The Museum of Weird Consumer Culture

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Food Photo Gallery


Dried Dog This "weird food" website is a grab-bag - some of the items are truly odd, while others are simply foreign and would be familiar to anyone who travels. This kind of begs the question of what makes something truly weird. In the sense of showing just how strange our consumer culture really is, I would go for something like the dried dogs for sale in this Chinese market, not because they show the Chinese are strange for eating dogs, but because they show how weird a consumer culture is when it raises hundreds of millions of perfectly edible domestic animals, and then refuses to eat them!	Bulalo Flavor Instant Mami. This has real meat and vegetables in it, and it actually tasted very good. Made in the Philippines.	MacCoffee. On the front it says it has "True American Taste." On the back the back the instructions are in Russian, and there is a tiny label "Made in Singapore." My student, Candice Lowe brought this back from Kazakhstan.	Can you taste the money? I have recently published a paper in the Journal of Consumer Culture on some of the absurdities in the bottled water business - imagine the USA importing water from Mexico and India, at the same time Mexico and India import water from the USA, for example. Water is a substance full of magical power, packaged in a clear bottle labeled with Nature and Science, blessed by giant corporations and government authority. Most bottled water is marketed as coming from a particular place or corporation, or it has a mysterious made-up name like Dasani; very few bottled waters are marketed like this one, under the authority of a celebrity like the Donald. This is truly weird.


Do you have a taste for foreign food? Stever Portigal has this great online museum of foreign grocery products at which has many strange and wonderful foods which I have never seen, but would someday life to taste.	This is not Oscar Meyer! There is something disturbing about eating a sausage made into a human face. Is it cannibalism? Is it that sickly smile? A lot of trouble went into making this into some very cute meat. Original source.	Celebrity branding is not only for sports heroes and famous actresses. Politicians had to get in on the act, and back in 2004 we saw the debut of Yassir Arafat brand potato chips in Egypt, where they proved instantly popular. Part of the price of each bag went to the PLO. You can imagine the jokes which followed. But seriously folks, if Billy Carter can have a novelty beer just because he is the US President's brother, any kind of fame is fair game.