10 Months in America's Dairyland

On first relocating to Wisconsin from the UK, where I’d accepted a position in 2002 as an unemployed depressive, and where the Labour government offers tax incentives to the vocal fed up, I was at first discombobulated by the unnerving cheerfulness of the mostly bulbous locals. At a coffee shop in Kenosha, our waitress, who probably weighed as much as our rental car, waddled back a minute or two after serving our breakfasts to wonder, "How are those pancakes workin’ for ya?" Later, when we left the Olive Garden, our server, who in London would have been placed under police custody for his own protection, wide-eyedly exulted, "Have a great rest of your night!" It was almost enough to put my reserved British bride off pasta drowning in cheese-enriched sauces.

Let us make no bones about the importance of cheese to the Wisconsin economy, and the dairy farming that makes it possible. Rich, flavorful, nutritionally indefensible for the most part — cheese is as much the backbone of the Wisconsin economy as breast augmentation surgery is Los Angeles’s and homosexual ecotourism San Francisco’s.

As much as by the locals’ reverence for and reliance on the solid foodstuff made from the coagulated milk of cows, goats, sheep and other mammals, I was struck by the local male populace’s fascination with men named Bret. The works of the writer Bret Harte were almost impossible to find in any of the state’s more than 100 public libraries, and had to be reserved up to one year in advance. Head coach of the University of Wisconsin’s beloved Badgers football team Bret Bulimia, namesake of the fashionable eating disorder, was regularly hanged in effigy, as well as in Waukesha, Sheboygan, and other municipalities with odd names, among which one could not reasonably count Green Bay, for whose professional football team yet another Bret, Favre, then plied his craft with fast-diminishing distinction and a perpetual 72-hour stubble in spite, one imagined, of his at-least-tacit endorsement of particular shaving products. America's best-loved little television scamp, Bret Simpson, had been named spokesperson for the state's beef industry, and was seen everywhere above the caption Have some cow, man.

Like their countrymen in Washington and West Virginia, Montana and Mississippi, and the News, Mexico, York, and Jersey, Wisconsin men seemed only too delighted to define their own masculinity in terms of the performances of mercenary athletes who probably knew as much about Milwaukee or Green Bay as you or I do about Zagreb, and who were as a matter of course offered free bratwurst by fawning restauranteurs who imagined that actual paying customers might flock to their establishments on the off chance of eating off the same plate, or with the same cutlery, albeit washed to the exacting standards set forth in the Wisconsin Food Code.

The noted British humorist and depressive John Cleese, it might be noted, would today be known as John Cheese if his father hadn’t gotten sick of the same old jokes and exchanged the h for an l sometime before young — and I mean very young at the time — John’s birth. It is entirely possible that Bret Favre didn’t…get Monty Python, but Packers fans adored him no less for it, and, indeed, gauged their own fitness on fathers on whether or not he was able to lead the Pack to victory or humiliation on any given Sunday.