Q. Why is it so hard to find queso dip at restaurants on the East Coast? In the simplest form, it’s just Velveeta and Ro-Tel, and those ingredients are available at any grocery store. But I don’t know of any Mexican or Tex-Mex-style restaurant around here that serves it. What gives?

-Katy Marquardt, Arlington, Virginia

A: What gives? The Texanist will tell you what gives. Katy Marquardt is not getting the professional-grade spicy Tex-Mex cheese dip that she so craves because at some point in her life she made the unthinkable decision to leave her home in queso country for a life of gluey clam chowders, sickeningly sweet baked beans, sinewy New York strips, salmonella-harboring egg creams, snooty Waldorf salads, unmanageable cheesesteaks, unsavory scrapples, and all the other disgusting “specialties” that pass for food east of the Sabine. Need the Texanist go on? Before uprooting herself Katy Marquardt forgot that what courses through her veins is the peppery melted cheese dish of her Texas home (the same is true of the Texanist, his doctors always tell him with alarm). Katy Marquardt now finds herself jonesing so hard that she doesn’t understand the real fact of the matter: There is no queso where she is because she is no longer where there is queso.

The Texanist