ranch ranch revolution

While I wasn’t born here, I have now lived a majority of my life in the Midwest. Throughout this time, I have come to make several cultural observations. One, is that quite a few people, at least in Indiana, will recoil in horror if you admit that you have no idea how to play Euchre. Another is that one must prepare for a wide range of weather at any given time. It may be a beautiful, spring-like sunny morning that devolves into sweltering humidity by early afternoon, topped off by hail and tornado sirens come nightfall.

But the one thing that has genuinely perplexed me, is the short range of flavors I find in food-especially in food that is normally supposed to be flavorful, like tacos, for example.

I came to the conclusion that delicate palate of the average Midwesterner is highly sensitive to exotic concepts such as flavor, and as such, no more than the slightest whiff of salt and pepper accentuates each and every dish.

I’d like to think that this dearth of spice employment comes from a simpler time. Indiana, as well as many other pancake flat states with rich soil, has long been an agricultural powerhouse. I’ve often wondered if spices weren’t really required because the fruits of pre-industrial agriculture simply tasted better on their own.

I’ve accidentally tested this concept in real life by driving 45 minutes to pick up eggs and meat from an Amish family using pre-industrial methods. Cracking an Amish egg next to my last store-bought egg demonstrated, in color, the difference between the two. The intensively farmed egg yolk was literally paler in comparison to the electric yellow of the farm fresh one…and it tasted the way it looked. The Amish egg wowed with a gentle flourish of S&P.

But, “progress” being what it is, little farms have been replaced by mega-farms and, while production has gone up, it is difficult to argue that quality has followed.

It is a bit of a stretch to suggest that all food here is seasoned only with a dash of S&P. I realized that Midwesterners actually do like flavor, but because the basics don’t taste so great in simple form any more, they have chosen to solve the flavor problem in another way.  Anything worth eating, at least here in Indiana, is worth eating with ranch-style dressing.

My first introduction to the unbridled passion for this buttermilk based basic was at a local…shall we say “Tex-Mex” restaurant chain. Back in my early working days, the staff at my dental office invited me along for lunch. Hungry for tacos, I readily dipped into the chips and salsa while I waited for my order…only to discover it was as if someone had simply poured a can of crushed tomatoes into the bowl and called it good. As I recall, there was no visible onion, jalapeños, garlic, or cilantro. Not the merest hint of lime. Only your basic salt and pepper.

Naturally, I was horrified. My tendency to be judgmental is something I am making a consistent effort to work on, however, I was left no choice but to conclude that if this was the salsa, I was in for a world of disappointment when it came to the tacos.

But, I had no idea that it was about to take an even more extreme turn for the worse. Each and every other person at the table, people who I thought were my mild-mannered and reasonable coworkers, ordered a side of ranch, and proceeded to dip their chips in it. When their food came, they poured the remainder of it all over their tasteless cardboard tacos.

I should probably mention here that this restaurant is a chain, and that both locations in my town are consistently packed out with customers. Maybe the margarita specials keep you from caring about the tasteless, tin can “salsa”. Or make you tipsy enough to add a ½ cup of salad dressing onto your burrito. Whatever the case, piling on condiments is one strategy to overcoming the tasteless industrial status quo.

Sure, I like a bit of ranch from time to time, I’d reckon quite a few Americans do. But honestly, it’s really not about the ranch. It’s also about piles of low-quality melted cheese, gobs of sweet sauces, and more dips than a road that has seen the ravages of back-to-back polar vortexes.

People, Midwesterners included, really do like flavor.  But the base is so boring- the eggs so pale and meat so flavorless, that we need to amp it all the way up with artificial, hyperpalatable crap instead of starting off with quality from the jump. We are adding and adding, hoping for a better outcome.

When I returned to work after my first extreme ranch experience, I dove right back into my busy schedule as an associate dentist. I checked x-rays, I cemented crowns, I placed some fillings. For every patient, I also read their chart and medical history.

And, for what it’s worth, I realized that the medical establishment was giving patients the ranch dressing treatment too. Everyone was on medication for high blood pressure and cholesterol. Many were taking multiple antidepressants and sleep aids. But it wasn’t difficult to see that the problems weren’t solved by adding in pharmaceutical pizzaz, they were just managed, covered up, and no where near as satisfying as not having the problem in the first place.

As I got to know many of my patients, I realized how stressed out they were. All of them were overweight. Very few had been counseled on diet or exercise, which is actually supposed to be the first line of treatment before pills. Many were dealing with emotional trauma and had no affordable way to receive therapy.  

To top it off, the drugs they took to manage health issues had big impacts on their oral health, resulting in cavities and expensive care, further stressing them, continuing the cycle.

The more I looked around in the world, the more I saw people, indeed whole systems, slathering the mediocre elements of life with some version of ranch dressing instead of drilling down to the root cause.

I saw it in my own life. When I felt frustration, I would cover over that feeling by reaching for the quick dopamine hit of social media. I could masterfully drench the unsavory bits of my life by going down the internet rabbit hole, and yet, under all that, I was fundamentally the same.

We can cover over a lot of things by adding more. More clothes, more degrees, more money. More training, more laws, more regulation. More drugs, more alcohol, more pharmaceuticals.

But couldn’t we also just improve the damned taco at it’s fundamental level? Couldn’t we figure out how to help the average unhealthy patient, when possible, with lifestyle change instead of drugs? Which means we would need to change some fundamental aspects of our culture perhaps. Like how we administer healthcare. Or how we allow food to be manufactured. Or maybe we could actually create work culture that fits around people’s real lives and needs and allows for a living wage from a healthy number of hours of work. We would need to build the cultural taco from quality ingredients.

I regret that I didn’t address the fundamental aspects of my own life sooner. I was giving them a buttermilk bath of distraction until burnout broke me all the way down. It was only then that I realized that nothing could cover over the issues. There was no way out through pilling on elements from the outside. As I continue to deconstruct this metaphorical taco that I have been unwittingly slathering in distraction, I know that its so much bigger than just me.

Culturally, I think we are having that same dawning realization. We have been given a ranch dressing solution to nearly every fundamental taco problem. Can we keep adding stuff in or do we need to deal with the base we’ve been told we can do nothing about? Can anything be made better by adding more stuff in, or is the core issue that we need to look at our crap, own it, and make it better? Can we even begin to overhaul long entrenched ways of thinking about life, health, work, money etc. and create a vibrant, joyful society for everyone? Pun intended, it’s high time we all taco ‘bout it.