Nor can you get a meal anywhere in the South without being confronted with “grits”; a pale, lumpy, tasteless kind of porridge which the Southerner insists is a delicacy but which I believe they ingest as punishment for their sins. “What? you don’t want no grits?” asks the wide-eyed waitress; not hostile yet, merely baffled. She moves away and spreads the word all over the region: “You see that man there? Well, he don’t eat no grits”—and you are, suddenly, a marked man.
