You know...

...I didn’t kick anyone’s dog. I just said that I thought grits were confusing. As a result, I’ve gotten more emails defending the mighty grit than I ever could have foreseen.

Listen, I’m not gonna eat them and you can’t make me. Of all the things that I’ve seen people put on grits, I’ve never seen anyone put ketchup on them and I’ve told you before...food is just a vehicle for my ketchup. So, I’m perfectly happy with my hash browns.

I’m sure that grits are delicious in their own way...but I just don’t care to try them.

That’s all...they’re just not for me.

I actually heard from a man who said that he had grits in the Army and that they were great.

What?

If there’s one thing worse than grits, if would have to be ARMY grits. I don’t think the Army even WANTS you to like their food. If people start saying things like Army food is good, some army dude somewhere will be losing his stripes.

Whatever.

So, where are all the hash brown people? I can’t be the only one who prefers them to grits. If grits were so damned good, Denny’s would serve them north of the Mason-Dixon Line. I never...EVER saw grits when I was living in the land of triple digit IQ’s.

I’ve received emails from every southerner with internet access and even a few Yankee turncoats who were somehow converted into grit aficionados, defending grits with as much passion as any of the natives of Dixie...the land of Roscoe P. Coltrain, Gomer Pyle and Jethro Bodine.

Many of them wanted to give me a lesson on the origins of grits. Some offered grit recipes handed down from generation to generation of grit eating grandmothers. A few even waxed poetic, possessing far too much passion and knowledge for and about the odious side dish. How would a person come up with so much raw data about any one side dish? I like french fries but I couldn’t tell you who was given credit for first appreciating the tasty gratification derived from the exalted deep fried potato enough to document the process for posterity.

Now I know more about grits than I ever wanted to know. I’ve always known that grits were corn. And...I know that they are one special kind of corn. Now...you tell me something. How boring does life have to be before someone says, “Hey Bubba, let’s dry out all of this here corn, not any other corn...but this one SPECIFIC corn...and THEN, once it’s as hard as a diamond...let’s grind it all up. After that, let’s boil the resulting substance and reconstitute the crap into a mush. THEN...we can issue an edict announcing that you may put any one of 50 different breakfast foods into it and then we can eat it EVERY SINGLE every morning for the rest of our lives. Yeah...that’s what we should do today. Now, go wake up Bobbie Sue and tell her to husk a bunch of corn after she brushes her tooth.”

OK, so it was in the south and they probably DIDN'T use any 4-syllable words like reconstitute...but I’m sure that they communicated the brainstorm in some way.

So THAT’S what people in the South were doing while people in the North were building cities. And you thought that they were all just running moonshine.

I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid and Laura Petrie never made grits. Granny did. Mr. French never mentioned grits. Fred and Doris Ziffel did. Hazel might have TRIED to serve grits, but Mr. Baxter wouldn’t have eaten them. Barney, Opie and Goober all ate grits.

So...cut me some slack. I don’t want to eat grits anymore than I want to eat a crawdad.

I’ve actually sat on the banks of streams with men in romantic places back in the woods. I listened as they dazzled me with their wit. Then, they would look down at a rock and recollect some childhood wistfulness from a day when they, as young boys, would turn the rock over and collect crawdads so that they could take them home for mother to boil. Apparently, crawdads are a culinary delight in their own right.

The crawdad story usually mean that the date’s over. I’m never gonna get the thought of his crawdad eating mouth out of my mind.

I can hear it now...“But, Meg, you can even put CRAWDADS in grits!”

The only thing that you grit defenders have accomplished with this salvo defending your precious grits is to make me more determined than ever never to eat a grit. You can put that on my tombstone...“She never ate a grit.”

So, eat your damned chicken feet, crawdads and grits...see what happens. Apparently, you forget the rules of grammar and drive pick up trucks with a big 3 on the backs of them.

I’ll just sit here and eat my hash browns, scrambled chicken embryos and ground up pig snouts. I can put ketchup on every single one of those things.

Tomorrow, line dancing.

See ya,

Meg