Stuff You Should Know - The Stories Behind A Few Food Fads

Episode Date: June 1, 2017

America loves to go nuts over new food trends and it turns out that the 20th century was a boon time for them. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry Jerome Rowland, and Franklin Chair.

Oh, Frank. He's been here the whole time. He just keeps quiet mostly. Yeah, I don't have my hat on today, though, so. We're running out. 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. His is longer.

Yeah. I'm always trying to be more like him. Plus, can't have a butt cut with short hair. Yeah, plus, I mean, I've had the same short, spiky hair for like 15 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 cue ball crap? I'm so tired of all this. Let me just see what it looks like with a, what's that, quarterback's name? Joe Thysman. No. Joe Thysman. No.

Terry Bradshaw. No. You know, the one. Oh, Randall Cunningham. No. Tom Brady, Tom Brady. Despite your harassment, I still figured it out. What about Tom Brady?

You want his hair? I have his hair, buddy. I don't know about that. I do. Me and Tom Brady now. 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. Oh, I've had them. When you were six or seven? No, I had them like in college. Oh, OK. So, OK. So you understand the magic of a TV dinner, right?

Sure. All right. Imagine that as like a six year old. Oh, I'm sure it was magical. All of your foods in like a different little compartment. Yeah. And I only just staring at you, waiting like just, just wait, just wait, buddy.

Yeah, yeah. 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. Right. So it was like a special night.

Hitting the guy party. Yeah, exactly. Right. I'd probably get to stay up late or there'd be some babysitter or whatever. 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. They didn't like each other.

I got you. They may have really enjoyed key parties. Well, plus, yeah, you never know. I had, I have a sister that's six years older though, so. Oh yeah, built-in babysitter. Yeah, but they still didn't do a lot of everything. I remember, I can literally just think of a few times, they like went to an Olivia Newton-John concert once.

They've got a pretty good track record so far. My mom wouldn't sell Elvis, but not with my dad. Wow. On that last tour or two, man. The, I think they call that the jumpsuit integrity tour. They, hold on a second. Let me catch my breath. Yeah.

But yeah, they didn't. What an undignified ending. Yeah, 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 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, oh, it's a pretty convenient meal. Like, you know, she was a ER nurse for Pete's sake, and it was weird hours and stuff. Sure. 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 them, but apparently like America as a whole has a bit of nostalgia for TV dinners. There's a TV dinner in 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 not so sure. No, no, no, I am sure. I was just joking around. I was trying to set it up as some, you know,

magical experience that everyone's about to have, but. Oh, I feel like that's ingrained in it. So as the story goes, Swanson, C.A. Swanson and Sons was and is a leader in the frozen food industry, and whether or not this is legend, who knows, but it's a great story, was that one Thanksgiving, they had too much turkey

on their hands post Thanksgiving. Yeah, to the tune of something like 250 tons of turkey that they didn't sell, they overestimated. Which is so sad, you know? Yeah, those turkeys are like, thanks for nothing. 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 have room and no freezer room to store all this turkey. So they put it on a frozen train or a refrigerated train car. As the 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 were just running this turkey all over the country to keep it frozen and cold. Right, it's like that one movie set in the future with Tilda Swinton, where the train never stops. Oh yeah, yeah.

All societies on the train. Yeah, that was great. It's like that, but with frozen turkeys. That was a good movie. So it's like that cross between that and speed. Yes. So if the train ever stops, it's gonna lose refrigeration.

If it loses refrigeration, the turkeys all go bad. So there's this. Do you remember that Simpsons? Which one? When Homer's trying to describe or think of the name of the movie, Speed. He's like, it's 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. But this was real life, Chuck. This wasn't a cartoon or a joke. No.

Half a million pounds of turkey on a train. And if it stopped, it would spoil. What are you laughing at, Simpsons? No, the idea that this actually happened. Oh, I know. It's so insane to me. So apparently the Swanson brothers, Clark and, what was the other brothers name?

Gilbert. Gilbert. I wanted to say Clark and Gable. But Clark and Gilbert Swanson said, all right, employees, we need you to put your heads together and come up with an idea. So they had, and again, this is the legend. They had an employee contest where whoever could come up

with what to do with all this turkey, I guess would just be employee of the month or something like that. 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 the Swinton wins. 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. This is the part I don't get. He traveled from Nebraska to Pittsburgh to where Pan American Airways had their kitchens

because they were testing a single compartment, 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 steel 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 weren't 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. Agreed. But this guy, Jerry Thomas,

is the, he's known as the inventor basically of the TV dinner, right? Yeah. So he comes back to the Swanson brothers and says, I got it. I've driven from Pittsburgh back home to wherever the Swanson company is located. Where am I?

He famously said, and he said, and I've added two more compartments into this tray. So now it's a three compartment tray, and I know- I drew two lines in this tray. 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 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 coalesced with the another craze, which was television. And in 1953, there were 33 million households with televisions. And it was really, I mean, there had been other people that had been doing this before. Quaker State Foods in 1949 had something in the supermarket, a frozen meal called

under, oh, geez. No, the most, I don't wanna say the most, one of the most offensive brand names ever. Yeah, the one-eyed Eskimo label. Yeah, that's terrible. So they were selling those in supermarkets. And then in previous to that even, the strato plates from Maxon 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 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. Cause they were served in bars? Yeah, they were served 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 LA, in Los Feliz when I lived there,

that around 2 a.m., the tamale guy would come around. So, okay, that's different. Oh, dude, it was the best. I mean, they were legit handmade tamales. And at 1.55 was the perfect time to be dropping in to the drawing room, you know? Oh yeah, nice. Anyway, the creation of the TV dinner

was not so much that it was a brand new thing, but it was a marketing success story. Because the TV, they thought, if we can build a thing 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, cachet 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 people still call these, like almost any frozen entree or frozen meal at TV dinner. Even though it was 1962 when Swanson

stopped calling their products that. They still made the products, they just stopped calling them TV dinners. Everybody else kept calling them TV dinners. Yeah, you were eating these in the 80s, like 20 years after that brand went away, still calling them TV dinners. And eating them on TV trays.

This is another thing you missed out on, Chuck. Did you have those? Sure. So, that was 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, whether you're sitting on the couch,

so you could watch TV most efficiently while you were eating dinner. Yeah, now they call that the coffee table, you just stoop over a little bit. 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 their big concept with the box, if you look it up on the internet, was it looked like it was designed like a little television, the box was it. 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 you know, it looked like a little TV. Right. And it was 98 cents in 1954. And they sold a ton of them. Yeah, apparently, so again, remember, all this came from a bunch of turkey

that was about to spoil. So, Swanson ordered- This is a really gross start to an industry. Swanson ordered like 5,000 of them initially to be made. And they hired a small battalion of ladies in aprons and ice cream scoops and spatulas to assemble these things, right? And they just had them go right down the assembly line.

And they sold 5,000 just almost immediately. And apparently in the first year that they were sold, they sold like 10 million of them. Wow. So, they came out with them in 1954. And by the end of the first full year of production, which I guess would be 1955, they'd sold 10 million of them. So, they went from initially ordering 5,000 of them

to selling 10 million of them in a year. So, it just hit America just right, you know? Well, yeah, and it was at a time where women were starting to 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 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 hair nut and rollers? Yeah, so apparently it didn't delight all men

because they weren't on board, but... Would it kill her to dress me up in a diaper? We should do an episode on that sometime. That's the thing. Oh, I thought you'd better say on Freud, but on men wearing diapers as adults? Yeah, I think it's called diaper play for sex play, but it's diaper-centric.

Yeah, we should do a podcast on that, just that. Well, if we can include it in maybe a fetish one, how about that? All right, okay. Wow. That took a weird turn all the sudden. It really did. Geez, you got anything else on TV dinners?

That's a good way to end it, I think. Nope. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, I'm gonna go change my diaper and we'll talk about gelatin right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. There is a little bit of a shock. So Chuck, you were saying that in the last one that the TV dinner hit just right. Yes.

And struck America in part because women were starting to enter the workforce, right? And that was partially the result of World War II. World War II also changed things as far as food and food consumption and food packaging goes. And that apparently at the end of World War II, there were a lot of companies that had gone all in into supplying the troops food.

Yes. And we're making pretty great money, but apparently we're basically caught with a large amount of supply when the war ended. And they said, well, if we don't figure out a way to get non-war time America, the regular American consumer to buy this stuff, we're gonna go out of business. We're overextended 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. Yeah, like spam, if you remember that podcast, that kind of was where that whole movement was born. Yep, spam, condensed soup, dehydrated stuff, freeze dried stuff, like all of this came out of basically an overstock of World War II food supplies

that were intended for troops and were kind of repackaged and rearranged to be served to the American consumer. And part of that also was that same thing that TV dinners struck, which was convenient. Like, hey, your husband still wants a meal and your family still expects you to be the one to cook for him, but now you have to work.

So what are you gonna do? Well, 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 Jell-O as the name brand,

but Jell-O-Tin the word is from Latin gelatus, meaning jellyed froze. And it was first used in Egypt, but was really first used in cooking in France. And I think most people know this by now, but if you don't, gelatin is a protein and it's produced from collagen from boiling animal bones.

Yeah, or hooves. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so 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. Yeah, that's never a good start.

No, it really is. You know. Yeah, and a guy from the, I think the 17th century in France, what was his name? Pepin? Yeah. Someone Pepin. Dennis Papine.

Right, who may or may not be related to Jacques Pepin. He was great in French. He's also a cook. He was the first person to mention it in writing, I believe, and then it just kind of sat there for a while until the 19th century, when I guess people were aware of gelatin 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 gelatin. It was the exact opposite of how we think of gelatin today, which is instantaneous, right?

Sure, so easy. Yeah, so in the 19th century, this guy named Peter Cooper figured out a way to turn gelatin into a powder form, a dehydrated gelatin powder, and it went absolutely nowhere for 50 years. And I was surprised to find this out. I knew gelatin was pretty old,

but it's interesting how it's just kind of moved along in these very slow little fits and starts. Yeah, 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 gelatin along in its progress. Yeah, so later on in 1894, a guy named Charles Knox kind of revolutionized things when he came up with a process that resulted in a dried sheet of gelatin and he hired salesmen 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 gelatin. Yeah, which we'll get to that. But 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 things were kind of moving along a little bit. Then in 1895, there was a cough syrup company in New York called Pearl, Pearl B. Wait, is that what it's called? Pearl Wait was the cough syrup. W-A-I-T.

Right. But they weren't selling much cough syrup, so they said, all right, let's get into the food business. And 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. Yeah.

But they didn't succeed either and sold that to their neighbor, Francis, is that the whole name, orator Francis Woodward? Yes. For 450 bucks, 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, despite some early attempts. He apparently tried to sell it to his supervisor at work for 35 bucks, even though he paid 450 to it for it. So at some point, I guess he decided to give it another go, and he hired a bunch of traveling salesmen, 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 kind of hit at just the right time, finally. I should say the world was finally ready for Jello. Part of it had to do with refrigeration. Yeah, for sure. Once refrigeration is key for Jello, as we all know. And once those technologies were developed,

it kind of, well, it formed, literally. It all congealed. And figuratively. And then once advertising started taking over, like in the mid-1930s, General Foods had a very famous radio ad from Jack Benny, 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 other flavors. I think originally they tried strawberry, raspberry, orange, and lemon, right? And then they tried chocolate. And apparently chocolate didn't go over very well. So they released pudding, though, right? No, first they just released it as chocolate Jello. Oh, God.

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 spurred like a whole pudding line, including something I grew up on, which is Butterscotch Jello pudding.

Oh, yeah. Man, that was so good. Except 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 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 brown, the chocolate Jello pudding. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, she'll make a parfait like, you know. Oh, nice. A little pudding, a little whipped cream, little pudding, little whipped cream.

She knows how to live. Yeah, she does. It's a special night. That happens about three times a year. And I'm like, oh boy, it's parfait time. So in the 1950s, supposedly, the Jello shot with alcohol was invented by this really interesting guy named Tom Lehrer, who he's a mathematician and a singer-songwriter who

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. What?

I've never had a Jello shot. Wow, well, you're not missing much. They're pretty gross. Well, Jello, I can't stand Jello. Well, even if you like or ambivalent to Jello, it's just gross. Does it taste like tequila Jello or whatever? Yes, it's a very obnoxious taste.

You're supposed to use, I think, to replace half of the water with whatever liquor you're using. Usually people use vodka. Well, it really just stands out in a noxious way. Gross. By the way, Tom Lehrer, I thought that name sounded familiar, he is pretty great. He wrote this one song called The Old Dope Peddler.

And Two Chains, actually. 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, no, that was young jock. Oh, right, right, right.

No, Two Chains, he's huge, man. He did a song where he sampled The Old Dope Peddler, and he, I guess, wrote to Tom Lehrer to ask for permission to sample it. And Tom Lehrer 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. But Jell-O shots are gross. Jell-O shots are gross. So Jell-O is speeding along. It's taking over America.

And then they decide to come out with these savory lines. And it became, and this was this post-World War II thing that you were talking about, when, I guess they did, what, there was this great article you sent, making and eating the 1950s most nauseating Jell-O soaked recipes. From Collector Weekly. Yeah, Hunter Oatman Stanford. And they did this interview.

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 Jell-O, 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, experimental, and unique centerpiece, food centerpiece. Made of Jell-O. Well, Jell-O mold. All kinds of things. We're talking about the hot dog tree. Right, yeah, and there, it could be a lot of different stuff.

And I think that's what Ruth Clark does. She recreates this stuff, right? Yeah. And her poor husband has to eat it. But a lot of those things were Jell-O molds. Oh, yeah. And a lot of the reason why Jell-O molds were so weird, and so popular is because Jell-O put so much time

and effort into publishing cookbooks. And the whole point was, all of these food companies wanted all of their products to be your entire meal. So they were putting these random products that the food company made into some really weird configurations. And they came up with some very odd Jell-O molds in the 50s or 60s. It was such a sad culinary time.

It was, but Ruth Clark makes a good point that to the people at that time, like a really well thought out fancy Jell-O 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 a lamb shank and asparagus inside of Jell-O. A savory Jell-O that's like celery flavored. Oh, you're lucky if it was savory.

Lime Jell-O is one of the most abused Jell-O flavors of all time. People would put tuna and stuff in with the lime Jell-O. There's one called Perfection Salad that's coleslaw inside of lime Jell-O. And what Ruth Clark pointed out was that Jell-Oton apparently preserves food really well. And that coleslaw that would have otherwise been inedible

and runny after day three was still like crunchy after day five when it was put inside of a Jell-O mold. So gross. It's still gross, yeah. There's actually a great BuzzFeed article if you want to get an idea of what people were doing in the 50s, 60s, and 70s with Jell-O molds. It's called 17 Horrifyingly Disgusting Retro Jell-Oton

Recipes. And they are gross, man. Like cottage cheese and salmon mold. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hate Jell-O. Oh, man. This must be like your waking nightmare.

I couldn't even look through it. You sent it to me and I scrolled about halfway through and just deleted it through my computer on the window. The best one I see is lime cheese salad. It's lime Jell-O mixed with cottage cheese. And then into the center of the Jell-O mold, you put a seafood salad. Oh, my god.

A sauerkraut 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 Jell-O molds were as big as they are. But she posits that 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 canned salmon, canned tuna, in Jell-O. Right. My god. So that's Jell-O molds, man. Where do you want to head next?

Let's go to the crock pot. All right. Do-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That was our crock pot travel song. First of all, I have a crock pot. The same here. And is yours actually a crock pot or are you using it as a proprietary eponym?

I don't think it is a crock pot brand pot. Yeah. It's a slow cooker. There you go. And I forget to use it a lot, but when I remember, I'll go on a little crock pot binge where I'll cook a few meals over the course of a few weeks and a crock pot.

And they're still great if you know how to use it and how to spice things up. For sure. Apparently, at first, people didn't know because if you're cooking a recipe, say, it's like simmering, say like a beef stew on the stove top, that simmering action that it's undergoing, it does something different to the recipe

than a crock pot does, even though it's the exact same recipe. And so at first, when crock pots came out, it was first introduced by Rival back in 1971. When crock pots first came out, people were like, this dinner that it's making is really gross. It doesn't taste very good to blend. Yeah. And yet they still didn't stop using or buying crock pots.

Well, food was more bland back then. Well, we're talking the 70s. So by the 70s, I think people were using more spices than before. I think it was more bland in the 40s and maybe the 50s. Yeah, but that one, yeah, you're probably right, but that one article we read said an old recipe for chili would have a teaspoon of chili powder or something.

And it's like all the food just sucked because they didn't realize, no man, you dump a bunch of that junk in there. So while you were saying back in the 40s or 50s, when TV dinners really hit, moms were starting to enter the work force. In 1971, moms were really into the work force. 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 despite the fact that it made these meals that did not taste like they should, people were still, like I said, they were still buying the crock pots. And instead, they started to look around

and 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, peace children, I've got this covered, listen up. Yeah, she wrote a book called The Crockery Cookery, or Crockery Cookery, no thee. And it was a huge, huge hit.

It was a New York Times bestseller. I believe she went on to sell about 6 million copies of this thing. And I don't think we've said that, you know, we said 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 cooks at a very, very low heat all day long.

Right. And then when you get home from work eight hours later, something like that, it will be done. You just serve and smile. Yeah, and thanks to Crockery Cookery, the crock pot in 1971 earned 2 million bucks, and 72, 10 million, 73, 23 million, and then eventually peaking in 1975 at $93 million

worth of crock pots being sold. Yeah. It was a genuine legit craze, food craze. And supposedly Crock Pot Cookery, the book, was America's sixth best-selling cookbook ever, right? Yeah. 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 stove top as compared to a crock pot. There was something, the flavor was just disappointing. So what Mabel Hoffman did was on a very tight deadline, 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 20 crock pots

going all day every day. Yeah, 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 than you would use like on the stove top, because you have a lot less evaporation. The crock pot keeps it in there, which

is one reason why meat is so tender in a crock pot or slow cooker, because it just recirculates the moisture rather than allowing it to just evaporate, right? Yep. And then another thing she came up with was that when you use herbs into the recipe, you want to reserve some of them for right before the things finish 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 they were selling a bunch of crock pots. She was selling a bunch of cookbooks. And eventually she would say, hey, I really was on to something here. So she wrote a deep fry cookery, chocolate cookery.

And these are 78, 79, 77, like kind of all in a row, crepe cookery. And then eventually, in 1985, healthy crockery cookery. And the person 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 crock pot recipe? Oh, jeez, I don't know. What's your favorite thing to cook? Well, usually some sort of like beef.

Yeah. It just does such a good job like making a roast or something, you know? OK. But yeah, that's usually what I'm cooking when I cook in a crock pot is beef. All right, Josh's crock pot, beef crock pot surprise. Right, with aspic.

You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll finish up with a bit interesting bit on Oat Bran. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

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Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

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So Chuck. Yes. We finally arrived. We're just going to go forward a few years. Blululululu. The Way Back Machine is in the shop, which is why I'm having to do it. To the 80s, man.

An oat bran. Yes. I know that we differ on the interestingness of this one. I'm just fascinated by it. Really? I really am, man, because it's got it all. It's like, it's got the 80s. OK.

Do you remember that SNL, the famous SNL ad for colon blow? I do. That was based on, this came out of this trend, has to do with studies, studies that contradict those studies. Yeah. Bad science reporting, the whole thing. OK. I love it.

Oats. Oat bran. Yeah. It's very important. It is. So there was this huge trend in the 80s where anything that had to do with oat bran, you could sell a million units of a minute.

Yes. So much so that there was a 1990 article from Tulsa World that said that there were, no, I'm sorry, the LA Times article from 1990 said that there were over like 300 different items available in grocery stores at the time that touted on its label the fact that it had oat bran in it. People were nuts for it. Yes, they were.

And this is largely due to some studies that came out that said that oat bran was kind of a miracle food for lowering cholesterol. Right. And that was like back in the late 70s. And I guess Quaker Oats took notice of those studies and they released a thing called Mother's Oat Bran. But they sent it straight to the hippies at the health food

store and just didn't do anything about it. They just released a product and that was that. Yeah. And then Kellogg's came along and said, hey, you know what? What if we start telling people that our food can basically prevent cancer? Can we do that? And the lawyer said no.

And the president of Kellogg 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, OK, 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 Horne in 1986 because they had a similar study about oat bran cutting cholesterol. Right. So they're starting to say, well, Kellogg didn't get in trouble.

Let's try this ourselves. And they went out and they hired Wilfred Brimley. You 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 persona was? Yeah, the word got around.

They were like, it may be a short day because that's how it goes with him sometimes. 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 told everybody that eating Quaker Opreng 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 Opreng. This book came out called The Eight Week Cholesterol Cure by a guy named Robert E. Kowalski. And it chronicled the decline of his LDL, the bag cholesterol, just from eating an Opreng diet.

And that book became extraordinarily popular. Supposedly it was 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 where the peak began. I think the Journal of the American Medical Association,

April 1988, published a study from the University of Maryland where these researchers found that eating Opreng could really significantly lower your cholesterol. And not only that, it does it for a sixth of the price of the expensive cholesterol lowering drugs. That's right, and people ate even more Opreng. That's right.

The trend is developing. Can you see it? I think it's fully developed at this point. So everybody's going Opreng crazy. And one of the big things that they were doing was eating Opreng muffins. But these Opreng 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 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? 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 20 people, which is not much of a study. It isn't. And the people who were on the Opreng diet were eating 20% more fat than the control group. It was a terrible study, almost like they wanted to take Opreng down a peg. And it worked really well. It's basically the science reporting in major newspapers

and the news services reported that Opreng was the greatest thing ever. And then they suddenly turned on it and said, Opreng is nothing. And everybody dropped Opreng. And if you read this stuff today, it's true. Opreng really does lower cholesterol. Sure.

But it just got overhyped. Right. Because of the 80s. That's the 80s for you. Yep. 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 HowStuffWorks.com. Yeah. Search bar. You're not going to get much, though. No.

You may want to just look elsewhere. But still, since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to 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 thoughts from people about my friend Billy. And just really great. People with MS, people who had people in their family.

We heard from doctors and nurses. And that just ended up being a really good episode. Yeah. 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.

Listen to the show on MS on my right home and like to commend you for how well you handle the topic. I was diagnosed a few years ago at 19. Luckily, my diagnosis was quick due to the severity of my first relapse. And I feel like your podcast would have helped me understand and cope with the diagnosis in a more constructive manner than my initially trying to self

destruct. Since then, I'm continually learning about the latest research in history. I love that you discussed Lidwina and Augustus Deste, 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 Deste'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, 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. I've 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 we said we keep this

anonymous because this person said, yeah, this person said, you know, that's great that you read it but if they're keeping it quiet for now we don't want to, you know, broadcast the names. Sure. Yeah. Nice. So, okay.

Thank you, Anonymous. Yeah, thanks, Anonymous. If you want to get in touch with us like Anonymous did, you can tweet to us. Yeah, I guess it'd be Anonymous. I'm at Josh Clark and at SYSK Podcast. You can hang out with Chuck on facebook.com slash stuff you should know or at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on facebook.

You can send us both an email. We promise to be confidential at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.