Almost everyone remembers the grocery store speech, even if families disagreed on how to give it. Depending on where and how you grew up, consumer frugality took on different forms. In genuinely poor rural households, store brands were often viewed with deep suspicion. When every dollar counted, buying an unproven off-brand was an unacceptable gamble. … Read more
There has long been a sense of humiliation baked into how most of us remember buying Little Debbie snack cakes. Instead of finding them in the primary bakery aisle next to the rows of Wonder Bread and Entenmann’s, they’re often marooned on the grocery store perimeter. They sit stacked in freestanding corrugated cardboard shippers, crammed … Read more
If you have driven the turnpikes of the Northeast or Midwest, you’ve probably repeated the same routine many times. You pull off the highway into a big service plaza, fill your tank, grab a burger from a fast-food court, pick up a coffee, and merge back onto the road without ever crossing an intersection or … Read more
Determining who “invented” the hard-shell taco is more complicated than it appears, largely because the answer depends on what is being asked. Are we asking who first fried a corn tortilla into a crisp, folded shape? Are we asking who first mass-produced pre-fried shells for fast-food assembly? Or are we asking who first packaged and … Read more
“Southern food is Black food.” For anyone who has spent time studying the agricultural and social history of the American South, this statement is not controversial, but foundational. With enslaved West Africans came staples like okra, black-eyed peas, benne seeds, and sorghum. With these and regional ingredients, the generational labor of enslaved women who ran … Read more
In the 1988 comedy classic Coming to America, Cleo McDowell delivers what might be the most confident defense of blatant trademark infringement in cinematic history: “Look, me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, … Read more