While farting around in blogworld, I surfed onto Fringe Element Enthusiast's blog (shockoecreek.blogspot.com), and was thus inspired. (I haven't figured out how to link to other blogs yet. Actually, I sort of have, but it's more work than I'd like to do right now and I find it much easier to simply type the link out and let you work for yourselves. Come on now, it's not as though you're busy--you're wasting time already by reading this, aren't you?)

Fringe Enthusiast discovered a pack of Spongebob Squarepants cookies which were trademarked by someplace in the wide and faceless Midwest but which, upon careful inspection, were labelled "Product of China." This, in itself, has always amused me. It seems inevitable that Chinese-manufactured items are labelled in two languages: PRODUCT OF CHINA / PRODUIT DE CHINE.

Um, English and French? OK, sure, two of the most influential culture/languages on Earth, but still. No one else buys this stuff? If you buy something from IKEA, the directions are mostly pictograms anyway, but whatever actual wording exists is in approximately ten languages, usually in this descending order: Swedish, German, English, French, Danish, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese. I usually like trying to follow directions in one of the languages that I do understand but which isn't my first, just to see how it turns out. So far, thanks to the rudimentary directions and the pictograms, I haven't had any collapsing furniture, but one day those Swedes are going to mess with my head and throw in directions in some obscure German dialect just to see if I'm paying attention.

So anyway, cookies.

The children of the past started every fairy tale with "Once Upon a Time," but in the wake of Star Wars, my people have supplanted that with "Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

So, long, long ago, in a galaxy...well, a couple of miles off, there was a bakery. Actually, there were several bakeries. In the long long ago that was my '70s childhood, most sizable cities still had a lot of local bakeries. I didn't know a single soul who ate Wonder Bread, because we all ate bread from the local places. Some people ate Schmidt's, some ate Koester's; we ate Hauswald's. If you didn't go to one of the actual bakery stores, the local supermarkets--even the local branches of nationwide chains--stocked the local stuff. You could go to a Giant store, and there would be about six loaves of Wonder Bread and ninety-three loaves of Schmidt's and Hauswald's.

But, since Hauswald had a store near our house, my mother simply included a bakery trip in the shopping run. We only ever bought bread there: nice Baltimoreans do not, as a rule, think much of cakes from a store. Breadmaking is labor-intensive and less showy, so it's fine to buy it, especially if it's only going to be used for the kids' school lunch.

I can distinctly remember that even stodgy Hauswald's cranked out a few baked goods to cash in on the popular culture of the day. (Keep in mind, this is 1975.) I remember specifically wanting one cookie, one sunny day in that distant year.

There were a few Scooby-Doo cookies, some Superman cookies. I wanted the one that was big and round and frosted in pink and yellow icing. It featured a slightly exaggerated figure in a running pose (my fellow Ancient Civilisation nerds would recognize it as "knielaufschema.")

It also had a legend surrounding the figure: "Let's Streak!"

Of course, I had no idea, at five or six, what this meant.

In retrospect, it's rather hard to believe that Hauswald would have even made Superman cookies, much less something so, er, alternative. They did, though, and perhaps more astonishing, my mother got one of them for me. It took a few more years before I learned what streaking had been.

Most of the traditional bakeries are long gone. Hauswald still exists, but it seems to produce only for institutional use now; its neighborhood stores have joined Hutzler's department store and the Century Theatre in the special heaven reserved for much-loved but much-outdated civic institutions. I think Schmidt's is gasping along, and Koester's went the way of the dodo before I hit high school. There are about four old-fashioned small, one-location bakeries in town (if you visit Baltimore, be sure to come in August to buy some peach cake from Hoehn's).

Isn't it sad that even our silly, spur-of-the-moment popular culture, even when it filters down to silly cookies, is farmed out now? There are no local bakeries left to do it, no local dime stores hawking cheapo candy shaped like Mutant Ninja Turtles. This is the realm of vast industrial China, now.

But then: the bakeries that live on don't mind cashing in where they can, usually on sheet cakes for kid's parties. You can go to Muhly's and get a cake with a creepy screen print of Spongebob. And then again: I was shopping at the market a couple of weeks ago and noticed a special-order cake being boxed up at Muhly's. It was evidently for a bachelorette party, and the bakery staff was trying desperately to keep it under wraps while they boxed it up. It had been beautifully iced with acres of sugar garlands and roses, and I know that the cake underneath was luscious and tasty--but it was surmounted by a very large, artistic and realistic, iced and decorated, uncircumcised dick.

I'll bet the Chinese don't do THAT.