Snacks of America Demystified

Chicken? Are you a man or you an elf?. I see this van around quite a lot. Next time they should use a bigger marker and write backwards so the car ahead can read it in the rear view mirror. :)

The Morning News has a brilliant article titled Unexplained Snacks of America written by an Australian who has a few observations and guesses about a some mysterious American foods. This coming from the land of vegemite is a bit amusing. :)

Americans tend to assume that 99.9% of the population of the planet have a deep, broad knowledge of American popular culture and for the most part few disappoint us in that assumption. Finns, including my own husband, know more at times about my own culture than I do. I find that I take a near absurd pleasure in explaining things to Jarkko that he hasn't ever seen, like 'Rooty tooty fresh and fruity'. Suddenly, somewhere, a bunch of Americans just got a craving for breakfast at midnight at Denny's. :) The world gets innundated with American TV, movies, books and cartoons so I always feel dreadfully exposed and dull by comparison to my European friends. It's like a woman who gets shagged on the first date; the mystery is gone. I have a giddy glee in seeing that the popular culture machine hasn't given up all the little things that make life in America and that some enigma still remains.

The author, Matt Roden, makes some very good observations and I have only a few small bits to add to his explanations of the unexplained. :)

• Grits ~ Grits are, most assuredly, a food found in the southern US, south of the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as Texas. I've seen boxes of 'instant grits' as far north as St. Louis. Grits are also known as hominy grits and less often grit-corn. Hominy is ground corn separated from the hull and germ. It is ground corn [ though i've also had wheat grits ] cooked in a vat of salted, boiling milk. It's like a corn porridge served with butter and milk or cream. There is also the expression, "Kiss my grits", which was made popular by the TV show Alice in the 1970s, but us yankees have no idea what that really means. I mean, ok, she was saying "Kiss my ass", but does that mean that grits taste like ass? Some would tend to agree with that assessment. Hollywood doesn't have a clue what grits are either so this is likely why it hasn't been exported via the usual channels just yet.
• Hush Puppies ~ Curse you for reminding me of one of my favourite foods! :) Hush puppies are deep-fried cornmeal batter. Again, this is mostly in the South and in parts of the Midwest, like St. Louis. Where did the name come from? Well...the more colourful explanation is that after hunting, fishing and eating a big meal, folks would toss the cornmeal bits to the dogs, calling, "Hush, puppies!" You can, of course, add a nice southern drawl for extra flair. The UK has fish and chips and the southern half of the US has catfish and hush puppies.
• Tums ~ My father used to eat these by the pound. They are, essentially, flavoured chalk. An antacid for the tummy, a.k.a. the tum tum. They are now marketed as a 'calcium supplement' for women who want to avoid osteoperosis. Not much fun as a candy goes.
• Mr. Pibb ~ Not Pibbs. Mr. Pibb was Coca-Cola's competition for the Dr. Pepper market for crappy, sugary, not quite root beer. If you want real root beer, those yankees with good taste drink IBC Root Beer which probably hasn't made it into the tinsel town marketing machine yet either. There is one soda fountain still operating in North St. Louis, the Crown Candy Kitchen, but few are left these days since most folks just belly up for the super-size coke at the McDonald's drive-thru.
• Collard Greens ~ Collard greens are another very southern menu item. I'm starting to get the idea that the South needs a better PR guy in Hollywood. Collard, derived form colewort, is another word for Kale but collard greens these days can be a mixture of kale, spinach, cabbage and other green leaves. They are boiled in a big pot with fatback, i.e. pork bacon fat and served with corn bread and black-eyed peas. Only southerners eat this stuff as the smell is enough to kill a northern yankee at 40 paces.
• Pork rinds ~ *ding*ding* A bag of gristle is a 100% correct answer. Pork rinds are just pork skin, sometimes a bit of seasoning, cooked in the fryolator and munched while watching sports with a cold Bud. Accept no substitutes that aren't genuine pork skin. Again, a southern treat especially loved by former president Clinton.
• Clark Bar ~ Better than the Butterfinger candybar, the Clark bar gets a bad rap. The Clark bar was, apparently created long before the 1950s in one of those romantic rags to riches stories that few immigrants experience anymore. It's interesting that Necco [the company who make all those valentine candy hearts] bought the Clark bar as they're right across the street from MIT and people always said that the factory is right over the particle accelerator. So, think of the Clark bar as the closest you'll get to MIT. :)
• Snapple ~ *ding*ding* Fruit juice with a good marketing team is an astute answer. Marketing in the US is a fight club all of it's own. I lived in Boston, which is right in Snapple marketing central. They dumped all the 100% juice flavours like cranberry and have gone into the yuppie GMO fruit flavours. They're a lot like Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream which is good, occasionally brilliant, but it's the marketing that makes them so popular. And don't blame TV for making you eat a cream cheese crust pizza...ick! :)

I hope he does another of these and I may just do a version of unexplained Finnish foods just for the fun of trying to explain mämmi without using certain words to describe the visual and the tactile senses. :)

24 Mar 2004 at 21:34, Helsinki