In which the NYT (again) makes my second-city blood boil

Much has been made of the young A. G. Sulzberger's getting a reporting job at the New York Times, which his dad happens to run, and quickly rising to become the paper's Kansas City bureau chief. Of course, the Times has never been exactly hesitant to publish articles that look cluelessly down on the cultural life of U.S. cities with fewer than 8 million residents. So I'm not sure I'd blame nepotism alone for the Sulzberger clunker the paper published this week.

In any case, it's rough stuff. Sulzberger, a vegetarian, says he can't find anything to eat in the Midwest. "It should be stated right up front," he says in the sixth paragraph, "that the Midwest...quickly defies stereotypes." An example of how it does this? Its "superlative decency." (You know, since everybody stereotypes midwesterners as selfish and rude.) But the rumors of rampant carnivorousness? Your intrepid correspondent reports that they are all true.

Sulzberger claims to cover the Midwest for the Times. But he must mean just the Great Plains states, since the paper has another bureau here in Chicago. Later he uses the term "heartland," which makes a little more sense, and he bemoans the "startling lack of fresh produce" in the region. There's a commodity grain of truth to that; putting up the land for a whole country's addiction to cheap corn and soy will do that to a place. But it's a massive exaggeration, not to mention the fact that the connection between a region's agricultural output and its restaurant menus remains (sadly) quite limited.