Everything on today’s link list is giving me nostalgia for the music, media, and fascination with wearable candy of the 80s and 90s.
From Sociological Images, a brief history of how the strawberry became such a popular fruit in the U.S. (I love stories about fruit marketing, but I wish I had read this piece before posting my strawberry jams!) I was surprised to hear that the character Strawberry Shortcake was created as part of a campaign to raise the strawberry’s profile. As I child I possessed quite a few Strawberry Shortcake tie-in toys–fruit-scented dolls, cartoons, even an odd little Atari game–so that must have been a successful campaign indeed, like unto that of the California Raisins.
At NPR’s The Salt, a fun little piece about one woman who makes food to be eaten onscreen in films–sometimes edible and sometimes not. Her techniques reminded me of Buy Me That, a series of media literacy programs from the 90s intended to help kids see through television advertising. The food episode was most memorable for its gross-out factor: to make food look good on TV, stylists have to use things that are emphatically Not Food like creamy Crisco scoops for ice cream and raw hamburger pinned and tucked as fussily as any prima donna.
RocketNews24: A Japanese Twitter user spends three hours knitting a scarf out of gummy candy.
To think of all the money I spent on fishnet gloves in my gothier days, when one could just make fishnet from a carrot!
I honestly don’t know where this meme originated (but I got it from my friend Richard):
One more video for old time’s sake: “Pesto is the quiche of the 80s.”
