USA. There is a white sauce here that the people pour upon everything, with the devotion of a sacred rite. I have become a believer. I noticed it slowly. A bowl of it beside the vegetables. A cup of it beside the bread. Beside the meat. Beside the other sauce. Children dipped fruit in it. A grown man beside me poured it onto a slice of pizza that already had a sauce of its own, closed his eyes, and sighed like a man coming home. I asked its name. They told me with a small reverence: ranch. For it is written that every great people anoints its food with one sacred thing — a drop of gold pressed from olives, a paste of beans aged in cedar. This nation has chosen a cool white elixir, and it anoints not one dish but all dishes, holding nothing back. For to leave a single food unblessed would be the deeper impiety. So I anointed. Everything. The vegetable, yes. But also the rice. The egg. The morning fish. I would not be the one barbarian who left his plate unblessed while a whole nation dipped in joy around me. And here my heart rose, and I declared the thing a calmer man would not: “I will pour this holy elixir upon every food beneath the heavens — the noble and the humble, the savory and the sweet — until I find the one dish it cannot improve. And on that day I will know I have reached the very edge of the world, for everything within it has been made better by ranch.” The teenager refilling the dip station watched me anoint a bowl of rice. “...that’s a lot of ranch, my guy.” “It is the correct amount,” I told him, “for a god.” I have not yet found the dish it cannot improve. I have stopped looking. So I brought a great vat of it to the next gathering and set it at the center of the table, and the whole room descended upon it with cries of joy, and a woman I had never met looked at me and said, “okay — YOU get it.” I have never felt more accepted. So tell me, America. You call it ranch. A condiment. A thing on the side. I call it the one sauce a whole nation agreed to love together — and I dip, with all of you, gladly.