The national political scene is part of my daily life here at CNN. We monitor the top contenders’ moves hourly and some poor sod has to put together a list of where they’ll be when. I couldn’t help but notice that for today, March 30, there’s a common thread - food.

Eating on the campaign trail can be strategic, with candidates often using local food stops to gain favor with crowds. This is how the top three GOP candidates will be spending their Friday nights:
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Kat Kinsman is a very proud member of and cheerleader for the Southern Foodways Alliance. That was not always the case.

The very first spoonful of grits I ever tasted was one jammed through my clamped lips and clenched teeth by the hand of my first real boyfriend. His other one was pinching my nostrils shut, and it quickly became a choice between perishing in a grimy, vinyl-upholstered booth in a Baltimore greasy spoon or choking down the food I'd eschewed for the first 18 years of my life. I opened up and swallowed hard.

I'm from Kentucky, and for a very long time, I didn't know what to do with that. It's a border state – neither quite the North nor the South, and to make matters more confusing, I spent ages 2 to 18 in Northern Kentucky, which isn't enthusiastically claimed by either side.

Some Cincinnatians enjoy a joke about the peril faced by passengers taking the lower half of a bridge connecting their fair city with the Bluegrass State just yonder over the majestic Ohio River. A Kentuckian will, naturally, wish to free their feet from the cruel and unusual imposition of those "shoes" those fancy Buckeye staters insist upon and pitch them from the windows of their pickup trucks, endangering all below. Hardy har.
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Kate Krader (@kkrader on Twitter) is Food & Wine's restaurant editor. When she tells us where to find our culinary heart's desire, we listen up.

It’s the Republican Presidential primaries, and the pancakes are flying (they always do during primary season). Mitt Romney has been a pancake-making machine, most recently serving them while fielding questions in Atlanta. In an interview Rick Santorum’s wife, Karen, revealed that he makes pancakes with his kids. Ron Paul has been immortalized in pancake art that’s available on eBay.

Newt Gingrich hasn’t spent a lot of time flipping pancakes but some reporters observed that he looked like he’d been eating too many of them. I wish that all the Republican candidates would do a Top Chef-style pancake elimination challenge; perhaps that would help clear the field. While I wait for that to happen, I’m looking at some of the country’s coolest pancake places.
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Politics? Schmolitics. We're in it for the regional foods of the great US of A. We've talked loose meat in Iowa, gorton in New Hampshire, and she-crab soup in South Carolina. Our colleague CNN video journalist Alexandra Willingham is based in Atlanta, but Key West, Florida, has been her lifelong destination of choice.

She's had a lot of practice chowing down while living it up on the island, and says "Forget what you learned from Jimmy Buffett - Key West eats go far beyond cheeseburgers and margaritas. Here are some of the best foods to try while visiting in paradise."

Here are five don't-miss dishes from the southernmost city.

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Have you ever had the pleasure of she-crab soup? Crab bisque, crab chowder and the like are surely not to be sneered at, but they are just handmaidens to the lady crustacean's Lowcountry delicacy.

A liberal splash of sherry cuts a swath through the heavy cream-drenched, crab-studded fish stock, which itself is riddled with a buckshot of tangy, coral-colored crab roe (hence the emphasis on the "she"). It's rich. Good gravy, is it rich and sumptuous and understandably, something of a Charleston obsession.

It's not especially easy to come by, seeing as it's so tightly tethered to blue crab spawning season off the South Carolina coast. So unless you can find a local to take pity on you and ship you some of their stash of Harris cans they've been hoarding for the off-season, you'd be well advised to book a trip to South Carolina in the summer or fall (or both) and consume your body volume in this creamy, dreamy, orange-tinted soup.
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Food in the Field gives a sneak peek into what CNN's team is eating, and the food culture they encounter as they travel the globe. Jeremy Harlan is a CNN photojournalist currently covering the New Hampshire primary. He has a hungry baby and he loves Vienna sausage.

"His name must be Mikey, because I think he likes it."

First, my name isn't Mikey. Second, I ate Life cereal almost every morning of my childhood and this particular "it" tasted nothing like Life. Third, I wanted to tell my fellow Nashua, New Hampshire diner patron that I wasn't ready to proclaim my fondness for this new taste.

I have found myself in the Granite State for my third Presidential campaign cycle. I think I've been in at least half the state's diners - most while shooting candidates pressing the flesh, posing for photos, and pleading for votes. For me, these events usually involve side-stepping pie displays, barging in on folk's breakfasts, and generally being a pain in the sides of hard-working cooks and waitresses.
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Steve Kastenbaum is a CNN Radio National Correspondent, currently covering the New Hampshire primary. He previously wrote about the mystique of the Brooklyn bagel.

A presidential candidate wouldn’t dare campaign in New Hampshire without making a stop at a diner. Sometimes they’ll hit several in one day. As they look over the menu to figure out what suits their tastes, patrons size up the presidential candidates here in the same way.

The Red Arrow Diner sits on a side street in the heart of downtown Manchester. The historic landmark has been here since 1923. There’s almost always a wait for a seat. The corned beef hash and the fried haddock sandwich are favorites among the locals and first timers struggle to eat every bite of the generous tall stack of pancakes.

But they also serve politics here and that’s the real draw. The walls of this old diner are lined with photographs of just about every presidential candidate who ran for office over the past few years, Republican and Democrat.

Click to listen to the CNN Radio podcast:

Romney, Bachmann, Santorum and the rest of the '12 class of G.O.P. hopefuls (along with the attendant hordes of media folk) have descended upon Iowa to make pals with the caucusing public over pork products and pancakes. A diner is a fine place for these aspiring candidates to chow down with the hoi polloi, but if they really wanted to show the locals that they're not just flying by, they'd have made right for a Maid-Rite.

Since 1926, Iowans have been feasting on the the iconic "loose meat" sandwich, invented by Muscatine, Iowa butcher Fred Angell. Angell began franchising the idea throughout the Hawkeye State under the name "Maid-Rite" after a delivery man he'd drafted to taste his creation purportedly said, "You know, Fred, this sandwich is just made right."
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Lisa Desjardins is the host of American Sauce. Click to listen to the CNN Radio podcast and listen to more American Sauce on Political Ticker:

Des Moines (CNN) – Both campaign essential and political cliché, the diner is again rising to prominence in the last days before the Iowa caucuses. Candidates have been crawling (almost literally, due to space concerns) all over the roadside fixtures.

But it is in the absence of candidates that Iowa voters may give you the most sincere reviews of both food and politics.

"I got the ham," said Chris Aldinger. "Iowa ham." Aldinger ate the "Shebang," an egg and ham special, at Des Moines' Drake Diner, a 50s-style restaurant next to the university of the same name.

In the diners of Iowa, pork is essential. Bacon, ham, sausage, tenderloin, barbecue, ribs and sandwiches are just the basics.
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Our favorite question to ask folks at this time of year how they'd finish the sentence, "It's not Thanksgiving without..."

Wolf Blitzer, Candy Crowley, John King and Soledad O'Brien share the dishes that make their holidays shine bright.

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