Mercantile Legends and the World Economy: Dangerous Imports from the Third World

Fine, Gary Alan

doi:10.2307/1499689

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The emphasis in these recent versions, however, is not the specific type of food in which the dangerous animal hides but the negligence of the supermarket chain for not inspecting fruits and vegetables before putting them out for customers to handle. As such, as Fine (1989) observed, its thematic ties are with legend complexes in which deadly snakes are found in nonfood products like carpets and clothing.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…While some widely spread and controversial narratives have proved to be untrue when investigated by skeptical scholars, as Paul Smith (1984) noted in his discussion of food-contamination rumors and legends in context, most of the stories told as part of the legend-telling process are in fact true or at least not obviously untrue. Gary Alan Fine (1989), too, was able to document large numbers of cases in which consumers had found rodents or other creatures inside bottles of commercial beverages; hence the widespread legend "The Mouse in the Coke Bottle" was based on a substantial body of legally documentable instances. The event recounted above is also part of a large corpus of narratives describing instances when a dog, considered a taboo dish by Europeans and North Americans, was unintentionally consumed.…”

Section: Contemporary Legend and Culinary Tourismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Whispers in an Ice Cream Parlor: Culinary Tourism, Contemporary Legends, and the Urban Interzone

Ellis¹

2009

Journal of American Folklore

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A contemporary legend active in 1910 held that white women were at risk of being abducted into involuntary slavery if they visited an ice cream parlor. This article grounds this legend in the emergence of ice cream into everyday American foodways, a trend paralleled by the growing economic impact of Mediterranean immigrants and by the increasing practice of "warehousing" potentially marriageable women of Western and Northern European descent in big-city colleges and technical schools. The ethnic-owned ice cream "parlor" thus became a liminal interzone in which single women engaged in culinary tourism in a way that was seen as dangerous to their ethnic identity. "Ice cream parlors," solemnly stated Miss Florence Mabel Dedrick in 1910, "are the places where scores of girls have taken their first step downward." Dedrick's remarks appeared in an enormously popular book titled Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, or, War on the White Slave Trade, a collection of various crusaders' accounts of combating the alleged criminal conspiracy that trapped scores of unwary white girls into entering a life of prostitution. Her contribution gave her impressions as a rescue missionary working among the denizens of Chicago's red-light district. Innocent country girls, drawn to the big city by its attractions and promise of good jobs, came in contact with the agents of Satan, who lurked inside movie theaters, amusement parks, fruit stores, and, most especially, ice cream parlors. And the danger was spreading, Dedrick said: ice cream was the bait attracting young girls "even in the large country town," where white slavers, the malign agents of a national and international market in prostitutes, had recruiting stations (Dedrick 1910:111).Another contributor to Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, Chicago's federal district attorney, Edwin W. Sims, claimed to have personally examined some 250 victims of white slavery and had documented the peril with multiple confessions from its perpetrators. "One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city," Sims warned, "and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement." When such places are owned by foreigners, the danger is greater, and he alluded to "scores of cases . . . where young girls have taken

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Contemporary Legend and Culinary Tourismmentioning

confidence: 99%