Just realized that the title of this thread reminds me of another artifact
of modern culture: "100% genuine naugahyde!" Tee hee.
> That's why, while I agree that mock apple pie therefore *seems* a rather
> innocuous, sentimental type of starting point to start on a tirade about
> the bogusness of so much of what people are "fed" and "believe" as a
> result; and that such bogusness is usually designed to be very palatable. I
> like that about it, that it's a weird starting place. But certainly it only
> takes on any resonance for me when I hold it up to the larger picture.
> Things we've learned since childhood to think are good for us, but if we
> look at them now we can see are not only innocuous shams, but also bad for
> us. We acquire the taste for them, thinking they are real, and thenceforth
> we can be fed them anytime. If apples were in shortage one time once,
> what's in shortage now?
>
> Ha. That hesitation (I hesitated too, for a good long while) suggests we've
> developed a taste for mock apple pie. :)
Good question, and I can see how the mock apple pie, as a flawed object
which simultaneously acts as a symbol of wholesomeness of person and
society, would be a powerful reminder of the bogus stuff our culture tries
to feed us on an ongoing basis...but it's more than that; it's also a
symbol and physical gesture of parental love and of the struggle to keep
up standards, as it were, in spite of hardship. Besides, suppose the pie
were real--it's still not exactly a healthy addition to one's diet.
I think the mock apple pie needs to be considered in context and
doesn't quite deserve the ironic sneer I suspect your "Ha!" implies. Even
if mothers were deceiving their kids and participating in a kind of
nationalistic bad faith or cultural mendacity, it seems to me that even as
late as WW2 the kind of ingredients used in a mock apple pie would not
have had the air of unhealthiness that we associate with them now. Lard
tastes good, suet tastes good - :-) - and eaten moderately in the
occasional dessert, nobody would have blinked at these things. If
mothers leaned on cinnamon for flavor and crackers for texture, well,
again that's a symptom of want, not of delusion. For active people in a
less sedentary age, some fat in the diet wasn't considered as awful as it
is today, especially for a growing red-blooded American kid <g>. I don't
think a mother or even a doctor of the time would have looked upon the
mock apple pie as something particularly awful or fraudulent--it's just a
way of making do. And heck, subsisting upon a diet of *real* apple pies
wouldn't do one's waistline any favors either.
I guess I'm just not convinced that serving a mock apple pie would be
considered much of a fraud by the standards of the time. It certainly
seems to me to be less fraudulant than the ancient practice of offering an
animals offal and skins up to the gods while holding the good food back
for the feast. We need ritual, and we need to be practical too, I
suppose.
I guess I find the whole mock apple pie scenario more poignant than
ironic, at least when we focus on the baker and eaters; it reminds me of
the way my mother always had powdered milk in the house when I was very
young. We didn't use it often, but it was always there for the days when
our regular milk ran out before the next infusion of grocery money became
available. Maybe milk doesn't have the same patriotic tinge--there's no
saying that goes, "as American as baseball and milk"--and it's considered
more necessity than luxury (by the lactose-tolerant, anyway), but it's an
example of using the best thing you can afford in a pinch. And the funny
thing is, my sister and I always came away feeling like the powdered milk
was something special, not a step down from the real thing. (I don't
remember if mom deliberately fostered that impression or if we just
thought it was cool that you could get milk out of a box. I do know that
she didn't mope about it and didn't sit down with us and say, "Now look,
kids, today you get the bad milk because payday isn't until Friday.")
As for the needfulness of the symbol: yes, the existence of the mock
apple pie asks the question, "why make a fake apple pie instead of a real
something else?" And one answer is, "to participate in the act of
consuming a cultural symbol of wholesomeness, even if the object consumed
isn't itself all that wholesome." Another answer is, "You can't always
get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might get what you
need." Better yet, a mixture of the two, for how do you deny someone the
right to participate in the little rituals and symbols of culture, even if
sometimes you have to employ imitation symbols to do so?
So, to me the mock apple pie is not an ironic symbol but a touching one.
The problem with using it as an example of the insidious bogusness of the
things we're often taught, I think, is that it's a much more powerful
symbol in it's sincere mode. It's not as though the mother baking
it doesn't love her son and wouldn't make something better if she could.
It's not as though the son, if he suspected something were amiss, wouldn't
smile anyway and tell his mom it's wonderful because he loves her too and
doesn't want her to be disappointed.
Still, one could look at other issues, such as who purveys the recipe?
Did the cracker company come up with this as a way to market their wares
in a depressed economy, for example? That would be pretty harsh (but if
the recipie works, does that justify it?). Does an apple consortium
promote the Americanness of apple pies, the way Chevy and Ford and Dodge
do with pickup trucks?
There are just so many other bogus things that deserve our wrath more, I
feel. Like those damn Visa Card commercials set in "Whoville," with their
message that money and gifts are the medium through which we express the
sentiment that money and gifts don't really define Christmas. Now
there's some cynical sh*t.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
