplies, we'll eat what Sysco wants us to eat.  Go HERE for Sysco.
• heavy carbohydrates release 'satiation' hormones and other 'happiness' endorphins.
• heavy carbohydrate / simple-sugar diets modify the insulin cycle.
• insulin cycles can be transmitted epigenetically
• portions are huge — they've grown and they're growing.  The normal changes and is set by experience (and a 2100-calorie breakfast, however yummy and fun, is really too much.  But thanks, Robin...)
• eating fits into cycles of work, and time pressure has multiple effects — eating 'on the run' may be balanced with 'breakfast treat at Lou's'