FOLKLORE, FOOD IN

FOLKLORE, FOOD IN. While doing folklore fieldwork with the Singing and Praying Bands of tidewater Maryland and Delaware, the present author observed a minor event that made a major impression on him. The Singing and Praying Bands are groups within some African-American Methodist churches in the Chesapeake Bay area of the East Coast of the United States that hold services in which they sing and pray with escalating fervor to invoke the Holy Spirit and to convert the unsaved. That day in particular, they were having no success: the Spirit simply was not stirring. Finally, one senior member slipped into the center of the singing group and called out the following verse to be added to the hymn:

Old man Moses must be dead;
Children in the wilderness crying for bread.

This couplet combines two episodes from the book of Exodus. The first line refers to the episode when Moses ascended Mount Sinai and disappeared from the camp of the Israelites, causing them to wonder about his continued survival (Exodus 32:1). The second line refers to the Israelites' muttering against Moses for leading them out of Egypt, only to face starvation in the wilderness (Exodus 16:2–3). In response to the murmuring of the Israelites, God caused bread, or manna, to rain from the heaven. This couplet, drawn from a large repertoire of folk poetry distinct to the band, summarizes the attitude of desperation of the Israelites, and applies their condition to that of the band members on that particular summer Sunday afternoon.

The moment the singing group heard this verse, they increased the energy of their singing, their clapping, and their foot stomping in a way that finally was successful in invoking the Holy Spirit. After receiving this blessing from the Spirit, people in the bands seemed to decide that the service could begin to wind down.

This use of "bread" as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit among the bands is not uncommon. On other occasions, the same groups append the line "Bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more"—a line drawn form the hymn "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah" by William Williams (1717–1791)—to the end of long, lined out hymns. They sing this line repeatedly as a meditation to focus the minds of the members of the group so that they can all come together in religious solidarity, as the disciples did on the day of the Pentecost (Acts 2:1-2), and the Spirit may become manifest among them.

In the liturgical language of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the word "bread" is often used as a metonym for food in general. Used as a symbol of all bodily nourishment, it may also become a symbol of the Holy Spirit, which provides band members with what they refer to as their "spiritual food." This story and the interpretation of its larger implications can be usefully employed to introduce the rich subject of food—in this case, bread—in folklore.

In actuality, references to food are made in all genres of folklore, and presumably in all cultures around the world. References occur in folktales (such as the story Hansel and Gretel, in which the witch's house is made of gingerbread and sugar candy, and Hansel almost becomes dinner himself), in folksongs (the hobo anthem, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain"), in folk dance (the Cake Walk, the Mashed Potato), in festival pranks (trick or treat during Halloween), in costume (a couple dressed as "a night at the movies" for Halloween, one attired as a theater ticket, the other as a bag of popcorn), and even in vernacular architecture (American roadside vernacular architecture includes buildings such as a duck-shaped drive-in restaurant selling roast duck as well as fast-food stands topped with sculptures of hot dogs amply slathered with condiments, as documented in the influential book on postmodern architecture Learning from Las Vegas ).

While it would be impossible to develop a unifying theory or classification scheme that accounts for all such references to food in folklore, a loose framework of analysis can provide a prism through which the subject of food in folklore can be viewed. In order to establish such a framework about food in folklore, however, we should first examine the subject of folk cuisine itself, and folk eating habits. Together, these constitute the domain that scholars in the field of folklore and folklife have come to call "foodways." The food traditions of any one community include not just recipes, but the methods by which foods are gathered, stored, prepared, displayed, served, and disposed of. Such traditions include also culturally transmitted rules that govern ideas of health and cleanliness as related to food. Further, the academic analysis of foodways includes the study of foods that are especially esteemed or shunned by any particular identity group, and the study of culturally specific rules governing the contexts in which particular foods may or may not be eaten.

In events that involve the serving of food—from ordinary meals to holiday feasts—ties of reciprocity between networks of preparers, as well as relationships between those preparing and those being served, become articulated. Differing customs pertaining to food also signal boundaries between differing groups of identification. Food events, therefore, tend to provide a rich subject for folk commentary about any one group's culture and social organization.

It is axiomatic in the field of folklore that folklore genres—whether food, story, art, or song—are expressive culture. Such expressive culture is not passively received and mechanically reproduced. Instead, when engaged in folk expression, individual tradition bearers in any cultural setting consciously build on the past to create the emerging culture. A corollary to this axiom is the idea that any such folk expression is rhetorical in intent: That is, it is designed to persuade its audience of the validity of its point of view about a subject. From this axiom and corollary, it follows that folklore about food in particular—that is, food in folklore, the subject of this essay—can be viewed first as expressive culture that offers a commentary on the foodways of the people from whom the commentary arises, and second as commentary designed to persuade its hearer or viewer of its point of view.

Folkloric commentary about food can be glowingly positive, even sentimental, or intensely negative. These extremes manifest themselves positively in festive, holiday cooking on the one hand, and negatively in food taboos on the other. Americans still listen longingly to songs or poems about chestnuts, wassail, and sugar plums long after these foods have disappeared as a regular feature of their diet. Americans do not just bake gingerbread men and cookies shaped like stars during this time of year. These foods are also turned into folk art when they are used as decorations on Christmas trees, thereby offering a commentary about our reverence for them as holiday foods.

Nontraditional food choices, conversely, may elicit disgust. In the United States, children's folklore, for example, abounds with songs or sayings about foods thought to be inedible. Children may enjoy the playing with the images of such foods to elicit disgust in others. In doing so, they demonstrate that they have internalized many of their culture's food taboos. In general, it is difficult to say a great deal about an item of folk expression without knowing the author, the author's motivation, the context, or the audience response. But in a society in which many children spend their formative years eating often nondescript cafeteria foods, they may also be offering a commentary on institutional food when they sing a song such as "Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat, little chopped up birdies' feet. . . ." Similarly, young people who refer to certain cafeteria offerings as "mystery meat" can be thought of as authoring a rather negative commentary on the food they are being served.

Other folk commentary about mass-produced foods is not so humorous. One urban legend tells of a couple who buy a fast-food dinner of fried chicken. When the woman bites into her meal, she finds that she has been served breaded, fried rat. The story can be viewed as a commentary on the anxiety of many Americans about potential contamination of industrially processed food. The folklorist Gary Alan Fine, who examined a large number of variations of this legend, suggests that the story also seems to chastise contemporary American women. Since the victim is always the woman of the couple, the legend seems to be contending that the whole episode might be her fault: if she had remained in the home and provided her partner with home cooking, the event would never have happened.

In African-American folklore, similar worries about the adulteration of the food supply have on occasion become transformed into rumors that blacks are vulnerable to being specifically targeted with toxic substances. In the late 1980s, folklorist Patricia Turner documented a rumor circulating among some African Americans to the effect that Church's Fried Chicken was owned by the Ku Klux Klan, and that their food contained a substance that would sterilize black men. The rumor seems to have been exacerbated by the fact that Church's located its franchises primarily in inner-city neighborhoods and did little advertising as compared with other fast-food companies. Furthermore, by offering food commonly identified with the African-American home kitchen, Church's had transgressed into somewhat sacred territory. Those who reported hearing the rumor had no problem believing that the Klan was capable of carrying out such a widespread secret plan, as the rumor claimed.

Another cycle of recent urban legends focusing on the disgust elicited by the eating of tabooed foods developed when Southeast Asian refugees began immigrating to the United States after the war in Vietnam. When several thousand refugees settled in Stockton, California, a rumor arose in adjacent communities that an expensive pet dog had disappeared; a neighbor's boy claims he saw a Vietnamese family eating the dog, and remains of the dog were later discovered by a garbage collector. While appearing to focus on racial stereotypes about the divergent eating habits of the new immigrants, according to researcher Florence Baer, this legend actually comments quite articulately on the white community's fear that new immigrants were swarming into the country and consuming so many resources and social services that none would be left for longer-term citizens.

Yet folk commentary on food taboos is not exhausted by urban legends about contamination of the food supply or diversity of eating habits. The most severely tabooed substances, according to esteemed folklore scholar Roger Abrahams, are human flesh, feces, and carrion. Nevertheless, items of folklore that speak of violating these taboos abound. In several predominantly male societies, for example, such as the logging camps of Maine, and railway construction camps in the West, a story known to folklorists as "Moose Turd Pie" has circulated as a song, a legend, and a joke. As the story is told by folksinger Utah Phillips, a new worker comes to work without knowing the workplace custom that whoever complains about the food will have to do the cooking until the next person complains. When the new man inevitably complains, he is forced to cook. To rid himself of the job, he sets about making a pie out of moose feces. On taking a bite of the pie, one of the more experienced coworkers calls out his disgust, "Moose turd! . . . Good though!"

This story comments on foodways in several ways. First, it humorously remarks on the horror of eating a grossly tabooed substance. Second, it seems to comment on gender roles in food preparation by taking for granted the idea that the men involved would rather do physically demanding manual labor than cook, which is often perceived as women's work. Third, the version told in concert by Phillips hints at traditional hazing practices to which new workers in male societies are sometimes subjected. During such hazing practices, the rookie worker is inducted into full-fledged membership in a group only after being ritually feminized—in this case by being assigned a "woman's" job. It also hints that the appropriate way for the new worker to endure such an initiation with his sense of masculinity intact is to develop a prank in retaliation that is as humiliating to the hazers as the hazing to the low man on the totem pole.

Folklore about food can reveal a great deal about gender identity. That life on the western frontier of the United States necessarily required pioneers to enlarge their repertoire of foods is incontrovertible, as folklorist Charles Camp has discussed in his review of the foodways data gathered by the Federal Writers Project during the New Deal years. Ranchers and cowboys who, like Native Americans, believed that no part of the animal on which their livelihood depended should be wasted on slaughter, developed the habit of eating bull testicles, which they often have referred to as "rocky mountain oysters." In Montana, where this specialized food may also be referred to as "Montana tendergroin" or "cowboy caviar," several festivals have come to be held every year in which all festival goers combined eat several tons of rocky mountain oysters. While there are a number of such events around the state, the first and largest, called "the Testicle Festival," takes place in Clinton, Montana, just east of Missoula.

Proverbial expressions in American English seem to imply that American males admire the virility of bulls. One speaks of being "strong as a bull." Manual labor that requires heavy lifting is called "bull work." A robust stock market is a "bull market." The eating of bull testicles can be interpreted as the human male's appropriating the bull's virility for himself. A festival that features this as its raison d'être, becomes in turn a celebration of human masculinity.

But the eating of such identifiable body parts of the bull also demands of many people who attend a suspension of some of their usual food inhibitions. Eating of such animal organs as eyeballs, brains, or sexual organs would under normal circumstances elicit displeasure from many Americans, old cowboy traditions notwithstanding. At the Testicle Festival in Clinton, Montana, this relaxation of eating habits—combined with the celebratory drinking of intoxicating beverages—seems to cause a lowering of other inhibitions as well. Human body parts that are usually covered are publicly displayed. Behaviors usually undertaken in private may be acted out or simulated in public. The result is a carnival-like folk festival the rationale of which celebrates masculinity in a way that inverts usual cultural inhibitions and exposes—as good festivals do, as good folklore does, and as some folklore about food does—human passions in their most naked form.

See also Art, Food in: Literature; Bible, Food in the; Bread, Symbolism of; Taboos .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrahams, Roger. "Equal Opportunity Eating: a Structural Excursus on Things of the Mouth." In Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, edited by Linda Kelly Brown and Kay Mussell, pp. 19–36. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Abrahams, Roger D. "Introductory Remarks to a Rhetorical Theory of Folklore." Journal of American Folklore 81 (1968): 143–158.

Baer, Florence E. "Give Me . . . Your Huddled Masses: Anti-Vietnamese Refugee Lore and the Image of the Limited Good." Western Folklore 41 (1982): 275–291.

Broudy, Saul Frederick. "The Effect of Performer-Audience Interaction on Performer Strategies: 'Moose-Turd Pie' in Context." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981.

Camp, Charles. American Foodways: What, When, Why, and How We Eat in America. Little Rock, Ark.: August House, 1989.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

Fine, Gary Allen. "Cokelore and Coke Law: Urban Belief Tales and the Problem of Multiple Origins." Journal of American Folklore 92 (1979): 477-482.

Fine, Gary Allen. "The Kentucky Fried Rat: Legends and Modern Society." Journal of the Folklore Institute 17 (1980): 222-243

Kalcik, Susan. "Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and Performance of Identity." In Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: the Performance of Group Identity, edited by Linda Kelly Brown and Kay Mussell, pp. 37–65. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Morse, Kendall. "Good Though! Seagulls and Summer People." Folk Legacy Records C-79 1980.

Phillips, Utah. "Good Though!" Good Though ! Philo Records #PH1004, 1973.

Theophano, Janet. "It's Really Tomato Sauce but We Call It Gravy." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982.

Toelken, Barre. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

Turner, Patricia. "Church's Fried Chicken and The Klan: A Rhetorical Analysis of Rumor in the Black Community," Western Folklore 46 (1987): 294–306.

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1972.

Yoder, Don. "Folk Cookery." In Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, edited by Richard M. Dorson, pp. 325–350. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Jonathan C. David

Great Green Globs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts

Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts
Mutilated monkey meat
Little chopped up birdies' feet
Great green globs of greasy grimy gopher guts
And I forgot my spoon.

So give me a sandwich with pus on top
Monkey vomit and camel snot
French fried eyeballs dipped in goo
Have some (Mom or Dad) it's good for you.

Good, Though!

Chorus: Oh, the Wild River crew is a rough old crew,
And I'll tell you the reason why:
We live on brew and cat-liver stew,
And a daily piece of moose-turd pie.

1. Old Jigger Jones kicked the knots off logs With his bar feet, so they say, But he hung around Wild River too long, And it drove him nuts one day.
2. Now old Jigger Jones he got pretty tired Of doin' all of our cookin', So he says, "If I hear one more guy bitch, For a new cook you'll be lookin'."
3. Jones was out in the woods next day Chasin' a big deer herd; Coming back to camp without any luck, He slipped upon some fresh moose turds.
4. He scooped 'em up in his old game bag, The grin on his face was sly; He thought the boys would surely bitch If they tried a piece of his moose-turd pie.
5. The boys come in for supper that night—Their appetites were high; They chawed their way through a ten-course meal, Then they started in on the moose-turd pie.
6. One by one the boys turned green, Their eyeballs rolled to and fro; Then one guy hollered as he sank to the floor, "My God, that's a moose-turd pie! [Shouted] Good, though!" [cheerfully, with eyebrows and one finger raised]

In Barre Toelken, Dynamics of Folklore, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979, pp. 179–180.