Meet The Team / Sean Elder

If New York has given it up for whoopie pies, San Francisco is a city that has sold its soul for a box of macaroons. And I don't mean the coconut kind that get stuck in your teeth – I mean French-style macaroons (often called macarons); little, round, pastel-colored puffs of perfection. If you've ever fantasized going to San Francisco with some flowers in your hair long after the Summer of Love turned to fall, I'm here to tell you: This is where the magic went. Tune in; turn on; add ten pounds.

Like the whoopie pie in NYC, French macaroons have been dubbed "the next cupcake" here, though I don't think the fair cupcake has to pack her bag quite yet. Macaroons are cookie sandwiches made with almond meal (or flour), powdered sugar, egg whites and food coloring, surrounding a filling of buttercream, ganache or jelly. Compared to the humble cupcake, the macaroon is rarefied – and at $1.60 each, they still go faster than Oreos, and are not the kind of snack you'll be buying for your ten-year-old's birthday party.

But forget the children for a moment, and get over your French-bashing and savor the flavor of these macaroons from Paulette San Francisco. First, dig the pretty colors, man. Caribbean chocolate, lemon, Sicilian pistachio, violet cassis – each box is like a rainbow, and lasts about as long. I brought six of them to the movies with me (The Blind Side) and had to stop myself from eating the whole sample set before the film was over. (And yes, I could discern the flavors in the dark.)

At some point in the last year, America's love affair with cupcakes started to cool off. We as a nation weren't thinking about cupcakes all the time. We didn't return the cupcake's calls as quickly as we used to. We just weren't that into cupcakes anymore.

It might have had something to do with cupcakes putting on airs. We could still recall a time when cupcakes were what your mom made for a kid's birthday party -- and not even her favorite kid. They were what you made when you couldn't be bothered to make a proper cake. How on earth could someone charge five dollars for one?

So we moved on. Sure, we still saw cupcakes sometimes, shared some jokes, maybe even a few nibbles. But when we went home and wiped that cream off our lips, we didn't feel that old frisson anymore.

Now we were making whoopie.

After writing about Aunt Jemima for a previous Slashfood post, I became curious about the dark side – racial images used in food advertising – and it seems I'm not the only one. Texas A&M journalism professor Marilyn Kern-Foxworth wrote a whole book about blacks in advertising, entitled "Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Rastus" (the guy on the Cream of Wheat box). But what's more amazing is that all three of these icons are still found on packaging today.

Okay, there is nothing inherently racist about putting black people on breakfast boxes, or else Wheaties would be in a lot of trouble. And I'm sure that the popularity of those icons, not to mention their products, had something to do with the diaspora of Southerners throughout the country, who associated freed slaves and faithful retainers with the comfort food of their ancestral home. The derogatory nature of some of these ads (a 1915 Cream of Wheat ad showed Uncle Sam looking at Rastus, bearing a bowl of cereal, and saying, "Well, you're helping some!") changed with the times.

Speedy Alka-Seltzer is one of our more durable male advertising mascots, though you wouldn't know it to listen to him. The high-pitched voice heard in over 200 TV advertisements between 1954 and 1964 (courtesy radio actor Dick Beals) could have belonged to a Madison Avenue castrato, sent to school an overindulgent nation on the error of its ways.

For Alka-Seltzer is not food, of course, but its antidote. In this Sixties spot, Speedy promotes the product as good for political headaches and Mardis Gras hangovers. The original model (brainchild of ad man Chuck Tenant and graphic artist Bob Watkins) was retired for decades, but made a triumphant comeback last year. In a series of Web videos, Speedy accompanied the Conchords-like singing duo Rhett & Link as they crossed the country in a tricked out AMC Gremlin dubbed the Speedmobile, playing chicken (and burger and falafel) with heartburn and stomachaches.

Speedy wasn't alone in the world of mascots. Though it's become harder to find Thomas Lipton on a box of Lipton tea these days, his spirit lives, Tom Joad-like, in every bag. Sometimes called the father of modern advertising, the Scots-Irish entrepreneur was celebrated for stunts such as parading hogs through Glasgow wearing signs that read, "I'm going to Lipton's! Best shop in town for Irish bacon!" (I guess you had to be there.) Lipton went from one teashop to over 300 in twenty years and was famed in the U.K. for his healthy, abstemious lifestyle. For that and underselling the competition.

Lipton went on to buy (and revive) blighted British tea plantations in Ceylon and pioneered the "flow-thru" tea bag that helped Americans overcome their fear of the stuff. His use of the word "brisk" (tea-taster code for leaves that weren't stale) was revived most recently in the canned ice tea commercials featuring Claymation puppets modeled after Bruces Willis and Lee, among other cultural icons, who exclaimed of the beverage, "That's brisk, baby!"

It's tea season in our house and I noticed something missing from Celestial Seasons' Sleepytime tea package: the Sleepytime Bear's family.

You know the Bear: dozing in front of the fire, cat in his lap. Used to be you saw Mrs. Bear and the kids on the side panel, headed off to be while dad dozed. Now the whole family has gone mysteriously missing and Mr. Bear has acquired a big blue radio -- a touch that just screams midlife crisis.

This change in personnel got me to thinking about other iconic food mascots and the makeovers they've received. Today we'll start with the women, with pride of place going to that fictional earth mother, the dark goddess of America's ready-made food unconscious, Aunt Jemima.