Popular Culture
Oversized vegetables have featured prominently across many media. Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach takes this to the extreme, with the title character sailing inside the gigantic peach across the Atlantic Ocean. Giant vegetable competitions feature in a number of films and television series, such as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit in which it is central to the plot. That's Life!, a popular British television show, frequently featured unusually shaped vegetables that were sent in or photographed by viewers.
The BBC comedy television programme Blackadder contains several jokes relating to the character Baldrick and his obsession with odd-shaped turnips. The most notable example occurs in the episode "Beer", in which Baldrick discovers a turnip shaped exactly like a "thingie", giving rise to several jokes throughout the episode.
Unusually shaped vegetables feature in the Terry Pratchett novel The Truth, where a man constantly submitting them to a newspaper for publication is a minor but frequent annoyance to the paper's editor.
Ben Elton's novel This Other Eden is set in a future in which most aspects of life are controlled to conformity, meaning the loss of 'amusingly shaped vegetables', much to the protagonist's annoyance.
Read more about this topic: Unusually Shaped Vegetable
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)