News from the Stroke Belt.
MoonPie to rise over Mobile to ring in the New Year
New York City has the ball. Atlanta has a peach. My hometown (home of the Arkansas Razorbacks) drops a pig statue to ring in the new year. And in Mobile, Ala., a city in the second fattest state in the land, revelers will celebrate the turning over into 2010 with the rising of a giant MoonPie.
Costly confection riled some residents
Mobile city councilman Fred Richardson spent $9,000 of taxpayer money on the 12-foot MoonPie, which understandably bothered some people. But reports have it that 15,000 people turned up at the first Pie rise last year, and it’s expected even more people will turn up this year.
So why a pie rise and not a pie drop? Well, everyone else has something that drops, Harriet Sharer of the Mobile Bay Convention and Visitor’s Bureau says, and they wanted to do something different. Besides, the moon rises, so why not have a rising MoonPie?
Why a MoonPie?
Richardson says the MoonPie was a perfect choice for the city’s New Year’s celebration because the MoonPie brings people together. “It cuts across economic status. It cuts across race,” he told the Mobile Press-Register last year. “If I had picked some other object, it could have divided the community. But the MoonPie, nobody has anything against the MoonPie.”
The city has been associated with MoonPies, apparently, since the 1970s, when an all-female Mardi Gras krewe from the city visited Tennessee and stumbled upon the confection. City leaders had been admonishing parade participants against throwing Cracker Jack boxes from floats, so the ladies brought the softer, rounder, tasty treat to the city to provide a safer throw.
The rising MoonPie is painted banana yellow (because that’s the easiest flavor to see, though not an incredibly popular one to eat) and decked out with 1,200 lights. It weighs 600 pounds and is hefted by a crane 200 feet in the air. Last year the Chattanooga Bakery, makers of the real MoonPies, gave away samples of the world’s largest edible MoonPie to revelers.
This year folks who want to pay $50 can celebrate the new year with a champagne toast, party favors, a private terrace view of the moon rise and a midnight buffet that we can only assume will include MoonPies.
The history of MoonPies
The Chattanooga Bakery was founded in 1902 and claims to have played a role in the early development of some of today’s most classic snacks, from fig bars to vanilla wafers. The MoonPie was developed in 1917 and trademarked in 1919. Coal miners asked for a snack that was solid and filling because they weren’t able to break for lunch, and one coal miner indicated that the product should be as big as the moon.
The original MoonPie was graham crackers dipped in marshmallow and covered in chocolate; today there are also banana, vanilla, strawberry, lemon and orange flavors.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News) |
