All our good and all our bad seems to start with food

A visitor from Lexington, Kentucky, says that he defies his friends who mock our fair city to find better barbecue anywhere in the country. He thinks the best BBQ is to be found here, particularly when the World Pork Expo is in town every June. Of course, Kansas City will dispute any competitive claims to the title of "Best Barbecue" (and they do take their barbecue seriously), but let's get real: No state produces more pork than Iowa. It's not even close. If you have four strips of bacon on your plate, one of them came from Iowa (at least, relatively speaking). And anyone who doubts that Iowans' capacity to consume that delicious food matches our prodigious capacity to produce it ought to stop by the Iowa State Fair, where overconsumption is a way of life.

That's not to say that our food habits are entirely innocuous. The Fair just got itself into trouble by sending out press kits filled with things like cookie dough, which all seems innocent enough until one of those kits breaks in transit and arrives at a radio station, leaking a white mystery powder. How red-faced anyone was to have called Hazmat over the leak (yes, they really did) seems not to have been reported.