I looked up lutefisk in the Oxford Companion to Food, and found that "There might have been further and more drastic changes [e.g., like eating something other than lutefisk for specific holidays] in the last quarter of the 20th century, when statistics showed that both in the countries of origin and among the immigrant communities in N. America, the consumption of lutefisk was declining steeply. However, a public relations campaign in the USA halted and reversed the trend there; and it was followed shortly afterwards by a similar campaign in the home countries. Riddervold* reproduces samples of bumper stickers which played an important role in the campaigns, and shows how some of the slogans tended incidentally to create a new myth, that lutefisk is an aphrodisiac."  (*_Lutefisk, Rakefisk, and Herring in Norwegian Tradition_, Oslo, Novus, 1990--amazingly, we don't have this book in our collection; perhaps some of our friends in the area with strong Norwegian settlement can enlighten us?)



Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
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Culinary Institute of America
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