By Dr. Sherwood Burr
Howdy folks, it’s your old friend, Sher-Bet! My publicist/parole officer told me not to force a nickname but it’s not forcing if you grudgingly say you like it, right? Right?
I’m sure you were wondering where I stood on our latest national crisis – Cracker Barrel adding Impossible sausage to its menu. And to all you finger wagers out there who are saying “This is what you’re worried about?” and “Who sells crackers by the barrel, wouldn’t a box be better?” then I say that you don’t understand the importance of breakfast to our national identity. It’s like Patrick Henry famously said, “Give me hash browns or give me … wait, you’ve got au gratin potatoes, then give me those, otherwise, give me death! Also, I have a buy-one-get-one-half-off coupon when the check is ready.” (Very few people get that quote right)
Breakfast is one of the few unspoiled refuges we have left. What other meal can one restfully consume meat, eggs, and other meat? Now the used-to-be good folks at Cracker Barrel have gone all food fascist by daring to serving fake meat, or as they call it “protein.” Like that’s even a thing.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Can’t you still get real sausage at Cracker Barrel?” and “Aren’t they just giving customers a choice?” You people sound just like my ex-wife with she gets hysterical and says, “Sherwood, you can’t keep sleeping in the canoe behind the tool shed.”
Eating at Cracker Barrel is about much more than food. It’s about camaraderie with folks who just want a good, hearty meal followed by purchase of a Christmas ornament – the flamingo riding a scooter is my favorite though the pair of cardinals sitting on a branch while wearing ice skates is a close second – without having to deal with some snobby intellectual saying, “Why are all the gnome figurines hetero-normative?” or pointing out that their famous pecan log rolls were George Wallace’s favorite dessert.
It's about taking a step back to a simpler time when not everything was so political and people could gather, in groups large and small, to celebrate the local high school football team winning a game or welcome a new pastor to town, all in a place that felt just like your grandma’s back porch on a Sunday afternoon, if your grandmother’s back porch had 70,000 nationwide employees and was publicly traded on NASDAQ.
And it’s about family, in that I often went there to get away from mine.
But now all that is ruined because serving plant-based sausage will throw the door open to all kinds of undesirables, like liberal arts professors, ironic moustache havers, people who bike to work not because they got a DUI but because it’s good for the environment, husbands who also hyphenated their last name in solidarity with their wives who sit there and read the New York Times on their phone and talk about how glad they are they don’t have kids but if they did they’d definitely buy reusable diapers, and, worst of all, vegetarians. I might as well join the soy-latte sippers across the street at that coffee house with the punny name I don’t get.
So you won’t see me eating at Cracker Barrel anymore, and not only the one in Louisville where I was kicked out of that one time over a misunderstanding about their shirt-wearing policy. I mean all of them! I’ll be taking my lunch with the good people at Burger King whom I can trust will always serve their Whoppers with 100 percent real beef.
Dr. Sherwood Burr appears courtesy of a phone number you thought you’d blocked
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