Actually, the popularity of Spam is probably due to its inexpensiveness. Hawaii has plenty of poor folk and most people seem to just scrape by. Most families are either recent immigrants or just a generation or two past the generation that raised entire families working menial labor and plantation jobs. Some families still fit that description. The current high cost of living isn’t conducive to building personal wealth, either. Land and housing are limited resources and consequently are very expensive.
Spam is cheap and versatile. You could probably stretch one can to make a small family’s breakfast, lunch, dinner-- Spam omelettes, fried Spam and eggs, fried Spam sandwiches, Spam and cabbage, Spam musubis, Spam as garnish in your ramen. As a result, more or less everyone grew up around it. It’s become part of the culture and isn’t really perceived as a poor person’s food.
I’m a bit surprised at some of the hostile responses here. Do you understand the difference between lowbrow and highbrow in anything else? Movies? Novels? Music?
Lowbrow foods are designed to hit the basal pleasures hard without much refinement or complexity. They load up on the fat, sugar and MSG to provide that immediate rush but theres no depth behind them. The food isn’t sophisticated and it just clobbers you in the mouth. Furthermore, lowbrow food often attempts to hide the poor quality of it’s ingredients through the use of strong flavours. Ketchup is the ultimate example of a lowbrow food, overwhelmingly sweet, salty and sour. Anything you put ketchup on will end up just tasting of ketchup, it overpowers other flavours.
Highbrow foods are more pure and subtle in their flavours and provide balance and integrity. Theres an effort to bring out the inherent taste of the food and provide balance and harmony on the plate. The goal of high brow food is that you should be able to taste each element of the food clearly yet at the same time maintain a cohesive whole.
This is not to say there’s anything wrong with lowbrow food. Sometimes, all you want is just a nice big plate of greasy french fries dipped in ketchup or some buttery popcorn. At the same time, lots of highbrow food falls well short of it’s intended mark and is stunningly awful. Lowbrow vs Highbrow food is like watching a hollywood blockbuster with lots of tits and explosions vs a cerebreal arthouse film. Nobody would ever confuse the two with each other which is why it’s so puzzling to me why people insist it’s just a matter of pretension when it comes to food.
I can go one better than that. The Sydney Morning Herald several years ago ran a lighthearted competition for the worst old-timey recipe. The winner was a depression-era hospital cookbook which had a recipe for…
…wait forrrrrr it…
…MOCK BRAINS!
As I recall, it involved congealed porridge. :eek:
If its served in something disposable (paper or styrofoam), its lowbrow, but if someone actually washed/washes the dishes you eat and drink out of, its high brow…
If you sit down to eat it, and order it, and someone brings it to you, its high brow, if a semi literate teen hands it to you in your car, its low brow…
the difference between weinerschnitzle mit brot and a hot dog is that the first comes on a plate, and the second comes in a napkin. Oh, and the first costs $15.99
Well, no – the Coney Island restaurants I mentioned earlier are definitely lowbrow, but they have real dishes and cutlery, table service, all that fancy highbrow stuff.
Snort! You’ve been whooshed by the name of decidedly lowbrow fast-food chain.
A Wienerschnitzle proper is a veal (the lowbrow version is pork) cutlet pounded out paper thin, breaded, and deep fried, served with thinly sliced lemon. A good one will be larger than a dinner plate, and given the current exchange rate, probably can’t be had for less than $20. The brot is most probably a zimmel, which americans call a kaiser roll, except it will have a thin, crisp crust, and you’ll be charged for each one you take from the basket. Wienerschnizel is available in highbrow places as well as practically any Gasthaus, which are typically working class.
To me, the word “california” as a food related adjective means “with avacado”
Some more anecdotal evidence. Honeybuns were the biggest seller in my High School cafeteria, as well. They came in right behind taco salads. Now, it was a predominately white, rural community but surely not all of us were “white trash” nor criminals as you seem to imply.
Perhaps it’s just that people enjoy cinnamon sweet rolls over other confections? Maybe the Honeybun is popular for the same reason that Cinnabon is popular? Maybe it’s because they taste good, cinnamon is a popular flavor, and the vast majority of people have a sweet tooth?
…personally, I think that they put crack in the honeybun frosting.
Ah yes, the lowbrow Honeybun is decidedly fattening and not very good for you, but you know what is worse nutritionally? The Honeybun’s Highbrow equivalent… The Gourmet Cinnabon Cinnamon Roll (730 Calories, 24g fat). The white trash seem to have the nutritional highground, as compared to all those cinnabon stuffing yuppies.
The fact that we’re all chiming in with opinions means that we’re not “really top drawer.” The classiest of the classy eat what they want to eat and have no cultural hangups about it whatsoever. The lowest classes do the same. Thinking that something is highbrow or lowbrow is a very middle-class state of mind.
Ditto linguistically. Nattering over grammar and word usage belies a fundamental social insecurity on the part of the natterer.
My own (middle class) opinion about food is that it’s marketing first and scarcity second. Lobster is both relatively scarce, and also hyped up as being “luxurious.” Steak is less scarce, but also gets hype. Things like the fiddlehead ferns and jellyfish powder, which made a splash on this forum earlier in the week, are relatively scarce (in the U.S. anyway) but receive no hype at all–so they’re not stereotypically prestigious. They might impress your geeky friends, but they aren’t going to excite the average well-to-do businessman.
Interestingly, this means that food from McDonald’s is more prestigious than food from Jack-in-the-Box purely due to marketing. They both use the same cheap and plentiful ingredients.
