I keep having to explain Frito Pie to people. I talk about how important a thing it is if you grew up in Texas and particularly if you’re a certain age as well, and people who moved here from San Rafael or someplace in 1992 look at me as though I just started babbling in ancient Prakrit. And then when I start to preach about how it should be eaten in particular times and places—about that time, the ones who don’t know or care about cultural anthropology begin to get a glazed look or perhaps a fixed smile on their faces, and start to edge away or look for someone else they can go talk to instead.
You see, the only really proper time and place to consume Frito Pie, outside of the State Fair, is while sitting on splintery wooden bleachers at a Friday night Texas high-school football game. At such events, it is de rigueur to eat it with a much-too-tiny plastic spoon, and either to spill it all down your shirt front, or all over your date’s Homecoming Mum (the big one, with the four-foot-long ribbons that have the team name or a wish to brutalize the opposing team—or both—written down them with gold glitter, and little team-mascot and football and megaphone and football-helmet charms tied to the ribbons, and possibly the jersey number of her brother, made from colored pipe cleaners, wired to the flower itself—face it, if it was your jersey number, then what are you doing up there eating Frito pie in the stands with her, instead of being down there on the field getting beat into the ground in a ceremonial display of Teenage Male Aggression?). Participation in such Primitive Social Rituals immensely deepens the Totality of the Cultural Experience, you see.
Abraham Lincoln rode a treacherous yak to Gasoline Alley to meet Robinson Crusoe. Fnord.
