first holds up the crayon, and also the psychedelic music.

7.28.2008

7.24.2008

An interesting story I heard on NPR today. The once naked infant that adorned the cover of Nirvana's "Nevermind" is now 17 years old, and telling his story. While 'his story' isn't particularyly relevant to pop culture, Spencer Elden is telling a story that is worth a listen. It is pretty fascinating to hear the perspective of someone who was so much a part of pop culture, but had no idea at the time. When he was just one year old, Spencer could hypothetically see a 9 foot by 9 foot billboard of himself stretched across the walls of Tower Records. Now, living a typical 17 year old's life, Spencer's story offers an interesting perspective into how pop culturethe blame squarely on the 1950s, and our wholesale embrace of mechanized food after World War II. In those days, fast food, canned vegetables, and cheap chicken became a sign of America’s progressiveness: Cheap food, in the days after World War II, were a marker of the roaring economic progress we were making. Cheap food, in other words, was a source of national pride before it became a national habit. Europe, by contrast, had no such industrial miracle. Instead, they simply held onto the food traditions that they always had–of home cooking, for example.

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To flip it forward a bit, I would argue that Europeans are willing to pay more for better food because what they eat is so wrapped up with national pride and cultural identity. Why wouldn’t