> I was in Iowa a few years ago, and the food is awful. I don’t think the food in Iowa used to be great “100 years ago before modern factory farming,” etc. I suspect it’s always been awful, and people just don’t care about it very much as long as they get the calories they need.

Iowa is a gigantic field corn, soybean, and pig farm with a few colleges, windmills, and one “city”. Commodity crops, not vegetables.

The one thing Iowa is known for is “loose meat sandwiches”, which is a Sloppy Joe with no tomato based sauce. Cuisine is not on the menu there ;)