Let's say you're on a diet, or you hate yourself and your family or you're training for the Olympic gag-suppression team. In '59, Jell-O had you covered.
In the fifties and sixties, the culinary world was stagnating. Having achieved perfection with roasted meats thousands of years before, Food was ready for its next big hit. Instead, they did this: they started reducing anything and everything to a nutrient sludge. If it could be blended, pureed, emulsified, or whipped, and served in a quivering man o' war shape, they did it. Deviled ham, creamed corn, fish paste, aspic, and Jell-O were all shoehorned into the American diet, whether the diet liked it or not, right between the "solid group" and the "liquid group". It was the "goop group".
Jell-O was a favored medium of the culinary (or "cruel-inary") goop artist, easily suspending the heaviest meats, vegetables, and seafood in apparent weightlessness, like prehistoric beasts trapped in amber. As proven in Jurassic Park, these floating relics are best left imprisoned. Regardless of who eats who, the humans never come out on top.
In keeping with advertisers' habit of trying to brainwash innocent people into using their products in nonsensical ways, Jell-O wasn't satisfied with their position in the "dessert" category. They wanted to dominate the dinner hour, so their dark priests concocted unholy plans to put all manner of vegetables and meats into Jell-O, hoping for a foothold as a salad replacement. Then, they would travel backward in time to lunch, with their hideous ham on wheat jiggler, and on to breakfast, where they would complete the sinister trifecta of meal blasphemy by trapping corn flakes in a milky Jell-O medium. If advertising has taught us anything at all, it's that If you repeat it enough, people will do it.
Lime Jell-O plus green beans, celery, and onions equals a waste of Jell-O, green beans, celery, and onions. The result looks like vegetables that drowned in their own vomit. Must have been one hell of a party. Better to be one of the happy dead vegetables than the poor creature that has to eat them this way.
And for desert, Jell-O salad with Kraft miniature marshmallows! Yum. No wonder the Mad Men drink all the time...
ReplyDeleteHa ha I grew up in the 60's my aunts were known for their jello salads... some for better, some not so much LOL
ReplyDeleteA normal salad with a few cubes of Jell-O could possibly be forgiven. The monstrosity in this ad is something you should be describing to a judge from the protection of a witness box.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, Qwey!