Abstract
In the lines quoted above, Palmer Cortlandt (the leading capitalist patriarch of the soap opera All My Children) succinctly argues one side of cultural studies' continuing debate over the function of mass culture. In this view, the culture industry (like the hospital cafe) supplies its own choice of, for example, televisual food to the starving masses, ignoring audience needs and opinions completely. Forced to fill up on empty calories, the viewer consequently suffers (like Palmer's daughter Nina, for whom he seeks protein) from diabetes. The inability to control blood sugar levels is a suggestive metaphor, recalling the plethora of arguments which, beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing through our own, castigate producers of popular fiction for force-feeding a vacuous or even dangerous textual diet to a voiceless, passive audience.
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