Media Consumption
‘Spice World,’ Chips and a (Carrot) Bacon Butty
Exploring the comfort food of the Spice Girls
The first installment in “Media Consumption,” a series of essays and recipes that take culinary inspiration from our favorite movies, TV shows, songs, and books.
It’s hard to picture it now but for about two solid years in the 1990s the Spice Girls were not only the biggest pop group on the planet, they had also winkled their way into our general perception of the entire world. There was no event that couldn’t have a Spice Girls angle to it, no section of the paper was safe from a reference to them, however oblique. I was deeply obsessed with the Spice Girls, and took their pervasiveness for granted — of course newspapers are going to mention them! The Spice Girls are the news!
The very peak of this publicity flurry was their 1997 film, Spice World, which charted a week in the life of the five, who played slightly heightened versions of themselves. It could have easily been badly-acted, self-indulgent nonsense (and its detractors will happily describe it as such), but instead Spice World is a witty, satirical, warm, and immensely good-natured time capsule. The cameos and bit parts are spectacular — from Jennifer Saunders to Hugh Laurie to Elton John to a pre-The Wire Dominic West —…
