11 Things New Jerseyans Do That Would Horrify the Rest of America

New Jersey is the most misunderstood, most maligned, most aggressively defended state in the union — a place that has absorbed fifty years of jokes, a reality television franchise, and the collective condescension of people who have driven through it on the Turnpike and declared the matter settled, while New Jerseyans have been quietly living in one of the most densely populated, most ethnically diverse, most culinarily extraordinary, most genuinely interesting places in America and building up a resentment so refined and so righteous it has become its own form of state pride. The Garden State does not care what you think. The Garden State has excellent pizza and knows it. The Garden State is not explaining itself to you.

1. Pump zero of their own gas and consider this a fundamental human right

New Jersey is one of the last states in America where self-service gas pumping is illegal — you pull in, an attendant pumps your gas, you pay and leave, and the entire transaction happens without you leaving your vehicle or performing any physical labor. New Jerseyans consider this the correct arrangement. The suggestion that they should pump their own gas is received with the genuine bafflement of people being asked to bag their own groceries at a restaurant. Oregon recently went to self-serve. New Jersey watched and felt nothing but confirmation.

2. Give directions exclusively using jughandles and expect everyone to follow along

The jughandle is a New Jersey traffic engineering solution that routes left turns and U-turns through a right-exit ramp that loops around — meaning to turn left in New Jersey, you exit right, curve around, and cross the main road. This is completely intuitive to New Jerseyans and a genuine source of existential confusion for everyone else. “Take the jughandle” is a complete and useful direction in New Jersey. In the rest of America it is a sentence that requires immediate follow-up questions that New Jerseyans find exhausting to answer.

3. Maintain a pizza loyalty so fierce it has ended friendships across state lines

New Jersey pizza — thin crust, proper cheese pull, sauce with actual flavor, slices large enough to fold, sold from no-frills pizzerias that have been in the same family for forty years — is defended by New Jerseyans with a passion that makes the New Haven apizza crowd look moderate. The idea that pizza from a chain restaurant is pizza is not something a New Jerseyan will engage with seriously. The idea that New York has better pizza is something a New Jerseyan will engage with at length, loudly, with specific counter-examples, and without ever reaching a conclusion that concedes the point.

4. Eat a pork roll, egg, and cheese on a hard roll and call it the perfect food

Pork roll — a processed pork product invented in Trenton by John Taylor in 1856, sliced, griddled until the edges curl, and served on a hard roll with egg and American cheese — is the definitive New Jersey breakfast sandwich, and the debate about whether to call it “pork roll” (North Jersey) or “Taylor Ham” (also North Jersey but more insistent about it) is a genuine geographic and cultural fault line that New Jerseyans have been arguing about for decades without resolution and without any sign of wanting one. The sandwich itself is not controversial. It is correct. The name is the war.

5. Defend the Jersey Shore with a specificity that requires its own geography lesson

The Jersey Shore is not a reality television show to New Jerseyans — it is a specific, beloved, fiercely regional institution stretching 130 miles from Sandy Hook to Cape May, with each town having its own character, its own loyalists, and its own place in the social hierarchy of Shore towns. Asbury Park is different from Belmar is different from Seaside Heights is different from Avalon in ways that require local knowledge to fully appreciate. New Jerseyans who summer at the Shore — and the Shore is where New Jerseyans summer, not the beach, the Shore — have opinions about their town so specific they can feel like a different species from people who summer two exits away.

6. Navigate the Turnpike by exit number like it’s a precise system of coordinates

The New Jersey Turnpike exit number is not merely a highway designation — it is a geographic identifier, a social category, and shorthand for everything you need to know about where someone is from and what their life is like. Exit 13 is a different world from Exit 4. The exits near the refineries and the exits near the shore towns communicate different information about the people who use them, and New Jerseyans understand this taxonomy without instruction. Out-of-staters who say they’re from New Jersey get asked immediately which exit. The answer is analyzed. Conclusions are drawn.

7. Go to a diner at any hour for any reason and find this completely sufficient

New Jersey has more diners per square mile than any other state — over six hundred of them — and the New Jersey diner is not a nostalgia experience or an ironic destination. It is a living institution open twenty-four hours, serving breakfast at three in the morning and dinner at noon, with laminated menus containing more options than most restaurants serve in a season, staffed by servers who know the regulars and take the new people’s orders with professional efficiency. The New Jersey diner is the solution to hunger at any hour, the venue for any conversation, and the place where the state’s extraordinary ethnic diversity shows up most democratically in what’s on the menu.

8. Fiercely deny being from New York while working in New York and rooting for New York teams

This is the great New Jersey paradox. A significant portion of the state commutes to New York City daily, roots for the Yankees, the Mets, the Knicks, the Rangers, and the Giants — whose stadium is physically in New Jersey — and yet will correct you with genuine heat if you suggest they’re from New York. They are from New Jersey. New Jersey is not New York. New York is where you go to work, not who you are. The Giants play in New Jersey and are called the New York Giants and New Jerseyans have simply decided this particular inconsistency is not worth addressing when there are so many other things to be annoyed about.

9. Speak at a pace and volume that the rest of America experiences as aggressive but is simply efficient

New Jersey’s communication style — direct, fast, loud, unpadded by the pleasantries that slower-paced states use to soften every exchange — is experienced by people from other regions as confrontational or rude when it is actually neither. It is efficient. The point is made. The response is received. Nobody’s time has been wasted. New Jerseyans who move to the South spend the first six months accidentally offending people with their conversational pace and the next six months learning that the longer route to the same destination is sometimes the social expectation. They adapt. They find it takes longer than they’d like.

10. Produce more Superfund sites than any other state and decline to make this their identity

New Jersey has more EPA Superfund sites than any other state in America — a consequence of being the most densely populated state, with the heaviest concentration of industrial activity, for the longest period of American industrial history. New Jerseyans are aware of this. They do not lead with it. The state also has some of the finest beaches on the East Coast, extraordinary ethnic food in virtually every town, the Pine Barrens, the Highlands, and a quality of life that the Superfund statistics do not capture and that New Jerseyans would like to have noted for the record.

11. Leave New Jersey, spend years defending New Jersey to everyone they meet, and eventually move back

The New Jersey diaspora — scattered across the country, living in cities that are fine, eating pizza that is not fine, pumping their own gas like it’s normal — maintains its identity with the stubborn loyalty of people who know they’re from somewhere specific and don’t intend to pretend otherwise. They defend the state to everyone who makes the Turnpike joke. They find the one good Italian deli in whatever city they’re in and it’s not the same. They visit home for the holidays and remember what a hard roll with pork roll tastes like and the calculation begins. A meaningful number of them move back. The Turnpike welcomes them. Someone pumps their gas.

New Jersey is not going to stop being exactly this much of itself — not for the jokes, not for the Turnpike, not for the reality television association, not for the Superfund sites, not for a single person who has driven through on I-95 and thought they had the measure of the place. It is too busy being genuinely, specifically, irreplaceably itself — feeding people at three in the morning, growing the tomatoes that make the sauce that makes the pizza that makes the argument that has been going on since 1962, sending workers into New York on the train and getting them home to their houses and their diners and their Shore weekends and their pork roll, egg, and cheese on a Saturday morning. The Garden State contains multitudes. The multitudes have opinions. The opinions are not going anywhere. Neither is the jughandle.