Maybe a simple national dish made with very cheap ingredients, or an old story around a very important staple crop. Some deep, deep memory that persists for a long time.
These are the opposite of thanksgiving, or other harvest and abundance cultural relics.
I don't think the USA has that starving myth. This cold war episode is as close as they get, and it is from the perspective of "the other". Maybe the dust bowl?
Cinema is not shy exploring ideas adjacent to this concept (Wall-E, Idiocracy, Demolition Man, Interstellar, to name a few). It, somehow, self-acknowledges that absense of a starving myth by reversing what their abundance means. Almost as if it wanted to have it, and it's ashamed of being spoiled.
From Wikipedia...
>Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to catch eel and grow corn and served as an interpreter for them until he too succumbed to disease a year later. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit also gave food to the colonists when supplies brought from England proved insufficient. Having brought in a good harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated at Plymouth for three days in the autumn of 1621.
Another episode: Out of the 500 settlers at the Jamestown outpost, roughly 440 (88%) starved to death through the winter of 1609, and survivors had to resort to eating rats, mice, snakes, dogs, shoe leather, and belts, and even some cannibalism.
And that's before you get to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era that gave us The Grapes of Wrath, migrant agricultural workers eating boiled weeds or flour mixed with lard, Hoover Stew, etc.
Not quite on the scale of Ukraine's Holodomor or Ireland's Great Famine, but it's interesting how the narrative around Thanksgiving has developed over time.
There's something about a simple dish made with simple cheap ingredients that makes it require no Wikipedia to pass on memory. You know what it is all about immediately. People starved, came up with clever ways to survive, and made those into culture. Poisonous plants that require arduous processing (like cassava or lupin beans), then make into crops, also carry that memory.
> And that's before you get to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era that gave us The Grapes of Wrath, migrant agricultural workers eating boiled weeds or flour mixed with lard, Hoover Stew, etc.
That's more likely. I had never heard of these.
cranberryturkey•7mo ago
layer8•7mo ago