From the exotic appeal of oranges to the joy of home-grown tomatoes, many fruits and vegetables have come to play key roles in our gardening, cooking, and eating habits. This book explores ten familiar cultivars apples, bananas, corn, cranberries, peppers, oranges, pumpkins, tobacco, tomatoes, and watermelons to show how they have become intimately entwined with the American way of life.
Through recipes and superstitions, jokes and urban legends, history and advertising, these foods have become unmistakably part of our popular culture. We might attend a county fair and see a blue ribbon...

From the first woolly mammoths painted in exquisite detail on Paleolithic cave walls to contemporary depictions of anthropomorphized mice as heroes of animated films and fiction, animals have played crucial roles in human cultures around the world. In What Are the Animals to Us? scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines explore the diverse meanings of animals in science, religion, folklore, literature, and art. The contributors focus especially on analyzing cultural products about animals. The chapters in the first section of the book, From Totems to Tales, interpret folklore of...