Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Monday, June 12, 2006

That's just wrong

Back in the 70s, before food became edible, some people went on diets. It was a hard time to be a dieter, in the 70s. Besides the fact that the food wasn't edible, the people who were supposed to making your diet easier were in actuality trying to sabotage it. For example, a jellied salad:


NO, you shriek, shielding your eyes from this nauseating vision! Surely it wasn't this bad! Oh yeah? Well, take this:



That's HOT DOGS wrapped around the pineapple. Moving on to dessert:



Wow. That's nasty.

All images from Candyboots, which provides many more recipe cards for your delectation, all with scintillating commentary.

H/T, oddly enough, to Susan.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yuck!!!Absolutely nauseating!! I do remember seeing pictures like those in magazines back in the 70's though...never tempted me then either. Looks like some good pictures to threaten the kids with when they're complaining about what's on the table for dinner..
God's blessings this day!!

Anonymous said...

I have always considered Jello to be an offense against God and Man. Jello salads doubly so.

Actually, food was quite edible in the '70s -- if you belonged to an ethnic group. But judging from articles and cookbooks from the period (and I'd include the '60s in here too), WASP food must have been pretty grim. (101 Things to Do With Wonder Bread!) But a lot of that was probably the result of not having access to the much wider variety of foodstuffs and produce that we now take for granted.

When our Spanish-surnamed family was stationed in Virginia in the late '50s-early '60s, the only tortillas available were canned. (We didn't buy them.)

The other problem was the infatuation with new convenience foods and ways to use them in recipes. I was recently going through some old cookbooks that had magazine clippings tucked between the pages. Lovely color photograph showing how to make Spam kebobs. (Cooking rule from that period: If you include canned pineapple in a dish you get to put "Hawaiian" in the recipe title.)

Vitae Scrutator said...

Have you seen that book, the Gallery of Regrettable Foods, by James Lileks? It's filled with these kinds of things.

I think there's a version of the book at his website (lileks.com)

Amber said...

Wow, that's just stunningly disgusting. I came across some Weight Watcher cards like that online awhile back and I sent the link to my MIL, because she's been in Weight Watchers off an on for the last 30 years (wow, that sounds bad when you put it that way, doesn't it). She said she actually made some of those things when she was doing WW in the 70's. She didn't remember how they tasted, but she did remember having a hard time not cheating on the diets. Gee, I wonder why...