Dear New York Times...

Yes, it's a hot topic in a cool town:

Dear New York Times,
What the hell is “grape salad”?

Signed,
All of Minnesota
...

“I have never in my life heard of a ‘grape salad.’ Not at Thanksgiving, not at Christmas, not during a Vikings game, not during the Winter Carnival, not during the State Fair, and not during the greatest state holiday: the annual hockey tournament of the Minnesota State High School League.”

So how the hell did Minnesotan's get assigned the "grape salad" dish to bring to the nation's communal holiday gathering?

After lefse ended up chosen for North Dakota and wild rice for Wisconsin, The Times had to look beyond the obvious ...

Clearly, they should have gone with a traditional Jello salad! (ok to include grapes, if that's your fancy...)

Funny article about how food stories are born.
---------------------
ADDED:

Updated, Thursday, 7 p.m.: I heard from Julia Moskin, a reporter with The Times’s Food section, who offered some background on the project.

“The recipes were not intended to be traditional, popular, or fully representative of the state’s traditions — agricultural, Thanksgiving, or culinary,” she wrote in an email to me.

“We didn’t make stupid errors, or fail to check our facts with perfunctory phone calls. We worked hard — writers and especially editors — to generate a mix of 52 recipes that would not be cliched, repetitive, unhealthy, or unappetizing.”

Well there goes Jello salad then...
(I can't tell if the paper is taking this seriously, with the aggressive pushback on the recipe choice, but they really shouldn't. With the early onset of winter, this is the kind of thing that keeps people up here going, I have noticed. It's like a sport.)

Keep in mind: What Would Garrison Keillor Eat?, and you will do fine.*

And if anyone is still tempted to throw grapes at Julia from the kiddie table, please people, make sure they are not of the frozen variety!

* He'd hit the Jello salad, I'd bet.