Permissive Parents Beware...

...they eat brats in Ohio! (Only they pronounce it so that it rhymes with "rot," not "rat.")

Other food-related dialectological observations from my 12 years in Ohio:

What I have always known as a Reese's peanut butter cup is by and large known here as a Reesey cup. I think it's a little strange, but this guy seems to have some serious issues with it:

There once was a guy named Reese. He created a Peanut Butter Cup. He put his name on it. It became what we now know as Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

Later they made an M&M -type candy and called it Reese's Pieces. This made sense because Reese's rhymes with pieces.

Let me repeat that: Reese's rhymes with pieces.

Reese's is not pronounced reecey. It does not rhyme with fleecy.

Please stop referring to your Reese's cup as a Reecey cup. It makes you sound like an uncultured redneck.

In response to his unsupported sociolinguistic observation: None of the people I've heard say it have been uncultured or rednecks, much less both at once.

If you're in the produce section of a grocery store here, and see a sign for "mango fruit," they're not being redundant. For some of the population here, unless otherwise specified, mango means green pepper. And green pepper, BTW, means what I grew up calling a bell pepper. Nevermind that bell peppers come in yellow, red, and orange, or that jalapeno peppers are green--if you want bell peppers on your pizza here, you'd better ask for green peppers. Otherwise, the server might just hear the initial [b] and mark you down for banana peppers. That's what happened to me when I ordered my first pizza in Ohio, and it was quite an unpleasant surprise. (That and the fact that they had parmesan cheese all over the top of the pizza, and sliced it into rectangles!)

A popular breakfast item is sausage gravy and biscuits. The first time I saw this written down, it was on the dorm breakfast menu, written just like I wrote it here. I thought, "Great! I love sausage and biscuits! I'll ask them to hold the gravy." Another unpleasant surprise: The comma I'd mentally inserted between sausage and gravy had been left out on purpose! The dish is biscuits with gravy that's been made with sausage. Actually, I know that this term exists outside Ohio, because a regional restaurant chain named Bob Evans serves the dish.

In fact, all of the above terms may well be in usage outside Ohio. All I know is that I sure never heard them when I lived in Texas, and since I became aware of them in Ohio, I'm listing them here.