11 Things Missourians Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

Missouri sits at the geographic and cultural crossroads of America — the Gateway to the West, the meeting point of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the place where the South shades into the Midwest and the East tips toward the Plains, and nobody fully agrees on what Missouri is, including Missouri. The Show-Me State has been arguing with itself about its own identity for two hundred years and has produced, from that productive tension, a culture of stubborn independence, deep local loyalty, outstanding food, and a political complexity that has made it a genuine bellwether state for most of American electoral history. St. Louis and Kansas City don’t agree on much. The rest of Missouri regards them both with mild suspicion. Everyone is from Missouri, and Missouri will need to see some evidence before it commits to anything. Show it.

1. Conduct the St. Louis versus Kansas City rivalry across every possible category simultaneously

St. Louis and Kansas City are 250 miles apart and have been conducting a low-grade civic rivalry across food, sports, culture, and general metropolitan worthiness for the better part of a century. Barbecue. Beer. Baseball versus football. The arch versus the fountains. Each city is genuinely convinced that it is the real Missouri and that the other one is a fine place that doesn’t quite understand what Missouri actually is. The rest of the state watches this rivalry with the tolerant exhaustion of parents watching two children argue about something that was never going to be resolved and has stopped being interesting.

2. Argue about provel cheese on St. Louis-style pizza with people who consider it a crime against food

St. Louis-style pizza — a thin, cracker-crisp crust cut into squares rather than triangles, topped with provel cheese, a processed blend of provolone, Swiss, and white cheddar that melts into a specific gooey consistency found nowhere else on Earth — is either a regional treasure or an affront to everything pizza should be, depending entirely on whether you grew up eating it. St. Louisans defend provel with the passion of people whose childhood comfort food is being called a crime. Everyone else calls it a crime. The square cut is called the party cut and it is objectively the correct way to share a pizza regardless of your position on the cheese.

3. Eat toasted ravioli and consider it a completely normal appetizer

Toasted ravioli — breaded, deep-fried ravioli served with marinara sauce, invented in St. Louis in the 1940s and now a fixture on every Italian-American restaurant menu in the city — is presented to visitors as an appetizer with the casual confidence of people who genuinely cannot imagine it being considered unusual. It is unusual. It is also excellent. The rest of America has been sleeping on toasted ravioli for eighty years and St. Louis has been fine with this because more for them.

4. Refer to a “concrete” at Ted Drewes without explaining what that means

Ted Drewes Frozen Custard on Chippewa Street in St. Louis has been serving frozen custard since 1929 and is a Route 66 landmark, a St. Louis institution, and a source of genuinely excellent frozen custard served in a “concrete” — a custard so thick it is served in a cup turned upside down to prove it won’t fall out. St. Louisans order concretes with flavor combinations they’ve been perfecting for years, stand in lines that should be discouraging but aren’t, and discuss the menu with the focused seriousness of people who know what they want and have wanted it all day.

5. Take the Gateway Arch completely for granted after about six months of living in St. Louis

The Gateway Arch is 630 feet of stainless steel elegance, the tallest monument in the United States, a genuinely extraordinary piece of mid-century engineering and design that visitors photograph from every angle with the reverent focus of people encountering something genuinely monumental. St. Louisans drive past it on the way to work and have stopped seeing it the way people stop seeing anything that is always there. Out-of-towners stand on the riverfront in genuine awe. St. Louisans suggest a good barbecue place nearby and have already started walking.

6. Float the Ozark rivers every summer with the commitment of a religious obligation

The Current River, the Meramec, the Jacks Fork, the Eleven Point — Missouri’s Ozark rivers are clean, cold, spring-fed, and absolutely packed with Missourians in canoes, kayaks, and inner tubes every summer weekend from Memorial Day to Labor Day. The float trip is a Missouri institution conducted with varying degrees of seriousness depending on the group and the cooler-to-canoe ratio. The Ozarks provide the beauty. The floaters provide the enthusiasm. The combination has been working for generations and nobody is reconsidering it.

7. Eat a slinger at two in the morning and describe it as a reasonable meal choice

The slinger — a St. Louis late-night diner special consisting of two eggs, hash browns, and a hamburger patty all piled together and smothered in chili and topped with cheese — is exactly as excessive as it sounds and is consumed by St. Louisans at two in the morning with the focused satisfaction of people who have decided that consequence is a problem for tomorrow. Diners that serve slingers are open late and busy when they’re open. The slinger is not on any nutritionist’s recommended list. St. Louis has made its peace with this.

8. Maintain extreme loyalty to the Cardinals while being philosophically complicated about everything else

The St. Louis Cardinals are one of the most storied franchises in baseball — eleven World Series championships, Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, Ozzie Smith, Albert Pujols — and St. Louisans follow them with a consistency and a passion that weathers losing seasons, front office frustrations, and the general misery that baseball inflicts on its devotees several times per decade. Cardinal red is a wardrobe color, a home decor choice, and a signal to other St. Louisans that you share a fundamental orientation toward the universe. The rest of Missouri has complicated feelings about this. St. Louis does not notice.

9. Say “warsh” instead of “wash” and “Missour-uh” instead of “Missour-ee” depending on where they’re from

Missouri contains genuine regional pronunciation variation that reflects its position at the convergence of multiple American dialect regions. The “warsh” pronunciation — adding an r to wash — is real and present in parts of Missouri. The “Missour-uh” versus “Missour-ee” debate is a genuine regional division that Missourians have strong feelings about and that outsiders find both bewildering and delightful. Politicians running statewide have to decide which pronunciation to use in which county and there is no choice that satisfies everyone. This has been true for generations.

10. Drive through the Ozarks and refuse to believe anything that beautiful is in Missouri

The Missouri Ozarks — ancient rounded mountains, clear spring-fed rivers, cedar glades, shut-ins where streams cut through pink granite, caves longer than most states are wide — are genuinely, startlingly beautiful in a way that surprises people who thought Missouri was flat and unremarkable. Missouri is not flat. The Bootheel is flat. The Ozarks are an ancient plateau worn into ridges and hollows and river valleys that contain more scenic beauty per square mile than Missouri’s reputation prepares anyone for. Missourians who live in the Ozarks have decided that Missouri’s underrated status is acceptable because it means fewer people showing up.

11. Produce an outsized contribution to American music and attribute it to the convergence

St. Louis gave the world ragtime, Scott Joplin, Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Nelly, and a blues tradition that flows north from the Delta through the city and into American musical history. Kansas City gave the world jazz — Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Big Joe Turner — developed in the clubs of the 18th and Vine district during the Pendergast machine era when Kansas City nightlife operated essentially without restriction. Missouri’s position at the convergence of musical traditions from the South, the Midwest, and the Plains produced something genuinely original that the rest of America absorbed so thoroughly it stopped noticing the source. Missouri notices.

Missouri doesn’t have a simple story to tell about itself, and it has stopped trying to find one. It is a state where the Gateway Arch stands on the eastern edge pointing west toward the history of American expansion, where the rivers converge and the musical traditions converge and the regional identities converge without ever quite blending into something uniform, where St. Louis and Kansas City conduct their rivalry across 250 miles of complicated, beautiful, underappreciated middle ground. It has toasted ravioli and burnt ends and frozen custard and float trips and caves and rivers and Cardinals baseball and a political history that contains every American contradiction in concentrated form. Missouri does not need to be understood from the outside. It needs to be driven through slowly, eaten in carefully, and listened to — because the music that came from this particular convergence has been playing in the background of American life for over a century, and most people still don’t know where it started.