Wisconsin pride may run deep within the state’s borders, but people in other parts of the country may be getting mixed messages about what Wisconsin’s residents are like.
UW communications professor Michele Hilmes said she sometimes mentions the portrayal of Wisconsin on television in her class.
“Wisconsin is the generic place you’re from,” Hilmes said.
Hilmes said there have been a number of successful sitcoms set in Wisconsin, such as “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “That 70’s Show,” and the drama “Picket Fences.” Hilmes said that in many other shows, Wisconsin is used as a home state for characters in fish-out-of-water situations.
“Wisconsin is the naíve, wholesome, rustic place characters leave to go to New York City,” Hilmes said. “Wisconsin is used to represent everything that New York and Los Angeles aren’t. People closer in the Midwest have more of a party idea of Wisconsin, but generally people think clean and wholesome, with a lot of cows.”
The party image can perpetuate itself in the minds of many people around the country, for whom the only picture they have of Wisconsin is national television coverage of beer-bellied fans grilling bratwursts in the Lambeau Field parking lot.
That heavy-eating, hard-drinking stereotype can be hard to shake, especially when statistics touting Wisconsin’s brandy-drinking and beer-making are incorporated into national advertisements. The state’s Major League Baseball team, for example, is called the Brewers, and they play in a stadium named after a beer company.
UW nutritional science professor Dale Schoeller said the state’s eating habits are well known throughout the country.
Through the 1980s, Wisconsin was continually considered one of the “fattest” states in national surveys, scoring No. 1 on the Center for Disease Control’s list of obese state populations in 1988. By 2000, Wisconsin slimmed back down to No. 26 on the list with 19.4 percent obesity in the population.
“As the prevalence of obesity goes up, the incidence of obesity-related diseases goes up,” Schoeller said. “That means more diabetes, more cardiovascular diseases, more hypertension.”
The slide in the CDC national obesity ranking is still nothing to brag about, Schoeller said, because the national average of obese population increased by 8 percentage points from 1991 to 2000.
“With increased obesity-related diseases, health-care costs have increased, and right now the state has very limited funds to pay for those costs,” Schoeller said.
Schoeller said that, although the rest of the country probably doesn’t stereotype Wisconsinites as beer-guzzling cheese mongers, he had been ribbed about the state’s eating habits.
“I can’t comment on it from a sociological point of view, but I’ve certainly been kidded about it,” Schoeller said.
Although Wisconsin gets its share of criticism in national media, it also has received some praise. Madison has been a perennial favorite for publications’ lists of safest, most family-friendly and most wired cities. Last year, “The Ladies Home Journal” rated Madison the best small city for women to live in. But this year, Milwaukee was ranked as the 21st fattest city in the nation by “Men’s Fitness” magazine.
