Cold snap has Coloradans craving chili and cinnamon rolls, the combo nobody can agree on

The first real cold snap of the season rolled into Colorado this week. It didn’t make me want a pumpkin spice latte or even a trip to the mountains to leaf peep. It made me want the best lunch from elementary school: a bowl of chili with a cinnamon roll on the side.

If you grew up with it, you already get it. If you didn’t, you’re probably making a face right now.

Chili and cinnamon rolls might be the most divisive meal in the West. Smithsonian Magazine compared the argument to the fights over pineapple on pizza and ketchup on hot dogs. The magazine described a dinner in Wyoming where someone brought up the pairing and a Pittsburgh transplant looked plainly disgusted.

Fans eat it in different ways. Some dip the roll in the chili. Some eat the chili first and save the roll for dessert. Some tear the roll up and drop it in the bowl.

The combo’s history is less exotic than you might expect. It started with budgets.

After the National School Lunch Program was created in 1946, school cafeterias had to feed a lot of kids cheaply, often using surplus food from the federal government. Beans were cheap and filling, and they could count as a protein or a vegetable. Cooking them in a tomato sauce and serving something sweet alongside got kids to eat them.

“If 25 percent of your food budget comes from the USDA entitlement, you’ve got to make it work,” Wordell told Smithsonian Magazine.

According to Smithsonian, the pairing was on school menus from Lake City, Iowa, to Greeley, Colorado, by the 1960s. It even appeared in a 1962 cafeteria textbook by Marion Louise Cronan, who ran the school lunch program in Brookline, Massachusetts.

There’s also a legend that the combo started in early 20th-century logging camps, where cooks needed cheap, high-calorie meals for workers. Food writers say there’s little proof of that. The school cafeteria explanation is the one most people accept.

Colorado has a claim to the tradition too. Visit Greeley says the city’s schools were the first to put chili and cinnamon rolls on the lunch menu, which is why the combo is a local classic there. That’s where I grew up, so it may explain my obsession for the combo also.

The tradition also runs deep in Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas. National Geographic named it Nebraska’s signature comfort food this year. Runza, the Nebraska fast-food chain, sells the pair as a combo and even makes merchandise with it.

As kids who grew up with the meal became adults, they kept making it at church potlucks, community dinners and small-town diners.

So if you’re a Colorado transplant who has never tried it, this is your sign. Make a pot of chili, pop open a can of cinnamon rolls and let it change your life forever!