A pred that blends in with society, but is therefore constantly surrounded by their ideal prey.
It’s like being offered up a fresh burger, and it happens wherever you go outside. There’s so much delicious food available all of the time. It can be overwhelming. It’s hard not to overeat, and it’s hard not to blow your cover.
It’s also kind of heaven. You’ll never be without food. You feast like a king every night. You have a lifetime supply, a free buffet every day.
Maybe when you first arrived you couldn’t really help yourself. You ate too much, got a tummy ache, and you almost got caught. But now that you’ve settled down, you can dine at your leisure. You have no competition and no enemies. Only a whole lot of cute, friendly, trusting, tasty food.
August 22nd is World Folklore Day, so we're bringing to you a sampling of our extensive folklore collection this week. Folklore studies, while pre-dating popular culture studies, is an important aspect of what we preserve at the Browne Popular Culture Library, since it seeks to learn about everyday people and how what we find significant is transmitted across time and space.
"Foodways" is the term used to describe the cultural practices around making, sharing, and eating food. Among our various books on foodways is the American Folklore Society's Digest: An Interdisciplinary Study of Food and Folkways (1991-1995), which the Department of Popular Culture Studies here at BGSU has been involved in at times. It features articles, reviews, photoessays, and calendars of important food festivals and conferences. Here are the covers of the four issues we keep in our collection:
The journal was relaunched in 2012 under the name Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture, and can be found at https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/digest/index. Its articles are open source, so consider checking them out!
The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States. Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use. Visit our website at https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html.
The sign of an unmortified sinful habit is being able to digest the sin without any bitterness in the heart. A man may imagine the kind of grace and mercy that will allow him to swallow and digest his daily sins without bitterness. When he does, he is at the brink of turning the grace of God into lewdness, and of being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. There is no greater evidence of a false and rotten heart, than to be able to trade that grace and mercy for the sinful habit.
March 1981 ad for Commando. For reasons I can only guess at old posts I have made like this featuring Commando tend not to show up in my own search results. DC Thomson.