The Stories Behind A Few Food Fads

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 my note, I was like, what am I doing? What's with this? Cube? All? Crap? I'm so tired of all this. Let me just see what what it looks like, you know, with a what's that

quarterback's name? Joe Eisman No, no, 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 chuck. Yes, did you grow up on TV dinners at all? No? Really no. My mom is was and 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. It was magical. All of your foods in like a different little compartment, Brownie 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, like I probably exactly, 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 really I don't remember having baby sitters. There was always one of them there. Yeah, maybe they didn't trust you, they didn't like each other. They may have really enjoyed key parties well plus yeah you never know, Um I had Uh. I have a sister that's six years older though, so Yeah. But they still didn't do a lot of I think I remember. I can literally just think of

a few times. They like went to an Olivia Newton John concert once. Uh, they've got a pretty good track record so far, and my mom went and saw Elvis, but not with my dad. Wow. On that last tour 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 look back, I'm like us pretty convenient meal. Like you know, she was an e R nurse for PiZZ sake, 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 forum, but apparently like America as a whole has a bit of nostalgia for TV dinners. There's a TV dinner in the Smithsonian, for peze sake, and that's like America's greatest repository of nostalgia for you know. Yeah, So I think we should take people on a delightful tour of the history of this wonder of TV dinners. You sound like you're I'm

not so sure. No, no, no, I am sure. I was just joking around, trying to set it up as some you know, magical experien 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 which is so sad, you know, yeah for those Uh yeah, like we so wanted to give our life as a meal. 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 refriger rated 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 refrigerator, 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 gonna 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 one 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 if it's topped it would spoil. 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 from Gilbert Swanson said all right, employees, 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 training out there are 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 don't 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 that yeah, and it was a single compartment right, So basically it was just a trade that you put a bunch of

food on. There were like different compartments in the trade, and he's like, I gotta get my hands on one of the 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, uh 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 trade. So now it's a three compartment trade. And I through two lines and then 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 get your peas here, you got your turkey here. None of it touches each other. I'm a genius. I'm

Jerry Thomas. So this coalesced 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 nineteen forty nine had something in the supermarket of frozen meal called under Geez the most the most one of the I don't want to say the most one of the

most offensive brand names ever. Yeah, the one eyed Eskimo label. Um, yeah, that's that's terrible. So they were stelling 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? Sure? Oh

all 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 and 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. They were legit handmade to Molly's and at one was the perfect time to be dropping into the drawing room, you know. 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 in our hands. 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 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 nineteen six 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. You were eating these in the eighties, like twenty years after they that brand went away, still calling the TV

dinners and eating them on TV trades. This is another thing you pissed out on, Chuck did you have? So that was the whole the whole point of a 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're 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? What

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 old 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. It was ninety eight cents in n 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 ordered 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 the end of the first full year of production, which I guess would be nineteen fifty five, 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 they it just hit America just right, you know. Well, yeah, and it was at a time where women were starting to u 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 killer to wear a hairnet? Yeah? So apparently it didn't delight all men because they weren't on board. But would killer to just me up in a diaper? We should do an episode on that sometime. That's a thing. Oh, I'll talk you 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, if we can include it in like maybe a fetish one, how about that? All right? Okay, Wow, that's a weird turn all of the time. Really did uh geez, you got anything else on TV Dinners. That's a good way to end it. I think, nope. Uh, should we take a break? Yep, all right, I'm gonna go change my diaper. 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 result 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 been 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 that was gelatine. Yeah, specifically Jello as the name brand, but uh, 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 Poppin right, 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 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 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, 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 in vention. It almost makes you feel like there was some sort of divine hand guiding

gelatine along in its progress. Yeah. So, later on in eight got 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 Desserts, which is a book of recipes, and uh, things were kind of moving along a little bit. Um. Then in there was a cough syrup company in New York called Pearl H Pearl B wait is that what it's called? Pearl okay? W W A I T. But they weren't selling much cough syrups, and 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 to Francis Woodward, Yes, for four hundred and fifty bucks. Uh. This person purchased the name and 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 hundred 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 uff, 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, uh 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 it and they they apparently chocolate didn't go over very well, so they were 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's

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 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, a little pudding, little whipped cream. She knows how to live she does. It's a special night they have is about three times a year, and I'm like,

oh boy, it's time. Uh So in the nineteen fifties, uh, supposedly the jello shot with alcohol was invented by uh, this really interesting guy named Tom Lair who Um he's 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 the 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 tequila jello 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? Yes you do? Oh wait was he our guy? Was he the guy that judged that? No? No? Oh, man, who was that guy? That was young Jock? Right? No? 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, and 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, 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. Yeah, Hunter Hunter Oatman 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,

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 parts 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 was 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 lime jello. And what Ruth Clark pointed out was that gelatin 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. 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 Gelatin recipes and they are gross. Man like cottage cheese and salmon mold. Yeah, yeah, I mean I hate jello oh man, like you're waking nightmare. I didn't even look through it. You sent it to me and that 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 kraut 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 monstos cities that they came up with, and people fell for it. Uh like can salmon, can tuna in jell o? Right, Oh my god, so that's jello olds Man. Uh, where do you want to head next? Let's go to the crock pot. All right, do a little that was a crock pot travel. So first of all, I have a croc pot the same here, and um, it's 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 slow cooker, 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 croc pots came out, it was first introduced

by rival. Back in when croc 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 croc pots. Well, food was more bland back then. Well we're talking the seventies, so by the seventies, I think it was the 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 nine 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, piece 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, and

you just serve and smile. Yeah, And thanks to Crockery Cookery, UM, the crock pot uh in nineteen seventy one or two million bucks and seventy two, ten million, seventy three, twenty three million, and then eventually peeking in nineteen seventy five at nine three million dollar urs worth of croc pots being sold. It was a genuine, legit craze, food craze and supposedly crock 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 recipes, and she did it in her own kitchen with like twenty croc 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 thing you would use like on the stovetop, because you have a lot less um evaporation. The crock pot keeps sit in there, which is one reason why meat is so so tender, and 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. Yes. 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 onto something here.

So she wrote Deep Prye Cookery, Chocolate Cookery. Uh, and these are seventy nine, um, seventy seven, like kind of all in a row crape cookery and then eventually uh healthy, healthy crockery cookery and um. The person you 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 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 a crock pot. Is is beef? All right? Josh's croc pot beef croc

pot surprise right with aspect? Uh, 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 interestingness of this one. I'm just fascinated by it. I really am, 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, oats oh brand. It's very important. So there was this huge trend in the eighties where anything that had to do with oprand 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 were no I'm sorry, the l A Times article from said that they were over like three different items available in grocery stores at the time that touted on its label the fact that it had oprand

and people were nuts 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 opran 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 gonna stop us, Reagan? And Reagan said no, I'm not gonna stop you, 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 has 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 brand cutting cholesterol. Right, so they're starting to say, well, Kelleg 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, it 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 him 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 opra and diet. And that book became extraordinarily popular, supposedly was the the one of the greatest selling self help health books of all time. It just took off. Yeah, 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 oprand 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 opran crazy. And one of the big things that UM that they were doing was eating Oprand 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, 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 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 Oprand down a peg and it worked really well. It's basically the um 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 Opran is nothing, and everybody dropped Opran and the if if you read the 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 fans, you can type those words into the search part how stuff works dot com search bar. You're not 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 m S response, and I would like to say that we got many, many, oh great responses from our MS episode. A lot of warm thoughts from people about my friend Billy and just uh it was 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 handle 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 in a 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 death 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 assumption 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 podcasts 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. Yeah, this person said, you know, that's great that you read it. But uh, if if they're keeping it quiet for now, we don't want to you know, broadcast the names. Yeah nice, so okay anonymous? Yeah, thanks anonymous. Uh. If you want to get in touch with us, like anonymous did, you can tweet to us. Yeah, I guess i'd be anonymous. Um, I'm at josh um Clark and at 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 how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how Stuff Works dot com