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Summarized by Melisa Davis
Mormon Foods Featured on Olympic Pins
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH -- Salt Lake City has Olympic pins for sale, but
with a twist -- the pins feature traditional Mormon foods and
cookware, including funeral potatoes, lime Jell-O with grated
carrots, the present-at-every-activity red punch and the ubiquitous
Dutch oven. These and other pins highlight familiar Utah foods, such
as fry sauce -- mixed mayonnaise and ketchup -- and mint sandwiches,
and are already being bought and traded by collectors.
The pins are all the rage, according to Craig Weston, the Salt Lake
City-based director for Aminco, licensee for Olympic pins. He said
that the food series pins are the most popular yet. People not
familiar with the pictured foods are sometimes confused. Some
believed the mint sandwich pin was a Book of Mormon. Others thought
that the roasting marshmallow pin looked more like a "flaming roll of
toilet paper," according to Jim Liddiard of Sandy, Utah, who sells
Olympic pins. Weston said that local people have fun sharing the
foods' stories with those from out-of-state.
The Utah pins include a Dutch oven, voted the state cooking pot by
the legislature in 1997. Utahns buy more Dutch ovens than the rest of
the world combined, said Ruth Kendrick of Ogden, Utah -- who with her
partner won the World Championship Dutch Oven Cook-off in 1998. She
supposes that the cookware first came across the plains with the
Mormon pioneers and has been popular ever since.
The food pins are flying out of the stores in Utah, and dealers are
selling them online. Weston anticipates that when the Sydney games
are over, the rest of the world will get to know the Mormon food pins.
Source:
Food-pin fever hits Utah
(Phoenix) AZ Republic 30Aug00 D6
By Judy Walker: Arizona Republic
Olympics spur 'craze' commemorating homey fare
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