Selects: The Stories Behind A Few Food Fads

the Chair. Oh Frank, it's been there the whole time. You just keep quiet mostly mostly. Yeah. I don't have my hat on today though, so I know what gives I don't know. You know, I'm growing the hair out, so I thought i'd just let it flow. I noticed it looks good. Why are you growing it out? I don't know. It just sort of started happening. Then I was like, my brother's got good hair, is longer. Yeah, I'm always trying to be more like him. Plus I

can't have a butt cut with short hair. Yeah. Plus I mean I've had the same short, spiky hair for like fifteen years. Time to mix it up. I know, man, when I started growing mine out, I was like, what am I doing? What's with this cube ball crap? I'm so tired of all this. Let me just see what it looks like, you know, with a what's that quarterback's name? Joe with Eisman? No Joe no? Uh, Terry Bradshaw, No, you know the one, Randall Cunningham. No, Tom Brady, tom Brady.

Despite your harassment, I still figured it out. What about Tom Brady? He want his hair? I have his hair, buddy. I don't know about that. I do me and Tom Brady? Now, uh chuh? Yes. Did you grow up on TV dinners at all? Really? No? My mom is wasn't is a great cook, so she wouldn't have that. I see, I see, Wow, well I did. I grew up on TV dinners and usually when a TV dinner appeared. Seriously, you did miss out. They were pretty amazing when you're like six seven years old.

I've had them when you were six or seven. No, I had them like in college. Okay, so so okay, So you understand the magic of a TV dinner, right? Sure? Alright, imagine that as like a six year old. I'm sure it was magical. All of your foods and like a different little compartment. Nie just staring at you, waiting, like just just wait, just wait, buddy. Um, when you're six, it's just even better. And when I was six, if I would get a TV dinner, it meant that my

parents were like going to do something right. They were going to play bridge or something like that. So it was like a special night and like I probably exactly right. I'd probably get to stay up late, or there'd be some babysitter or whatever. Um, it was always just kind of a special thing when TV dinners made an appearance. My parents never did anything together. They never like, they never played cards or no. Man, I rarely had babysitters.

I rarely. I don't remember having babysitters. There was always one of them there. Yeah, maybe they didn't trust you, that they didn't like each other. They may have really enjoyed key parties well plus yeah you never know, Um I had I have a sister that's six years older though, so ter Yeah, but they still didn't do a lot I can remember. I can literally just think of a few times they like went to an olibaan Newton John

concert once. Uh. They've got a pretty good track record so far, and my mom wentnt saw Elvis but not with my dad. Wow. Uh on that last tour or two man, the uh I think they call that the jumpsuit Integrity Tour. They hold on, let me catch my breath. Yeah, they didn't put an undignified ending, Yeah they didn't. They didn't do much stuff together, so I didn't get a lot of TV dinners. I didn't get a lot of Hey, there's just throw it in and warm it up. My

mom was kind of yeah, always cooking for us. Yeah, yeah, no, my mom cooked a lot too. But now that I'm older and looked back, I'm like us pretty convenient meal. Like you know, she was an e R nurse for pete sake, a weird hours and stuff. Um, but she was a great mom. She raised me very well, as everybody knows. It's a well known fact. So with TV Dinners in particular, though, I have a certain amount of nostalgia for him, But apparently like America as a whole

has a bit of nostalgia for TV dinners. There's a TV dinner the Smithsonian, for Pete's sake, and that's like America's greatest repository of nostalgia for sure, you know. Yeah, so I think we should take people on a delightful tour of the history of this wonder of TV dinners. Yeah you sound like you're I'm not so sure. No, no, no, I am sure. I was just joking around. Was trying to set it up as some you know, magical experience that everyone's about to have. But I feel like that's

ingrained in it. So as the story goes, Uh, Swanson ce A Swanson and Sons was and is a leader in the frozen food industry. And um, whether or not this is legend, who knows, but it's a great story. Was that uh one Thanksgiving they had too much turkey on their hands Post Thanksgiving to the tune of something like two fifty tons of turkey that they didn't sell they overestimate, which is so sad, you know, yeah for

those nothing. Uh yeah, like we so wanted to give our life as a meal right now, we're just on a train. Well, yeah, that's what they did. So the story goes, they had about they loaded it, they couldn't store it. They didn't none of room and no freezer room to store all this turkey, So they put it on a frozen train or a refrigerated train car as a polar express, it's called in the industry. And the trick to this thing is is in order for that

train to stay refrigerated, it's gotta keep moving. And so they basically we're just running this turkey all over the country to keep it frozen and cold. Right, It's like that one movie UM set in the future with Tilda Switten, where like the train never stops, societies on the train. Yeah, that's like that, but with frozen turkeys. That's a good movie.

So it's like that cross between that and Speed. Yes, Like so if the train ever stops, it's in a lose refrigeration, the losers refrigeration, the turkeys all go bad. So there's this remember that Simpsons which one when Homer is trying to describe or think of the name of the movie Speed. He's like, it's about a about a bus. If it's speed goes down and it can't speed up. And he says it like that many times, and he goes, I think it's called the bus that wouldn't slow down

or that couldn't slow down. Yeah, I remember that very funny line. Um, but this is real life. Chuck, this wasn't a cartoon or a joke. Half a million pounds of turkey on a train and if it's topped it would spoil Simpsons. No, the idea that this actually happened, it's so insane to me. So apparently the Swanson brothers Clark and um, what was the other brothers, Gilbert Gilbert.

I wanted to say Clark and Gable, but Clark and Gilbert Swanson said, all right, employ ease, we need you to put your heads together and come up with an idea. So they had again this is the legend, they had an employee contest where um, whoever could come up with what to do with all this turkey, I guess would

just be the employee of the month or something like that. Um. And all the while this contest is going on in the Swanson company, there's a train out there in the United States of America just circling endlessly because it can't stop or else the turkeys will go bad until this Winton wins. Yeah. Yeah. So there was a salesman named Jerry Thomas g E r R Y, not like our

own j E R I right, which no one ever gets. Right. Um, this is the party, I will get He traveled from Nebraska to Pittsburgh to where Pan American Airways had their kitchens because they were testing uh single compartment uh foil tray meals that they would serve to people. And I guess he couldn't envision what that might look like unless he went there in person, right and steal one. Well yeah, so yeah, it was a single compartment right. So basically it was just a tray that you put a bunch

of food on. There were like different compartments in the tray, and he's like, I gotta get my hands on one of these, right, this is innovation. Yeah. I don't understand that either, which is why his story smells a little fishy to me. Um. But this, this guy, Jerry Thomas, is the He's he's known as the inventor basically of the TV dinner. Right. So he comes back to the Swanson brothers and says, I got it. I've I've driven from Pittsburgh back home, h to wherever the Swanson company

is located. Where am I? He famously said, Um, And he said, and I've added two more compartments into this trace, the three compartment trade. And I drew two lines I know what to do with the turkey. Now we're gonna basically sell it as a frozen Thanksgiving dinner. And they said your employee of the month, Jerry. Yeah. They say, look, you got your your potatoes and gravy here, you got your peas here, you got your turkey here. None of it touches each other. I'm a genius. I'm Jerry Thomas.

So this coalesce with the another UH craze, which was television, and in nineteen fifty three there were thirty three million households with televisions, and um, it was really I mean, there have been other people that had been doing this before. Quaker State Foods UH in ninety nine had something in the supermarket of frozen meal called under Geez, I know, the most the most one, I don't want to say the most one of the most offensive brand names ever. Yeah,

the one eyed Eskimo label. That's that's terrible. So they were selling those in supermarkets. And then in previous to that, even UH the Strato plates from Maxim were being served on airplanes, but not as a retail food. So it had been done before. So the creation of the TV dinner, well, wait, don't don't don't leave out Jack Fisher. Who Jack Fisher? Oh right, what was that one called frigid dinners? Yes, but they're the most depressing meal ever because they were

served in bars. Yeah, they're serving in a bar, so you didn't have to leave to go home to eat dinner. You could just stay and keep drinking. Oh man, there were some bars in l A in Los Felis when I lived there that around two am, the Tomali guy would come around, So okay, that's different. Oh dude, it was the best. I mean, they were legit handmade to Molly's and at one was the perfect time to be

dropping into the drawing room, you know. Oh anyway, the creation of the TV dinner was not so much that it was a brand new thing, but it was. It was a marketing success story because the TV they thought, if we can build a sing around the television, then we've got something on our hands. Right. That was the key the TV making it a TV dinner, right, because all of a sudden it was like, hey, everybody loves TV.

Plus this is something I didn't realize. It added a certain amount of like cashe to the TV dinner because if you had a TV dinner. It meant that you had a TV. And if you had a TV, you were probably upper middle class at the time, right, So the idea of having a TV or a dinner to go with your TV really appealed to two Americans. And even to this day it was such a great marketing coup. I guess that um people still call these, and like almost any frozen entree or frozen meal, a TV dinner.

Even though it was two when Swanson stopped calling their products that they still made the products, they just stopped calling them TV dinners. Every everybody else kept calling them TV dinner. Yeah, you were eating these in the eighties, like twenty years after they that brand went away, still calling TV dinners and eating them on TV trays. This is another thing you possed out on Chuck, did you have?

So that was the whole The whole point of the TV tray was it was a foldable individual table that you would open up in front of yourself and eat your TV dinner on while you were sitting on the couch, so you could watch TV most efficiently while you were eating dinner. And now they call that the coffee table. You just stoop over a little bit right, or the sink eating over the sink. I don't know what that is.

That's a depressing way to eat. So these are actually called that was the brand, Swanson's TV brand, frozen Dinner. And there they're big concept with the box. If you look it up on on the internet. Was it looked like it was designed like a little television the box was it the t The dinner itself was like the screen on the screen and then it had the little dials on the bottom left and right corner and uh,

you know it look like a little TV right. And it was ninety eight cents in nineteen fifty four, and they sold a ton of them. Yeah, they apparently um so again, remember all this came from a bunch of turkey that was about to spoil. So Swanson start to

an industry. Swanson ordered like five thousand of them initially to be made, and they hired a small battalion of of um ladies in aprons and ice cream scoops and spatchel is to assemble these things, right, and they just had them go right down the assembly line and they sold five thousand just almost immediately, and apparently in the first year um that they were sold they sold like

ten million of them. So they came out with them in nineteen fifty four, and by the end of the first full year of production, which I guess would be nine, they'd sold ten million of them. So they went from initially ordering five thousand of them to selling ten million of them in a year, so that it just hit America just right, you know. Well, yeah, and it was at a time where women were starting to want kind

of re enter the workforce. Gave them time that they could still get that hot meal on the table, because that was their job back then, right right. It gave women a really great opportunity to provide a stark contrast to the your husband's mother. Yeah. Yeah, Apparently there were a bunch of men who were like, this isn't good enough. I want my wife to cook from scratch like my mom. Dr Freud, And if they could be like my mom in a lot of other ways, that'd be awesome. Would

it kill her to wear a hairnut? Yeah, So apparently it didn't delight all men because they weren't on board, but would have killer to just me up in a diaper. We should do an episode on that sometime. That's the thing. Oh, I thought about san Freud, but on men wearing diapers as adults. Yeah, it's for like I think it's called diaper play for sex play, but but it's it's diaper centric. Yeah, we should do a podcast on that just that. Well, we can include it in like maybe a fetish one,

how about that? All right? Okay, Wow, that took a weird turn, all of this, it really did. Uh geez, you got anything else on TV Dinners? That's a good way to end it, I think. Nope. Shall we take a break? Yep? All right, I'm gonna go change my

diaper and we'll talk about gelatin right after this. So, Chuck, you were saying that um in the last one, that uh, that the TV dinner hit just right and struck struck America in part because women were starting to enter the workforce, right, and that was partially the results of World War Two.

World War two also changed things as far as food and food consumption and food packaging goes, and that apparently at the end of World War Two there were a lot of companies that had gone all in into supplying the troops food. And we're making pretty great money. But apparently we're basically caught with a large amount of supply. Um when the war ended, and they said, well, if we don't figure out a way to get non wartime America, the regular American consumer to buy this stuff, we're going

to go out of business. Were over extended basically, and so food companies, I guess, individually and on the whole, taught America to basically eat what had prior to that point being considered field rations like spam. If you remember that podcast that kind of was where that whole movement was born. Yep, spam, condensed soup, um, dehydrated stuff, freeze,

dried stuff, like. All of this came out of basically an overstock of World War two food supplies that were intended for troops and we're kind of repackaged and rearranged to be served to the American consumer. And part of that also was that same thing that TV Dinner struck, which which was convenient. You know, like, hey, your your husband still wants a meal and your your family still expects you to be the one to to cook for him. Um, but now you have to work. So what are you

gonna do? Well, we have we have something helpful for you, and it's called convenience food. And one of the big convenience foods that came out of the post war era. But really it started to gather steam before then was gelatin. Yeah, specifically jello as the name brand, but gelatine. The word is from Latin gelatas, meaning jellied froze. And uh. It was first used in Egypt, but it was really first

used in cooking in France. And um, you know, I think most people know this by now, but if you don't, Um, gelatine is as a protein and it's uh it's produced from collagen from boiling animal bones, yeah, or hoofs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, So it's a it's glutinous basically, and it can go one of two ways, I think, depending on what you do with it. You can turn it into glue or you can turn it into food. That's never a good start, no,

it really you know. Yeah. And a guy from the I think the seventeenth century in France, what was his name, Peppin, someone Peppin, Dennis Poppine, who may or may not be related to Jacques Pepin. It was great and French. He's also a cook. Um. He was the first person to

mention it in writing. I believe, Uh, and then it just kind of sat there for a while until the nineteenth century, when I guess people were aware of gelatine and that you could use it as a food, but it was extraordinarily gourmet, like the average person was not making jello at home. It was very time consuming. You had to start from scratch and boil animal bones to start the process of gelatine. It was the exact opposite of how we think of gelatine today, which is instantaneous. Yeah.

So in the nineteenth century, um, there this guy named Peter Cooper uh figured out a way to turn gelatine into a powder form, a dehydrated gelatine powder. Um, and it went absolutely nowhere for fifty years. And I was surprised to find this out. I knew gelatine was pretty old, but it's it's interesting how it's just kind of moved along in these very slow little fits and starts, like no one would give up on it. No, it was interesting, which is weird because it's really disgusting if you think

about it. It should have been given up on, yeah, and it never was. It's a very bizarre invention. It almost makes you feel like there was some sort of divine hand guiding gelatine along in its progress. Yeah. So later on in eut named Charles Knox, uh kind of revolutionized things when he found came up with a process that resulted in a dried sheet of gelatine, and he hired salesman to go door to door to show women like, hey,

you can add liquid to these sheets. You can make desserts, you can make aspects, which is a really gross word. I think it is. It's not it's pretty. It's a gross thing. It's a savory gelatine. Yeah, which we'll get to that. But uh. A couple of years later, Rose Knox, which was that his wife, I guess yes, published a book called Dainty Dessert Hurts, which is a book of recipes,

and things were kind of moving along a little bit. Um. Then there was a cough syrup company in New York called Pearl Pearl b wait is that what it's called? Pearl way? W W A I T. But they weren't so much cough syrups. So he said, all right, let's get into the food business. And uh, the wife, whose name was May, said, you know, let me add some fruit syrups to this stuff. And actually she's the one

who named it Jello. She came up with that name, but they didn't succeed either, and sold that to their neighbor. Uh Francis, is that the whole name? Or Tor Francis Woodward for four hundred and fifty bucks. This person purchased the name in name brand Jello, right, and he almost fell victim to the curse of Jello as well. Right. He could do nothing with it either, um despite some early attempts. He apparently tried to sell it to his supervisor at work for thirty five bucks even though he

paid four and fifty to it for it. So at some point I guess he decided to give it another go and he hired a bunch of traveling salesman, sent them out to fairs, community gatherings, that kind of stuff, and said, teach the people how to make the jello. And this time it started to stick. Actually, Jello, Jello kind of um hit at just the right time. Finally, I should say, the world was finally ready for Jello.

Part of it had to do with, um, refrigeration, Yeah, for sure, once you know, refrigeration is key for jello, as we all know, right, And once those technologies were developed, it kind of Uh well, it formed literally, it all congealed and figuratively. Uh. And then once advertising started taking over, like in the mid nineteen thirties, uh, General foods Um had a very famous radio ad from Jack Binny, the j E L l O tag, which really kind of

helped push things along as well. Yeah, and I noticed that at some point they started dabbling with with other flavors. I think originally they tried strawberry, raspberry, orange, and lemon, right, um. And then they tried chocolate and they they apparently chocolate didn't go over very well, so they released no. First they just released it as chocolate jello. That's pretty awful.

And then they thought, oh, maybe we should add milk instead of water, and that's when they came up with jello pudding and they re released chocolate and that that spurred like a whole pudding line, including something I grew up on, which was butterscotch jello pudding. Oh yeah, man, that was so good, except you you couldn't. You had to get the skin off. The skin was no good, But everything under the skin was great. What was the skin? It was just like a on top. It was a

very it was the tougher layer on top. Yeah, but if you just scraped it off, you had some nice pudding underneath. Emily still loves the uh the brown, the chocolate jello pudding. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. She'll make a parfait like you know, a little a little putting, a little whipped cream, little pudding, little whipped cream. She knows how to live. She does. It's a special night that happens about three times a year, and I'm like, oh boy,

fight time. Uh So in the nineteen fifties, uh, supposedly the jello shot with alcohol was invented by uh, this really interesting guy named Tom Larer, who, um, he was a mathematician and a singer songwriter who I looked into him. He did song parodies about math and chemistry. I guess he was like the Jonathan Colton of his day as far as I can tell. And he was also in the army and to get around alcohol restrictions. As the story goes, he claims he invented the jello shot, which

I've never had. Uh what, I've never had a jello shot? Wow, Well you're not missing much of a pretty gross well jello. I can't stand jello well even if you do, even if you like or or ambivalent to jello, it's it's just gross. Does it taste like, yeah, it's or whatever. It's a very obnoxious taste you're supposed to use, Like I think you're a place half of the water with whatever liquor you're using. Usually people use vodka. It really

just stands out in a in a noxious way. By the way, Tom Larra, I thought that name sounded familiar. He um, he is pretty great. He wrote this one um song called The Old Dope Peddler and two Chains. Actually, um, you know the rapper two Chains from Atlanta? No, yes you do? Oh wait was he our guy? Was he the guy that judged that? No? Man? Who was that guy?

That was young Jock? Right now? Two Chains is he's huge? Man. Um. He did a song where he sampled the Old Dope Peddler and he, I guess wrote to Tom Laird to ask for permission to sample it. Tom Lair had this awesome famous response, So just read up on that. What was did he let him use it? Yes? Oh great, So he's the opposite of Don Henley and probably every single way Yeah yeah, uh but jello shots, Yes, jello shots are gross. So jello is speeding along. It's uh,

it's taking over America. Um. And then they decided to come out with these savory lines and it became uh and this was this post World War two thing that you were talking about when UM, I guess they did what. There was this great article you sent making and eating the nineteen fifties most nauseating jello soaked recipes from collector Yeah Hunter Hunter Oatmund Stanford, and uh they did this

interview and um with Ruth Clark. Yeah, Ruth Clark. Basically it's a really good interview and she talks about kind of this savory movement that took over, and not only with jello, but the fact that it was a time in America where and if you look back, it's so great to look back at these old ads and these old recipe books that it was a time where you would the goal was to have a dinner party with this big, flashy, uh experimental and unique centerpiece food centerpiece

made of jello, well, jell all kinds of things. We're talking about the hot dog tree right yeah, there and there there. It could be a lot of different stuff. And I think that's what Ruth Clark does she recreates this stuff right, and her poor husband has to eat it. Um. But a lot of those things were jello molds, and a lot of the reason why jello molds were so weird and so popular is because Jello put so much

time and effort into publishing cookbooks. And the whole point was all of these food companies wanted, like all of their products to to be your entire meal, So they were putting these these random part like products that the food company made into some really weird configurations, and they came up with some very odd jello molds in the fifties or sixties. Such a sad culinary time it was.

But the Ruth Clark makes a good point that that to the people at that time, like a really well thought out, fancy jello mold was as a centerpiece of your table, was like the pinnacle of classiness. Yeah, but we're talking about like a shaped mold with like uh lamb shank and asparagus inside of jello. A savory jello that's like celery flavored. You're lucky if it was savory. The lime jello is one of the most abused jello flavors of all time. People would put tuna and stuff

in with the lime jello. There's one called Perfection Salad that's cold slaw inside of law, I'm jello. And what Ruth Clark pointed out was that gelatine apparently preserves food really well, and and that cole slaw that would have otherwise been inedible and running after day three was still like crunchy after day five when it was put inside

of a jello mold, so still gross. Yeah. There's actually a great BuzzFeed article, um if you want to get an idea of what people were doing in the fifties, sixties, and seventies with jello molds. It's called seventeen Horrifying Lee Disgusting Retro Gelatine recipes, and they are gross. Man like cottage cheese and salmon mold. Yeah, yeah, I mean I hate jello. Oh Man's like you're waking nightmare. I didn't

even look through it. You sent it to me, and that's scrolled about halfway through and just deleted through my computer out the window. The best one I see is lime cheese salad. It's it's lime jello mixed with cottage cheese and then into the center of the jello mold. You put a seafood salad, Oh my god, sour krout mold. It just goes on and on. But it was a weird time. And again Ruth Clark has a bunch of theories.

She said she can't really answer exactly why jello molds were as big as they are, but she posits that, uh, part of it was this idea that there were all these companies trying to get you to use their products, and these were just monstrosities that they came up with, and people fell for it, like can salmon, can tuna in jello? Right, Oh my god, So that's jello molds. Man, Uh, where do you want to head next? Let's go to the crock pot. All right, Dot, that was a crock

pot travel. So first of all, I have a croc pot the same here and um as yours. Actually croc Pot are using it as a proprietary eponym. I don't think it is a croc Pot brand pot. Yeah, it's a slocaler um and I'd forget to use it a lot, But when I remember, I'll go in a little crock pot binge where I'll cook, you know, a few meals over the course of a few weeks in a croc pot, and they're still great if you know how to how to use it and how to spice things up, for sure.

You know, apparently at first people didn't know because if you're cooking a recipe, say, um, it's like simmering, say like a beef stew on the stovetop, that simmering action that it's going undergoing, it does something different to the recipe than a croc pot does, even though it's the exact same recipe. Um. And so at first, when crock pots came out, it was first introduced by rival back in when crock pots first came out, um, they people were like, this is this This dinner that it's making

is really gross. It doesn't taste very good. It's bland, and yet they still didn't stop using or buying crock pots. Well, food was more bland back then. Well we're talking the seventies, So by the seventies, I think it was people were using more spices than before. I think it was more bland,

and like the forties and maybe the fifties. Yeah, but that one, yeah, you're probably right, But that one article we read said, you know, like an old recipe for chili would have like a teaspoon of chili powder or something, and it's like all the food just sucked because they didn't realize, like, no, man, you dump a bunch of that junk in there. So well, you were saying. Back in the forties or fifties when TV Dinners really hit, moms were starting to enter the work force in one

moms were really into the workforce. And so the idea of having a crock pot where you could make this meal in a one pot in the morning, throw it all in there, turn it on, and then come home at the end of the day and dinner was ready and you still went to work and got everything you needed to get done done was so attractive that just that, despite the fact that it made these meals that did not taste like they should um, people were still, like I said, they were still buying the crock pots, and

instead they started to look around to find tips for how to make these things taste better. And actually, a woman named what was her name, Mabel, Yeah, Mabel Hoffman, Mabel Hoffman stepped into the fray and said, peace piece, children, I've got this covered. Listen up. Yeah. She wrote a book called The Crockery cookery or crockery cookery. No, the and uh it was a huge, huge hit, was the New York Times bestseller. I believe she went on to

sell about six million copies of this thing. And UM, I don't even think we've said that, you know, we said we you throw the food in there and cook it all day. But the whole idea is that you put a kind of a tight fitting lid on there and it and it cooks at a very very low heat all day long, right, and then when you when you get home from work eight hours later or something like that, it will it will be done. You just

serve and smile. Yeah, And thanks to Crockery Cookery. UM, the crock pot uh in nineteen seventy one or two million bucks in ten million, seventy three, twenty three million, and then eventually peaking in nineteen seventy five at ninety three million dollars worth of croc pots being sold. It was a genuine legit craze food craze and supposedly croc pot cookery. The book was UM America's sixth best selling cookbook ever. Right, so this was like a legitimate craze.

Crock Pot cooking was a legitimate craze, but again there was something compared to the same recipes on the stovetop as compared to a croc pot um, there was something. It was the flavor was just disappointing. So what Mabel Hoffman did was on a very tight deadline um create from scratch a book, I guess, the world's first cookbook of slow cooker rest piece. And she did it in her own kitchen with like twenty crock pots going all

day every day. She had to testing all this stuff, and she figured out some of the keys to crock pot cooking, which was, like, you want to use way less liquid um then you would use like on the stovetop because you have a lot less um evaporation. The crock pot keeps it in there, which is one reason why meat is so so tender in a croc pot or slow cooker um because it just recirculates the the

moisture rather than allowing it to just evaporate. Right. And then another thing she came up with was that when you um, when you use herbs into the recipe, you want to reserve some of them for right before the things finished cooking, so you can add it like a pop of fresh flavor. So once she figured this out, crock pots just took off even more. Yeah, so she was they were selling a bunch of crock pots, she was selling a bunch of cookbooks. Uh. And eventually she

would said, hey, I really was into something here. So she wrote deep frye cookery, chocolate cookery. Uh, and these are um seventy seven like kind of all in a row crape cookery, and then eventually healthy healthy crockery cookery

and um. The person he who interviewed her later in life said that she was just this really great lady, very humble, and was super upfront about the fact that she like, hey, I hit something at the right time with the right book, and it just sort of I kind of fell into this and it's been just like a wonderful thing for my life. Yeah, it's really neat. Yeah, she sounds like a pretty cool person. So what's your what's your crock pot recipe? Oh, jeez, I don't know

it's your favorite thing to cook? But usually some sort of like beef. Yeah, it's just does such a such a good job, like making a roast or something, you know. Um, but yeah, I that's usually what I'm cooking. When I cook in the crock pot? Is is beef all right? Josh's crock pot beef crock pot surprise right with aspect You want to take a break, Yeah, let's take a break and we'll finish up with a bit interesting bit on oat brand, So Chuck, Yes, we finally arrived. We're

just gonna go forward a few years. Blue the way Back machine is in the shop. This is why I'm having to do it to the eighties man an oat brand. Yes, I know that we differ on the interesting nous of this one. I'm just fascinated by it. I really yeah, man, because it's got it all. It's like, um, it's got the eighties. Um. Do you remember that snl the famous snl um add colon for colon blow that was based on this came out of this this trend. Um has

to do with studies, studies that contradict those studies. Um, bad science reporting the whole thing. I love it, Oh brand, It's very important. So there was this huge trend in the eighties where anything that had to do with O brand you could sell a million units of a minute. Yes, um, so much so that there was a article from Tulsa World that um said that there are no I'm sorry.

The l A Times article from said that they were over like three hundred different items available in grocery stores at the time that touted on its label the fact that it had oprand and people were not uts for it.

Yes they were. And this is uh largely due to some studies that came out that said that brand was kind of a miracle food for lowering cholesterol, right, And that was like back in the late seventies, and and I guess Quaker Oats took notice of those studies and they released a thing called Mother's Oh Brand, but they sent it straight to the hippies at the health food store and just and didn't do anything about They just

released a product and that was that. And then Kellogg's came along and said, hey, you know what, what if we start telling people that are food can basically prevent cancer? Can we do that? And the lawyers said no, and the president of Kelloggs said, well, we're doing it anyway. Who's going to stop us? Reagan? And Reagan said no, I'm not going to stop you. That was a good Reagan, thank you, And so they said, um, okay, well, you eat our cereal and it will reduce cancer. And nothing happened.

There was no blowback, despite the fact that this had been illegal for nearly a century. And then Quaker Oats partnered with Chicago's Northwestern University and Linda van horn In because they had a similar study about o brand cutting cholesterol. Right, so they're starting to say, well, Kelley didn't get in trouble, let's try this ourselves. And they went out and they hired Wilfred Brimley. Remember his ads. Yeah, I think I told the story about working with him. Oh yeah, wasn't

he like the antithesis of what his his persona was. Yeah, the word got around they were like this, you know, just maybe a short day, because that's how it goes with them sometimes it's so funny, and I think it was. I think we wrapped it about half day because he was just like, I'm done, I'm cantankerous. But in the meantime, when the cameras were rolling, he he told everybody that eating quicker opra and was the right thing to do

and it would cut your cholesterol, that's right. And then this book came out, so things are starting to build here for opra and this book came out called The Eight Week Cholesterol Cure by a guy named Robert E. Kowalski, and it chronicled his the decline of his l d L the bad cholesterol UM, just from eating an O brand diet. And that book became extraordinarily popular. Supposedly it was the the one of the greatest selling self help

health books of all time. It just took off. And then yet another thing happened, and this was the thing. This is like where the peak began the UM. I think the Journal of the American Medical Association April published a study from the University of Maryland where these researchers found that, yeah, eating O brand could really significantly lower your cholesterol, and not only that, it does it for a six of the price of the expensive cholesterol lowering drugs.

That's right, and people ate even more OAT brand, That's right. The trend is developing, can you see it. I think it's fully developed at this point. So everybody's going OPR and crazy. And one of the big things that UM that they were doing was eating OPR and muffins. But these opra and muffins were like loaded with fat and butter and eggs, and so they weren't actually doing anything to lower their cholesterol because the effects would be counteracted. Suckers, right.

But in the in the meantime, people were still having fun, eating lots of muffins and pretending they were really healthy. And then this Harvard study came out and it basically said, you know what, Um, you're all fools, you're dummies. You know how it lowers your cholesterol because it keeps you from eating bacon and eggs. That's how you chumps. Well yeah, And then that study itself was was attacked because they only studied twenty people, um, which is not much of

a study. It isn't and the people who were on the opran diet were eating more fat than the control group. It was a terrible study, almost like they wanted to take Opran down a peg and it worked really well. Basically, the science reporting in major newspapers and the news services reported that Oprand was the greatest thing ever, and then they suddenly turned on it and said Oprand is nothing, and everybody dropped Oprand and that if if you read

this stuff today, it's true, oprand really does lower cholesterol. Um, but he just got overhyped because of the eighties. That's the eighties for you. That's food fads. Man, You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Man? Well, if you want to know more about food fads, you can type those words into the search bar at how stuff works dot Com said search bar. I'm gonna get much though, so you may want to just look elsewhere.

But still, uh. Since I said that, it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna call this MS response, and I would like to say that we got many, many great responses from our MS episode. A lot of warm thought from people about my friend Billy and just uh, it's just really great people with MS, people who had people in their family. We heard from doctors and nurses, and that's just ended up being a really good episode.

So we appreciate that feedback. But this is from anonymous listener. Hey, I've been listening to your show for a couple of years now. I want to thank you for making my commute more engaging. Listened to the show on MS am I right home and like to commend you for how well you handled the topic. I was diagnosed a few

years ago at nineteen. Uh. Luckily my diagnosis was quick due to the severity of my first relapse, and I feel like your podcast would have helped me understanding cope with the diagnosis and more constructive manner than my initially trying to self destruct. Since then, I'm continually UH learning about the latest research in history. I love that you discussed uh Ledwina and Augustus dis Day, as a lot of the time they don't come up in the mainstream

discourse of MS. Didn't really know any history until I wrote an undergrad history paper on MS last year and found reading through bits of death Day's journal to be the closest I've ever felt with a historical person. You mentioned that many tend to keep their diagnosis a secret.

I'll admit that with me, it's a need to know basis, and I rarely openly talk about it outside of family, friends, in the support system, and my support system, mainly because of the stigma of the disease and that the assumptions circulating MS tend to negatively alter people's perceptions of myself as an individual. Have had people approach me when I start limping thanks to fatigue and a permanently numb foot, but I'll rush it off and tell them there's nothing

to worry about, or it's an old injury. However, I think with time it's getting easier to talk about thanks to resources like your podcast that are well researched and accurate. I cringe whenever someone tells me there's an easy homeopathic solution to my ailments, and sometimes I struggle with discussing MS in an accessible way that doesn't solely rely on the clinical pathological understanding of it. And I will be sure in the future to redirect people to this episode.

Thank you so much for sharing and uh, we said we keep this anonymous because this person was close. Yeah, this person said, you know, that's great that you read it. But if if they're keeping it quiet for now, we don't want to, you know, broadcast the nage. Sure. Yeah, nice, So thank you Anonymous. Yeah, thanks a nonymus. Uh. If you want to get in touch with us, like anonymous did, you can tweet to us that s Y s K podcast.

You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know, or at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook. You can send us both an email. Uh. We promised to be confidential at Stuff podcast at House Stuffworks dot com and has always joined us at at home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.