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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   2681 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Obligatory E.B.White quote for whenever this comes up:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

What's up with "pie for breakfast?" Lazy googling reveals this possible reason:

Like most jokes, that one’s based on a kernel of truth. UVM history professor Dona Brown has written about how the tourists who came to spend the summer on Vermont farms during the late nineteenth century were upset about the pies and doughnuts that farm wives served for breakfast. Didn’t Vermont farm families eat fresh fruit and cream and vegetables? The visitors thought so, and so farm families adjusted their menus to accommodate their guests.

When back-to-the-land advocates Helen and Scott Nearing moved to Vermont during the 1930s, they found their own vegetarian, largely raw diet at odds with the local foodways. According to the Nearings, their Vermont neighbors ate pie, doughnuts, and cake “for two if not three meals a day” while they didn’t bake a single pie the entire twenty years they lived in Vermont.

Based on the above, I'm guessing "eats pie for breakfast" translates to Southern culture as something like "eats fried bologna and mayo sandwiches for breakfast," connoting "backward and low class."

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