Jell-O, America's Most Unsettled Triumph

Renee: I need, i need to tell you about the summer of 1978 my grandmother's kitchen in july which is the single hottest place a human being can voluntarily enter and she's making a jello mold not just regular jello mold right a lime green thing with carrots suspended in it and a layer of cream cheese floating in the center like a terrible, terrible secret. And she's going to serve this thing at Sunday dinner as a vegetable. As vegetable.

Marc: It's a flavor hate crime.

Renee: It is. It's objectively a hate crime. And I was 10 years old and I couldn't do anything about it. There's a picture of me eating it, I swear to you, where I look like I'm being tortured, absolutely tortured. But here's the thing. Here's what I remember most clearly. I was completely transfixed by the process. She had this, you know, copper mold, you know, shaped like a fish, and she poured this white electric green hot liquid into it. And then she put it in the fridge. And then for a while, it just like it just sat there. And then something crazy happened. Something that was liquid became something that was not liquid. I mean, it wasn't really solid, but it also was not liquid. It's held its shape and it wobbled when she unmolded it. And it was somehow both a solid and completely philosophically not a solid. And I remember standing there in that July kitchen thinking, oh my, how does this work?

Marc: Okay, for the record, you know, carrots and Jell-O, it's indefensible, right? But you know me, the chemistry underneath is where, you know, all of this gets good.

Renee: Yeah, yeah, I know you. The chemistry, the history, the marketing, the cultural arc, all of it is fascinating because Jell-O is not just a weird 50s relic or a hospital tray staple or fraternity party delivery mechanism for cheap vodka. I mean, it is, but it's not, right? It's one of the most interesting food technology stories in American history, and today, we're getting into all of it.

Marc: Right into the biomaterials. This is on brand for us.

Renee: Yeah, this is absolutely on brand. I'm Renee.

Marc: And I'm marc.

Renee: And this is the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. Okay, before we get to Jell-O the brand, I want to make an argument that gelatin, the thing that Jell-O is made of, and the underlying technology is one of the most underappreciated food innovations in human history. And I will fight you on this.

Marc: Yeah, okay. I think we're going to fight.

Renee: All right, all right. So gelatin is ancient, right? We're talking about a technology that predates writing in meaningful ways, because as long as humans have been boiling animal bones and connective tissue over fire, that's right, someone has noticed that the liquid left behind does something strange when it cools. It thickens, it sets, and it holds its shape. And medieval cooks absolutely knew this and built an entire tradition around it. If you look at European feast tables in the 14th and 15th century, I mean, my God, Henry VIII loved this, right? His cooks would boil the bones of tons and tons of pigs. Now, think about this, right? Because it would have to be a lot of pig bones you boiled and knuckles and everything else for you to get enough gelatin to put a bunch of lamb legs in it. And then they would bring that out to the table and pretend like it was going to fall over. And whoever the guests would be like, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's going to fall. Oh, it didn't fall. And he'd stick his hand in it. He'd pull out a lamb leg and eat it and laugh. That was Henry VIII. Anyhow, like they knew this, right? They knew it. And you can see these elaborate, molded, savory jellies, decorated, layered, multicolored, showing off the wealth of the household. Because remember, it took a lot of pigs and pigs aren't cheap.

Marc: Yeah, it's the aspic tradition, which is kind of a word that makes modern people, you know, let's say, recoil and probably make a comeback just for the chaos of it.

Renee: Aspic is merely the savory application of the same technology. And I think it deserves better than the contempt you're giving it. Because the key thing of this is before refrigeration, before industrialization, making a perfect gelatin mold was genuinely hard. You're boiling calves, feats, you're skimming, you're clarifying the liquid through a cloth, you're flavoring, you're managing the set. This all-day project requiring skill and label, and usually like a staff of people. So a beautifully molded jelly at a dinner party is not just food. It was a declaration of wealth. It was saying, I have people whose entire job it is to spend a day doing just this.

Marc: We've talked about class, you know, sort of displays of wealth, right? Gelatin is class theater here.

Renee: Yes, it's pure class theater, which means when industrialization comes along and starts asking, what if we did the disgusting extraction part in a factory and sold people just the powder? You know, you're not just inventing a convenience food, you're democratizing a status symbol, just like we did with nail polish. It was saying, right, I have people. It's like you're democratizing the status symbol, and it's a very, very different thing.

Marc: Yeah. Okay. And so we're going to get to Peter Cooper in 1845.

Renee: Peter Cooper in 1845. And Peter Cooper is a fascinating figure to attach to this story because he primarily is known for completely different things. He built the Tom Thumb Locomotive. He founded Cooper Union, the free engineering school in New York that still exists today. He ran for president. He is a significant person in American industrial history. And also, as a kind of a footnote, he patents a method for producing powdered gelatin. Just powdered, processed, ready-to-use gelatin. No calves feet required on the consumer end. Huh?

Marc: I mean, that's, yeah. The abstraction away from the biology, you know, to turn it, because everybody would know, right? You know, that process.

Renee: Well, right. I don't want to know where bacon comes from. I wouldn't want to know where this comes from either. Like, I like abstracting away biology. It's a good thing, right? So he did that, which is exactly the right way to put it. You get all the functional properties without needing to understand or interact with where they come from. You didn't have to boil all the bones of a... Dead pig to get this or a dead cow, right? And he has the patent and he essentially does nothing with it because he's busy with railroads and schools and politics. And it just sits there. And it doesn't sit there for a little while. It sits there for 50 years.

Marc: Until Pearl B. Waite.

Renee: Until Pearl B. Waite arrives in 1897 in Leroy, New York. And I'm going to spend a moment on the name Pearl B. Waite because it's generally a remarkable name, and he deserves full credit for existing with it. Waite is a carpenter who is also dabbling in patent medicine, which in the 1890s is a very normal sign of business for a carpenter. I make cabinets and medicine. I mean, that makes sense in 1897. You needed to cover a wagon to sell the medicine. I get it, right? He looks at Cooper's gelatin concept and adds fruit flavorings, and he and his wife May, who has better naming instincts than he does, she calls the result Jell-O.

Marc: With the dash.

Renee: With the dash. Jell-O.

Marc: Yeah. So May Waite, you know, names the Jell-O. And, you know, of course, her contribution tends to get lost.

Renee: Yeah, because it's a her. So May Waite names Jell-O. Yes. And we should say her name clearly without rushing it because she did something. She named an American institution. Anyway, Wade has this product, and he has absolutely no idea what to do with it, which is a very relatable situation for an inventor. And in 1899, two years after creating it, he sells the whole thing to his neighbor.

Marc: Yeah, orator. I love the names, you know, in this story,

Renee: Right?

Marc: Yeah. Orator Woodward.

Renee: Or to Francis Woodward, which alongside Pearl B. Weight makes the most wonderfully named business transaction in food history. The price is $450, which is the worst deal in American culinary history, I'll argue, with the possible exception of the guy who let Ray Crocker's hamburger stand at the McDonald's, right?

Marc: Yeah. So Woodward almost immediately tries to resell it for $35.

Renee: Try Jell-O. Try to sell Jell-O for $35. So the valuation went $450 briefly, $35. And within a few years, a million dollars a year in revenue. That is not a typical business trajectory.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. So tell me what changed here.

Renee: Well, what always changes, right? Marketing. Marketing changed, which is actually what we're going to talk about next. All right. So here here is what I think of the great overlooked marketing stories in American business history. Woodward figures out something that most people in the 1900s don't understand yet, which is that what you don't sell is a product by explaining. You don't sell it by explaining what it is. Right. Because if you had to sell Jell-O by explaining what it is, no one would buy it. Right. That's right. You sell a product by showing people what their life looks like when they have it. Think about that. Like Steve Jobs understood a 1900 like understanding. Don't don't tell them what it is. Tell them how it's going to change their life. It's amazing.

Marc: It reminds me of oat milk, you know, right? Oats don't. They're not. It doesn't milk.

Renee: They don't have mammary glands. What are you talking about?

Marc: You can't milk an oat. So, you know, so you don't explain what it is. You know, you market it and you say it's oat milk, right? Right, right. Yeah. But for Jell-O, it's recipe booklets.

Renee: Now, think about this. Think about it. Think about what an amazing, like, concept that is. I have something new. I don't want to tell you anything about it because if you knew how gross it was, you wouldn't buy it. But I'm going to show you how to use it and I'm going to show you how to do it in a recipe booklet. He starts printing and distributing them for free in 1902, which is a genuinely radical thing to do with money at the moment. At that moment in time, you're spending on content, to use a very, it's a very modern word, before anyone had a framework for that concept. And the booklets are not, here's how Jell-O works. They're beautifully illustrated documents full of elegant desserts and molded salads and party presentations. And Jell-O's just the vehicle. The emotional pitch is you could set a table like this. You could be that kind of host. This is what your Sunday dinner looks like when you're the kind of person who has things together.

Marc: It's yeah i mean it's a really cool concept and you know you still get this a little bit with the all the food packaging like i can't think of too much food you know processed food packaging that doesn't have a recipe on it you know like velveta you know has recipes for toll

Renee: House cookies and it's not just how to make a chocolate chip cookie but it's how to make a thousand things with that semi-sweet chocolate yeah.

Marc: Exactly i mean yeah they're still playing the betty crocker right i mean all of that stuff yeah but it's it's you know it's like the iphone playbook apple leads with the beautiful life you know it's like have you ever watched have you watched some of the modern you know the the modern events you know the big the big events it's the you know the drone view sweeping across this beautiful landscape and all this right you know and so there's a beautiful life and then they tell you which tool makes it possible

Renee: Right right i've said this exact things at multiple dinner parties and i'm i'm glad we're now on record agreeing with me right the jello recipe booklet of the 1902 iphone box right, bows are primarily selling a feeling aspirational. Like, Jell-O is aspirational. It's not gross. It's not meant to be in hospitals. It's aspirational. By 1906, Jell-O is doing a million dollars a year in sales. In 1906 dollars, this is a product made of processed animal byproducts and artificial flavoring. And it's making a million dollars. Can I tell you one other thing? That the advertising campaign was always little kids, the Jell-O children, right? And there were a bunch of different ads, right? And so one's a little girl, one's a little boy. But they're all like two years and under. Because if you were 12, you were working in a factory in 1902. You didn't have time to stay home and make jello, right? So it's easy. And some of the advertising would say easy enough for your two-year-old to cook. And they're not wrong. It was just you boiled some water, threw this in, and let it sit, right? Right. But what was really, really crazy was one year around the holidays with those recipe books, it was all five kids together on one advertisement. It was literally, like, groundbreaking for advertising that these children became brand avatars, and those avatars were interacting with each other all on one page. That was actually something really, really crazy and amazing at the time. Crazy.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, you know, thinking back to, like, because I had a cousin that loved the Coke, you know, Coke advertising. And it was always the especially in the early 1900s right it was the the lady right the classic you know oh yeah you know but that's it she didn't interact with anyone right it wasn't until much later that you had interaction between you like coke coke and santa or you know coke and you know the polar bears or whatever yeah but you know the early early stuff it was always sort of an iconic image but not you know brand icon interactions kind of interesting I hadn't really thought about that

Renee: So yeah it's good it was good Jell-O did it back in 1902 and it was pretty it was groundbreaking for people who followed the brand right it was like oh look they're all on this same page oh look they're all talking to each other and they're all two.

Marc: You know like I mean is that you know we should because we do have a topic on advertising to go back to I wonder if yeah I haven't

Renee: Read that yeah we should be Yeah, we should go back and update that script. Just do it again and say, like, watch how things changed, right? It's not just PT Bardo. Yeah, it's really, there are these moments in advertising where the brand, like how we think about brand completely changed.

Marc: Changes, yeah, yeah.

Renee: And that was one of them. So anyway, so yeah, it's made of animal bribe products and artificial flavoring. But they made a million dollars, marc. A million dollars in 1902.

Marc: That's a lot. That's a lot. So, you know, since you just mentioned animal byproducts and artificial flavoring, you know, this is like the right moment to actually explain what's happening, you know, chemistry, the molecular level, because I think the chemistry is part that makes, you know, the rest of this, you know, important.

Renee: You know what? Do it. I want to hear it.

Marc: All right. So gelatin comes from collagen. You know, you can buy it at the vitamin store now, which is the most abundant protein in animal bodies. It's, you know, it's in skin, it's in bone, it's in tendons, and all the connective tissue. And collagen has a very specific and, you know, pretty beautiful molecular architecture, the triple helix. Oh, the triple helix.

Renee: Helix.

Marc: Yeah. The three protein chains wound tightly around each other, which gives it, you know, this kind of really enormous structural strength. And that's why tendons can handle the forces they handled. This is the part that, you know, I kind of, you know, like because I'm a vegetarian and gelatin is the ingredient that got, you know, kind of passed me for years, even before I was a vegetarian. So you learn to read the labels, you know, because my kids and, you know, my wife are all vegetarian. So you read it, you know, and gelatin doesn't, you know, it doesn't like pop up, right? It's just there. Like it's not an obvious ingredient. It's in sweets and in yogurts. Like, we didn't, like, and our discovery of gelatin was kind of this, like, gradual process, learning what it all showed up in. Like, first it was gummy candy, and then it was something else, you know, and then it was yogurt. And he's like, yogurt? What the heck, man? It's yogurt.

Renee: Yeah, that's why it's so, like, it's so, like, weird and it's not running. It's squishy.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, so once you understand what it was, the whole category of that stuff changes, right? So now, because I'm a vegetarian and the kids are vegetarian, we're all vegetarian, a whole family avoids it. And, you know, we kind of, this rule, right? If it has a specific sort of gelish bounce, right? Assume gelatin unless proven otherwise. In the UK, that, you know, that pretty much the whole gummy candy aisle, like Haribo's and stuff like that, there are a bunch of vegetarian gummies and they exist you kind of learn which ones are which and you know where you can buy them and all that there's these ones that are and they probably

Renee: Aren't as good right they're not as good.

Marc: No they're good they're good shut off they're good there's these ones that they're called strobs And they're like strawberry ones. And then if you go to Marks and Spencer, Marks and Spencer has a whole line of vegetarian gummies. And they have Colin the Caterpillar and Percy the Pig. Because, you know, you want to have Percy the Pig as a vegetarian, you know, gummy, not as the thing that you're actually eating the pig. So, you know, yeah. Anyways, but you kind of learn to live around, you know, around that stuff.

Renee: So, which is remarkable when you think about what those protein chains actually are. They're just long sequences of amino acids following a particular pattern. The specific pattern produces this winding geometry, right?

Marc: Yeah, yeah. And so that sequence, you know, it really matters. So the collagen is heavily weighted toward glycine, proline, and hydroxyproline in a repeating motif that locks in the helical structure. And when you boil the collagen, you add just enough energy to break the helical bonds. The triple helix unravels and the three chains separate and denature. You know, that means that they lose their specific folded structure. And what you have now is the solution of kind of long floppy protein chains And that's your, that's your actual dissolved gelatin.

Renee: Oh, it's scrambled structure.

Marc: Scrambled structure, you know, but this is where it gets kind of cool, right? So when you, ha ha, cool. When you cool the solution down, the chains start to reassociate, you know, not back into the perfect original triple helix, you know, that, that, that process, that window's closed. But they find each other at points and form junctions, sort of a partial helical segments. And the junctions become the nodes of a three-dimensional network. And the chains bridge and they tangle and they connect. That's when you get it as a physical gel.

Renee: It becomes an imperfect structure, but it's functional.

Marc: Yeah, right. The structure is imperfect, but functional. And that's a cool description, you know, to get a lot of the sort of, you know, successful technologies. And the key thing here is that the network, you know, what it does to water, a standard box of Jell-O when prepared is about 98% water. The protein is 2%. But the 2% protein organized into this mesh is enough to give the whole mass the mechanical properties of a, well, not quite solid, like non-Newtonian, you know.

Renee: It's got 98% water. It's almost barely food. It's structurally organized flavor water. Which, hang on, that's why you eat it while you're on a diet. Yeah, yeah. That's why they give it to you in the hospital. It's barely anything. It's just solid water, solid-ish water.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's technically is called a hydrogel. Like when I was in the Boy Scouts, like we would have that as our, as our hot drink in the warnings, you know, when we were hiking. Oh, wow. And then, and then like what's, what's even like worse is like, so you'd, you'd boil your water, you'd pour your package yellow and eat it out of a metal cup, you know, or drink it out. You drink it out of a metal, aluminum metal cup, you know, so you get the, like the metal. Yeah. Taste too and then yeah exactly and then as because it's cold out and it's you know you're drinking it and then you're pulling the heat away because you're drinking it it starts to solidify you know on the surface of the metal yeah yeah yeah anyways why

Renee: Did you do that just because it would fill it like what would happen to it after you drank it did it make you feel full like what.

Marc: Is the point of any of that no it's just it's like it's because you know you're you're you know whatever a 10 or 11 or 12 year old kid or whatever so that they're not cooking up coffee you know

Renee: I see okay so it was just.

Marc: Okay yeah but tang too hot tang

Renee: Oh that's nasty quit talking to me like this is nasty like i would have to put my tang in a blender with ice before i would eat it like no no no no hot.

Marc: Tang i man when i was a kid i loved tang i love that stuff you know

Renee: Taking moonshine is good. I'll give you that. Like, that's good. But I don't know about the rest of it.

Marc: Yeah. We should talk about a whole, like, class of processed foods, you know?

Renee: Right? Yeah. Spam. We'll do spam next.

Marc: Oh, no. No. Go ahead. I can't do spam. I can't do spam. Talk about gelatin, man. That, like, gross, slimy stuff. I think, yeah, it totally is gelatin. Anyways, but technically, you know, gelatin or jello is this hydrogel. The protein network is trapping water molecules and constraining their movement, but not like rigid like ice, right? So the network itself flexes, which is the wobble. You know, as I'm saying the word wobble, I'm like, my head is wobbling back and forth here. The wobble is the hydrogel doing exactly what, you know, what it's supposed to do.

Renee: The wobble is a feature. You know, that's real. I feel strongly this is really underappreciated. Like, that's the point. The wobble is the point of it all.

Marc: Completely unappreciated. You're absolutely right. For Jell-O, the wobble is the, you know, is the feature, right? But there's also a bit of a temperature behavior. And that matters a lot too. So the gel to, you know, sort of solve transition temperature for Jell-O, the point at which the network breaks down and it becomes liquid again is around 35 degrees Celsius. So, you know, in freedom units, somewhere around the mid-80s to, you know, mid-90s, which is below, you know, right below body temperature.

Renee: That's why it melts on your tongue. When you eat it and it just melts in your mouth, it's because you're 98.6 degrees and you're tearing that network down and swallowing it.

Marc: Yep, exactly. That's why it melts on your tongue. So the warmth of your mouth is just enough to locally dissolve the protein and then, you know, it releases the water, which is what gives jello that kind of very specific sensation that nothing else sort of replicates. It's solid that your body temperature turns into a liquid in real time. It's like, there's no other processed food that does that.

Renee: Right? It's actually pretty extraordinary. I mean, I've eaten Jell-O a hundred times. I have it in the cupboard right now. I think I might make it when we're done. And I did not consciously understand that I was dissolving a protein network with my mouth. Like, you know what I mean? With my own body heat. Like, that's crazy. Like, I am deconstructing a network that was made by creating heat in the first place, right? Like, that's pretty rad. It's rad.

Marc: It is pretty cool. I mean, the chemistry is pretty neat. So, of course, because, you know, the youngest asked about, you know, recording and stuff. So I told her, you know, doing Jell-O and, and. But she didn't understand that the brand Jell-O and the Jell-O gelatin, you know, were two different things. And she's like, oh, I used to eat Jell-O. I'm like, no, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. You know, she was like, yeah, yeah, we did that with the little glass cups. And she was thinking about the pudding, you know, the Jell-O brand pudding, you know. So, yeah. But anyways, but thinking about that chemical process, like people don't think about it. most people haven't thought about it. The other practical consequence of the transition temperature is that jello can be remelted and then reset. So if your jello gets too warm and liquefies, you can refrigerate it again and it sets again. The network will reform. You haven't ruined it. Well, not exactly.

Renee: So wait a minute. So like if you made lime jello with, let's say, carrots and a shrimp and you're like, gee, no one ate it. I can melt it down, take the carrots and shrimp out and then return it into a dessert and no one would know the difference.

Marc: Well like i

Renee: Guess yeah see i could have saved a lot of jello like that's crazy that is a loss i'm gonna sit with because i could have i could have made something really gross and then just saved it for dessert right.

Marc: I yeah i'm not yeah i don't know The flavoring and coloring system is, you know, it's kind of owned piece of food chemistry and, you know, worth mentioning, though. So getting the fruit flavor, and it comes in such wonderful colors, you know.

Renee: Right. Yeah, that's not killing us for sure.

Marc: Getting the fruit flavor stable in a dry powder form in 1902 without, you know, the modern toolkit of encapsulation technology was, it's like a pretty significant formulation problem. Flavor compounds are, you know, often volatile. They escape, they degrade. Getting them to survive, you know, the dry storage phase and then bloom correctly when you dissolve them in hot water, it's not a trivial task.

Renee: And the color is doing the cognitive work that I think is genuinely unappreciated, right? There is no strawberry in strawberry jello, just so we're clear, right? There has never been any strawberry.

Marc: Unless you put them in.

Renee: Unless you put them in. There has never been any strawberry in strawberry jello. But that specific shade of red is doing enormous work in your brain before the food even reaches your mouth. The color is communicating flavor in a medium where the flavor source is entirely absent. Right? The color is a promise. This is going to taste like strawberry. And then you eat it, you're like, strawberry. No. No. But, yeah.

Marc: What if you're colorblind?

Renee: It would all taste like gray.

Marc: Great.

Renee: Or blue. I don't know. I don't know. Oh, I know people who are colorblind. I'll ask them later. Yeah. I'll get back to you on that one.

Marc: Yeah. So the flavor-color mapping at Jell-O is one of the sort of earliest and most successful examples of what food scientists now call sensory congruence engineering.

Renee: Okay, number one. Like food scientist and then sensory engineering. We're engineering food, which is a very technical way of saying, tricking your brain into tasting things that aren't there. You know what? I mean, as a compliment, I often teach my brain. I mean, I'm not a great cook, but Sam sometimes says, oh, my gosh, this is so good. And I think it looks good, but it can't possibly taste that good, right?

Marc: What does blue taste like, Renee?

Renee: Raspberry. Isn't that stupid?

Marc: I know. It's so stupid, blue raspberry. It's the dumbest flavor ever. And we have so much blue food. And I mean.

Renee: Yeah. And it all tastes like raspberry.

Marc: No, it does not taste like raspberry.

Renee: Maybe because raspberry is so unappealing as a color. It's like kind of bloody red. Like raspberry is a gross color. I can see why you would say, hey, blue is better for that. Plus little kid, like little kid candy, like all of it is weird like that. Right? It's blue and it's bright green and it's bright yellow.

Marc: I wonder if the blue thing came from a flavor side or a coloring side. Like, because red dyes have a whole negative history, right?

Renee: Right.

Marc: And, you know, there's all sorts of issues with red dyes. And I wonder if blue dyes were easier to do. And so some food scientist was like, you know, oh, we've got to do blue, blue, you know, what's the flavor of blue? Raspberry. I'm going to flip that up now.

Renee: I mean, I guess you could make blue any flavor you wanted, right? I mean, so, you know, during like Halloween, you can get like purple ketchup. Like yeah i don't know what that's i don't know why like that's that's dumb yeah i know plus it's so weird it's purple it should be grapey tasting but it's just ketchup like yeah i don't, that thing that thing where your brain is expecting one thing but your taste buds are like kind of adapting to what that that's actually a thing i that wow okay all right yeah well i think, You thought that was weird. Here's where it gets really weird. We need to talk about the mold era, because this is where Jell-O stops being a product and starts being a cultural pathology.

Marc: Yeah, I'm not. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Pathology is not too strong a word.

Renee: Thank you. I was born in 1968, which means I have a lived memory of the tail end of this period. And I can tell you from, you know, direct personal experience that the American relationship with Jell-O in the 20th century decided you could put anything, anything inside of Jell-O. And the people listened to this person. I don't know, tuna fish and Jell-O.

Marc: Oh, no.

Renee: Cabbage and lime Jell-O served as a salad. Cream cheese. Okay. First of all, in the 1940s, they did it to stretch the budget. Yes. Like you didn't have a lot of money, right? So you would mix gelatin in with your meat and you would say, it's meatloaf. I don't use the air quotes here because it's just a loaf of meat, but you didn't have enough to feed a family of four. You had enough to feed two people to make it stretch. You would just suspend it in gelatin and then it would feed four. Okay. And then we went to war, came back, made a ton of money and thought, let's do that again. Like, I don't understand where that came from. Okay. In a lot of ways, I actually do. So here's the thing. Like, I'm going to just explain it real quick. So as the kitchen modernized, right? Now we have like, you know, dishwashers and we have, you know. Ovens and we have like, we're not cutting wood anymore. Like we have a modern kitchen and the modern kitchen left mom to, you know, not have to do as much work. She has to bake her own bread anymore. She can buy it off a shelf. There's a lot going on there. So if you used to, as a homemaker, do all that stuff to prove that you loved your family, what do you do in a modern environment? Well, you create ways to make things more complicated. And what better way to do that than to put shrimp in cherry jello? Like, think about it, right? Like, my mom, My grandmother's carrot situation. This appeared on real dinner tables made by real people who otherwise, I don't know, they seemed to have good judgment until the Jell-O mold showed up. And now it was crazy. Yeah.

Marc: I mean, yeah, well, you know, there's a cultural explanation for this, you know.

Renee: All right. So, okay. So do it. Tell me. I'm ready. Tell me. Tell me.

Marc: So the post-war period through the 60s is when, you know, processed food technology is arriving at, you know, consumer scale simultaneously across a huge number of categories. Canned goods, frozen dinners, powdered drink mixes, artificial flavoring, freeze-dried food. There's all this general, you know, kind of consensus being manufactured, mostly through women's magazines and corporate advertising. The modern food science is progress, essentially, and that's how it's marketed. And using these products creatively is a form of domestic sophistication. So the Jell-O mold is not seen as laziness. It's packaged as innovation.

Renee: That is so important, right? Three things come together, right? The modernization of the kitchen, the modernization of food technology, and putting recipes into women's magazines. Like all those three things come together to do, exactly what you said it's innovation right it's aspirational you're showing your dinner guests that you have mastered the tools of the modern kitchen that you're you're not some 19th century person boiling your own thing for hours you're a contemporary woman who has harnessed food technology.

Marc: Yeah yeah and yeah you know that that's you know the the the recipe thing you know with It's a corporate advertising, you know? Mm-hmm. It's not like, remember when we had the kitschy, you know, the business cards at cooking.com, and we had, you know, our favorite recipes on the back? You know, that's cute. But, like, the recipes became marketing and advertising for the brands in the 60s. So, yeah. Yeah. Anyways, so Jell-O's parent company, which by the post-war period is General Foods, is spending heavily to make sure that, you know, the message lands. They're in women's magazines or sponsored cooking shows. Yeah. What's her name? Julia Childs, right?

Renee: Right.

Marc: They're commissioning recipes from home economists. The corporate content machine and the cultural aspirate machine are running together.

Renee: And I want to push back on the easy, like, weren't people silly back then framing because I think it's condescending and it misses the actual story. Women putting tuna in Jell-O were not confused and they were not naive. They were operating inside a closed loop of manufactured taste where companies selling the product are also producing the publication, telling them what good tastes like. Right. It's not that it's not gullibility. It's just it's it is a manipulated information environment, which, by the way, sounds just like TikTok. Like if TikTok told you to do this, I bet you a thousand people would do it and then put it on TikTok. Right. Oh, yeah.

Marc: Yeah. I've seen some really stupid recipes on TikTok.

Renee: Right. Thank you. People who dump like whole things out onto a grill and then just stop cooking it. You're like, why? Ew, stop.

Marc: Yeah, some of that. Oh, no. Yeah. Manufacturing consent, it's old, right? It ran through a men's magazine long before it ran through a feed.

Renee: And the technology of manufacturing consent is ancient and continuous. And Jell-O is just one particularly wobbly chapter of it.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. Jell-O is also positioned as a health food during this period. Oh.

Renee: Collagen, baby. You're getting a lot of it.

Marc: Okay. There you go. Maybe. Yeah. Which is one of the more audacious moves in American food marketing history, right? There are genuine advertisements targeting people recovering from illness at children, at the elderly. They claim is that gelatin is nutritious and easy to digest.

Renee: Yeah. Which is entirely, which is not entirely false to be charitable. I mean, It does have nutritional properties. It's a protein source. In a hospital context for someone who can't eat solid food, it's genuinely appropriate. The problem is that when the health framing gets applied to lime cabbage molds at dinner parties, which are not serving, and they're not serving any therapeutic function whatsoever, yet y'all were eating it like crazy.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. The hospital context is one part of Jell-O's history that I think sort of gets overlooked because it's not funny or weird. Jell-O in institutional food settings, hospitals, schools, military cafeterias, has been a practical solution to real problems for, you know, over 100 years now. It's cheap, easily produced at scale, soft enough for people who have difficulty chewing or swallowing, relatively shelf-stable in powder form. There's a version of Jell-O's history that, you know, is kind of quietly useful in a way that the mold culture never was.

Renee: The jello that exists for people who need it is is genuinely, kind in a way that the jello that exists to impress dinner guests is not i think you know what i really think that distinction matters anytime i was sick i would want jello anytime i had dental work and i couldn't chew i ate jello right like so it it does have a place in the world right.

Marc: Yeah yeah it's got a place in

Renee: Well, not in your world.

Marc: Yeah, not in my world anymore.

Renee: But, you know, in the world, I guess.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, sure. So, okay, let's talk about the corporate history of Jell-O because that's a whole other story. And it's, you know, it's a little weird.

Renee: Okay, it's weird as underselling it, but go ahead.

Marc: Yeah, all right. So, all right. So, we already talked about the early days, right? $450 to $35, you know, right? So Jell-O gets folded into the Postum Cereal Company in 1925, which renames itself General Foods a few years later. So, okay, fine. Big company buys a popular brand. But then in 1985, Philip Morris, the cigarette company. This one, I just like my... Hey, come on.

Renee: Cut off a break. Like they were diversifying. Come on now.

Marc: Yes, I know. I know. I mean, that's the thing though, right? Is that like, if you look at the tobacco history, I mean, I don't know. Like, I don't want to do an episode on smoking, right? Or cigarettes, right? You know, that's like, it's wrong. But oh my gosh. I don't know, dude.

Renee: That story of Juul is one worth telling, but go ahead. Oh my gosh. Vaping, that's a story worth telling. It's crazy. Yeah. It is crazy.

Marc: But yeah, I'm not sure I could, you know, I don't know. Anyways, but so Philip Morris, you're right. They're trying to diversify. They're trying to get away from, you know, the evil tobacco, you know, view. So they're a cigarette company. they acquired General Foods. So tobacco company now owns Jell-O, and that's in the 80s.

Renee: A tobacco company owns Jell-O. Let that sink in, like owns Jell-O. Go ahead.

Marc: I know, yeah. Okay, so, and then in 1988, Philip Morris also acquires Kraft. Okay, so another big, yeah. So now tobacco company owns both Jell-O and a significant chunk of American food manufacturing.

Renee: That's why Kraft macaroni and cheese is so addictive. I got it now. I got it.

Marc: Yeah. That's it. Nicotine? No. Yeah, no.

Renee: Tomato. Yeah, exactly.

Marc: General foods and Kraft eventually merge into Kraft general foods. And then later just Kraft foods. And Jell-O goes along for all of that process. So getting passed between corporate entities, kind of like a piece of furniture that nobody quite knows what to do with. But, you know, everyone agrees it's probably worth something.

Renee: Oh, like that chair from the 60s no one will sit on. What this creates is a brand that's being managed rather than developed. You have an asset with enormous name recognition and nostalgic goodwill. And the corporate priority is to protect the equity, you know, and not invest in it. The formula does not meaningfully change. The positioning does not meaningfully evolve. You're just, Jell-O is just coasting. Yeah.

Marc: It's sort of wobbling its way through the 80s.

Renee: Oh, nice.

Marc: And then two things happen in the 90s that shake the brand out of its stasis.

Renee: The Jell-O shot and Utah.

Marc: Yes, the Jell-O shot and Utah.

Renee: So let's start with the Jell-O shot first because it's genuinely an innovation story, and I will not hear otherwise. Because someone with the exact attribution is disputed. So we don't know who exactly did it. Although there's apparently a claim that traced back to Tom Lehrer in the 50s.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. So Tom Lehrer, the satirist, yeah, he reportedly developed something like it while working for the army. Whether the story holds up, you know, that's debated. But that's, you know, he claims this.

Renee: And that would be the most Tom Lehrer's origin story, the most Tom Lehrer origin story imaginable. But regardless of the origin, the jello shot is a mass cultural phenomenon, is a 90s thing. I remember making it in the 90s for corporate parties, if I could just be fair. Like, Renee, will you make the jello shots? Like, yeah, I get you weirdos, I guess. And what it represents is technically is genuinely clever. You replace some of the water in your jello prep with alcohol and the protein network still forms. You got to get that right. Otherwise, it'll be too runny or it'll be weird. Yeah. And you now have a portable, portion-controlled, festive, easily transported delivery system for liquor that also tastes like a fruit and is impossible to spill. Come on now, that was a good, and you put it in disposable little cups that look like shots, and they were called the Jell-O shot.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. Because I don't drink. I've never done this. Right. But, you know, I know how the chemistry works here, right? So the ethanol does affect the gel structure. Higher concentrations of alcohol, they interfere with the protein network forming correctly, which is why There's a practical upper limit on how much vodka you can put in the Jell-O shot before, you know, it won't actually set.

Renee: So even the Jell-O shot has a technical constraint that you have to understand and work with it. I love this stuff. I actually enjoyed making it, to be honest with you. But you would have to eat a lot of it to get drunk, like a lot of Jell-O shots to get drunk.

Marc: Yeah, so roughly an ounce of high-proof alcohol per three-ounce packet is about the limit. So a three ounce packet, I don't know how much water I should have looked it up, but, you know, so it's quite a lot, you know, that makes, you know, a bowl of Jell-O.

Renee: Right. Many cups, right? And then you're throwing in one ounce of, I mean, even if it was moonshine, seriously, like, like I still, you have to drink a lot of it. The more important thing culturally is what the Jell-O shot represents for the brand. It takes Jell-O completely out of the domestic, feminine, Sunday dinner context it had lived in for decades and drops it into a completely different world. A college party is not where your grandmother's copper fish mole lives, right? Jell-O acquires a second identity entirely separate from its origin, and it speaks to a completely different generation. And no one had to read about it in Rolling Stone magazine, right? Tom set it all up for us somehow probably a frat party from being.

Marc: Fair like you'd go from you know petticoats and you know aprons to you know spiky hair and you know college and drinking

Renee: Off of a ping pong tip yeah yeah a little party yes yes yeah.

Marc: So so the brand fractures across the demographics you know and it's kind of actually hard to manage

Renee: Which brings us to Utah, and I want to be straightforward here. The Utah chapter, it's one of my favorite pieces of Jell-O history because it's both very funny on the surface and actually quite interesting underneath. Utah had, for a period in the late 90s to the early 2000s, the highest per capita Jell-O consumption in the United States by a significant margin. There was a state snack designation movement. There was licensed branding.

Marc: Yeah. Utah.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: Yeah, the working theory, my dad even had, like, there was, what was it? Oh, it was when the Olympics were hosted in Salt Lake. They had pins and stuff, and they had, one of the pins was the green jello thing.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: Yeah. That's rad. Yeah. So the working theory, which, you know, seems well supported, is that in a heavily LDS community where potluck culture is central to social life and alcohol is not part of the cultural vocabulary, jello fits actually pretty well. It's inexpensive. Yeah. It's festive. Yay. I mean, it's bright green and bright red. I mean, how can it not be festive? Right. It's easy to make for large groups and you can make it into a salad. You just throw something in and now it's a salad. And it doesn't require any of the things that make other party foods complicated in that context.

Renee: So jello becomes a community food, which is, when you think about it, exactly what food is supposed to do. Communities organize around food. The specific food here happens to be lime jello with pretzels. Oh, right. Do you remember the cherry jello with the pretzels and then the cool whip at the bottom and then the crushed pretzels at the bottom and it was like, oh, my God, yeah. And I mean, this was without any irony. This is a beautiful function for food to serve. It's really nice. I like it.

Marc: Yeah i don't yeah i don't know yeah i'm not sure i ever did the pretzel thing i don't i don't remember

Renee: That oh it was good you crush the pretzels and put them in the bottom of the pan and then you would put like cool whip in like and then you would, yeah and then it was the jello right so i think what you did was the jello first and then the cool whip and then you put the yeah yeah yeah pretzels on and then you flipped it over and it looked layered right um and yeah And it was almost like a lemon bar or something, but it was cherry and it was pretzels. And the pretzels were like the crust. It was so good. Because it was salty and it was sweet. Oh, yeah, it was good.

Marc: Now you're going to make it. Now you're going to make it.

Renee: I am. I am. I have pretzels I need to use. I'm going to do it.

Marc: We don't have Cool Whip here. Like... It's, yeah, no Cool Whip here. It makes me sad.

Renee: Well, that's lame. Well, you can do heavy cream. You just whip that up.

Marc: Yeah, it doesn't quite work the same.

Renee: Because you can't freeze it, right? Cool Whip you can freeze. Yeah. Yeah.

Marc: Okay, so, you know, side thing here. Like the one gelatin exception that we made as a family was this one pie that we made called grasshopper pie. And it's just a tiny little bit, but it's just enough for it to set up. But basically, you take the creme de menthe and Cool Whip and a little bit of gelatin, and you mix it together, and then you pour it into the pie crust. And I think it had egg yolk or something, too, because it's kind of like a custard. But then it sets up, and it's this grasshopper pie, and it's so amazing. And you know i i can't make it because cool whip is the is the dairy kind of the product inside of that that custard stuff and yeah you can't get you can't get cool up here it makes me sad i can't

Renee: Believe it you don't have cool up there you don't have ranch dressing how do you live how do the british.

Marc: Live have you seen the you know at the airports they have they've been putting the ranch

Renee: TSA is like, quit putting the ranch dressing in your carry-on. Put it in your check bag. Check bags. We can't keep doing this.

Marc: Yeah, I know. I know. I don't know. You know what? I don't miss ranch dressing. So anyways. All right. So let's come back to Jell-O in Utah, though. So Utah leans into this kind of completely, right? There are tourism references. There's merchandise. I told you about the little Olympic pin. Jell-O achieved a regional identity marker status that, you know, kind of very few processed foods, you know, ever reach.

Renee: And then comes the Bill Cosby chapter, which we cannot skip, even though it's terrible, and which it's not funny.

Marc: Yeah, we can't skip it, unfortunately, but, you know, no, we can't.

Renee: Yeah. So, OK, so Cosby was the Jell-O spokesperson from 1974 through 2015, 41 years. And for much of that period, particularly through the Puddin' Pops era and the children's advertising, he was the face of the brand in a way that was basically inseparable from the product itself. An entire generation cannot think about Jell-O without thinking about him. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, 74, you know, that's like, that's when I was born. So for the whole time of my life, you know, and, you know, then the connection goes from being the brand's sort of greatest asset to being something just, you know, entirely different.

Renee: Yeah, when the full scope of what he had done became public, Jell-O had to very quietly and very quickly distance itself from the most famous cultural ambassador. And there was no good way to do it. You can't unassociate 40 years of advertising. The brand has never fully recovered the cultural centrality it had before, which is, you know, it's not the most important consequence of those revelations by an enormous distance. But it's a real part of that brand's history. And you know what? I feel like in this day and age where brands are so quick to associate themselves with influencers, they've gotten really good at walking away. Yeah. They've gotten really good at it. They've gotten really good at, no, it's not me. I don't know what you're talking about, right? So maybe they learned something from the Bill Cosby years at Jell-O. You're just like, like really fast. You're like, no, we don't agree with that. And we fired him. Like we're good people here.

Marc: Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean. We learned from that. I can't think of.

Renee: Like oh subway and jared that's the only other one you can think of where they were so no they were so entwined like jared the guy who lost the weight who was the brand ambassador and for 10 years he did that and now he's in jail right for doing horrible things and so like yeah i feel like that's another one where you know subway goes all in on this guy and this guy turns out to be a horrible horrible human being um and now they have to try to rebuild that brand without you thinking every single time. Oh, remember Jared, right? Like, it's just, yeah. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough.

Marc: Yeah. I can't think of anybody that's so associated with a brand, you know, than Cosby was.

Renee: I mean, 40 years. That's a long time.

Marc: Yeah, 40 years. I mean, the commercials, I still remember those commercials, you know, him and the kids.

Renee: Yeah, like my Puddin' Pop. Like, yeah, yeah, I don't know.

Marc: Him making the funny faces and all that stuff.

Renee: Yeah, and the kids laughing. yeah.

Marc: Yeah it's weird it is weird and yeah like that he was the central figure you know like almost to the point where the jello was the side you know it

Renee: Wasn't right right like like he was jello right like that's pretty crazy right yeah and at the time you have to remember like like all through that he's super popular his stand-up stuff is super popular yeah um the cosby show was really popular set the standard for you know comedians doing sitcoms like he was really really so it made sense that you would tie yourself to him like kind of make yourself modern that way but, yeah i i hope brand marketers have learned from that i feel and again i feel like they have like like now they work with influencers and cut them loose real fast like real fast yeah yeah yeah yeah, So anyway, okay, so what do we actually do with all this, right? Because I've been turning it over since we started building this episode. And here's where I land.

Marc: Okay. All right. Throw it at me.

Renee: Are you ready? All right. Jell-O is fundamentally a story about what happens when you democratize a status symbol. The original gelatin mold was labor-intensive. It was a class marker. Jell-O's entire premise is, what if everyone could have this? It is a genuinely progressive food technology promise, right? Right. Making something accessible that was previously restricted to people with resources and staff. I mean, we've talked about this a thousand times. Right. I know. Like like it belongs to the rich until it doesn't. And then the rich want nothing to do with it. Right. And it's like like the aristocrats were all about it. It was going to be everything. It was everything to them. It's how they impressed people. And then when the rest of us have it, it belongs in schools and hospitals and you poo poo it and you never talk about it again. So, yeah, right? Like, I think that's true and that matters.

Marc: That matters. So, to me, the abstraction layer removes the barrier to entry, right? And it hits on what we said at the beginning. The genius of powdered gelatin was abstracting away from the animal, right? You never see the calf's feet. That gets sold as convenience. You know, all of the process that, you know, would have existed, you know, that's all gone. And so when you're vegetarian, you read the back of the packet and put the information, you know, put that information back. The product is built so you don't think about where it came from. It works on me too. You know, I just have to fight it at the till.

Renee: But here's the thing, and this is something that I've been thinking about for a while. Once you've removed the labor, once you've removed the craft, you have to ask what was actually valuable? Was it the molded jelly or was it the molded, what did it represent it, right? Which was time and skill and care. And if it was the latter, the powder in the box doesn't actually deliver that. It delivers the shape but not the meaning. And maybe that's why in the 1960s, we get back to the idea that they should be big, you know, things at dinner parties that you were trying to use to impress people. Right. I mean, jello itself isn't all that great. What you do with jello is pretty amazing. Right. And it comes to represent things that that little box of lime never was meant to. I mean, if it was meant to represent that, a two year old wouldn't have been able to cook it. Right. Back in 1902. Right. So, yeah, it always becomes something bigger than it is. And the meaning isn't what it started out being ever, right?

Marc: Yeah. I love those little videos and stuff of the ladies that make the layered poured fruit with the gelatin. It's the reveal. Yeah.

Renee: Oh, my gosh. Sam always talks about the parfait. He's like, it came in three things and you would set the cups into the refrigerator sideways so the parfait went sideways. And then when you set it up right, it was just, it was this really beautiful, like, yes, yes, right? Yeah. I mean, it was always bigger than it actually was.

Marc: Yeah, I just love, they're so colorful and, you know, they're arranged perfectly and they're layered and structured and you have... Yeah, to me, the whole thing is like when they flip the mold over, you know, and they slowly lift it off, it's the reveal, you know, and it's this beautiful piece of structured food, you know, it's not cooked, you know, well, it's cooked, obviously, but it's structured, it's engineered, you know, and all of that effort, you know, that's the load bearing part.

Renee: Yeah, the effort was load-bearing. And this is a pattern that repeats itself across almost every food technology story, right? Bread makers. You used to spend a lot of time making bread, and now you buy it in a loaf, in a bag. And at Costco, you get two of them for what you would pay at the store. Instant coffee like instant coffee is a thing you just put it in water stir it up and boom right every convenience food takes a that takes a labor-intensive craft and automates it is it's making a trade you get accessibility, i mean to to home to do it at home to make a twinkie at home i mean it takes a lot of effort no right you and you lose the meaning of that lived, that lived and the difficulty of it all. Like, I am not a chef if I open a Twinkie. That's it. That's it in a nutshell. I've lost what made it special, but that was the trade in being able to walk into the pantry and eat a Twinkie, right?

Marc: Yeah. I mean, a Twinkie is just like, it's like the same as that strawberry shortcake, right? And then just the cream squished in the middle. You know but then a pastry chef that made that that would be you know it'd be it'd be beautiful it would

Renee: Be beautiful and unbelievable and it would taste amazing yeah exactly.

Marc: But but all of that you know that that sort of decomposition of a process you know that it it's kind of why the molecular gastronomy movement in the early 2000s is kind of interesting in that context Right. Because what Fran, Adria and Heston Blumenthal and the whole sort of cohort, you know, were doing with gelatin and agar, you know, as they were putting the labor back into it, they were taking the same underlying technology and making it require years of skill to use it correctly.

Renee: Spherification. It's my favorite thing. Set gels as textural elements in tasting menus, using gelatin in ways that require real understanding of the chemistry. They aren't using Jell-O, obviously, but they are using a gelatin. And what they're doing is saying this material is interesting enough to deserve, you know, serious attention again. Whenever they make crazy caviar, right? And then it's not really caviar. It looks like caviar. It looks like roe, right? Right. But when you taste it, it's like tangerine. Like it's crazy. It's crazy. It's good. It's good stuff. They're doing amazing stuff with that.

Marc: It's also kind of what the craft beer story is about and the artist of bread story. Right. There's a whole cycle around that.

Renee: And there is an absolutely continuous cycle. Technology makes a thing accessible. Accessibility makes it a commodity. The commodity loses meaning. A small group reinstates the difficulty and calls it a craft. And eventually the craft gets commoditized again. Boba. We are going around. Brown continuously jello has been through multiple laps of all this boba boba i mean all it is is tapioca like i.

Marc: I just i can't the kids like that stuff and i just

Renee: Can't i can't you shouldn't have to chew a drink i'm just gonna put it out there you should not have to chew a drink that's all i'm gonna say well.

Marc: I i know with your love of you know funky straws that it's gotta you know it's gotta be a little bit weird right

Renee: Right and i don't like i don't like things that are you know multiple textures and if like i won't eat lettuce and noodles like why like that seems bizarre to me.

Marc: Well yeah like well that's one of my problems with with jello like when people put weird stuff in it you know it's

Renee: Oh you just need it to be jello you don't want to chew it yeah okay.

Marc: Yeah that's fair yeah so so from a material science perspective that the hydrogel structure You know, it's still quite remarkable. We spent the last few decades building hydrogels intentionally for specific applications, contact lenses, drug delivery matrices, wound dressings, agricultural water retention gels, the same fundamental principle, a polymer protein network organizing water into material with specific mechanical properties. It shows up across all of those industries. And the food science version of it, the version that you could buy for, you know, a dollar or whatever, is structurally similar to materials that require sophisticated manufacturing processes in all of those other contexts.

Renee: And the distance between a pantry staple and a biomedical material is shorter than them.

Marc: Yeah, much shorter. And I think that's part of, you know, what is interesting about Jell-O at the technical level. The chemistry underneath has not changed since 1897. You know, what has changed is every single thing around it. The cultural container, the status, the associations, demographics, you know, of who's eating it and why. The molecular architecture of a hydrogel is, it's constant, stays the same. The meaning we put on top of that is, you know, completely in flux.

Renee: True. The technology is stable, but the story keeps changing, which, come on, if you listen to this podcast, we stumble onto this eventually on every single one of these episodes, right? The technology is stable, the story keeps changing, which might be the most interesting thing about it. The incredibly simple food chemistry, boiled bones, reconfigured into a network, has been Aristocratic. An aristocratic, I got it, an aristocratic luxury, a working-class aspiration, a marker of domestic sophistication, a potluck staple, a party drug delivery system, a regional identity, a hospital food, and a biomaterials research inspiration. Dude, it is all the same thing. All of those containers are all the same.

Marc: Yeah, not bad for a product that almost sold for $35.

Renee: Orator Woodward almost let it go for $35. And instead, it became one of the most recognizable food brands in American history. If he had taken that deal, we would not be sitting here right now, which I find genuinely upsetting on a personal level. I mean, we did this whole episode because I loved the story of Jell-O. So I would be, so thank you, Mr. Woodward, for not letting it go.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. The counterfactual where Jell-O sells for $35 and disappears is a world where the mold era maybe never happens. And in some ways, that, you know, that world is better, right? But in other ways, we lose the whole story.

Renee: We lose the copperfish mold. We lose Utah. We lose the Jell-O shot. We lose whatever my grandmother thought she was doing with those carrots. I have complicated feelings about that.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. The carrots make the world more interesting,

Renee: I guess. Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. The carrots make the world more interesting. But I cannot believe. Yeah, I can't believe I just agreed to that sentence. No. Okay. I'm going to take it back. Carrots do not belong in Jell-O. Neither do shrimp. If I just put that out there. Like, don't put shrimp in mine. Or tuna.

Marc: Oh, my gosh.

Renee: Or tuna. Whoa. Peas. They used to put peas in that stuff. As a matter of fact, they used to have whole sections telling you which to put in first because some vegetables float and some actually sink. And so, like, the ones that sank would be at the top of your mold. So, you would put certain—no, it was crazy. I don't see what it—like, why did we have to do that? We survived World War II and the Depression. Let's celebrate and not do that. Yeah, yeah.

Marc: You know what they, what's the thing that they put in, I think it is a Utah thing, in the lime jellos, isn't it pineapple? They put the pineapple in the green jello?

Renee: Oh, yeah. Well, you know what? Ambrosia salad was like canned peaches, canned pineapple, lime jello, and Cool Whip, right? And they would mix it all together and then eat it.

Marc: Salad.

Renee: Right? But they called it a fruit salad, which it was neither a salad nor fruit. I don't get any of it.

Marc: Well, there were peaches. I mean, you know.

Renee: And there's canned pineapple in it. So like maybe I don't. Oh, gosh. Yeah, that's tough. All right. So at any rate, for me personally, what I keep coming back to is that moment in my grandmother's kitchen in 1978 when I was 10 years old and I was watching liquid become a solid. And I didn't have any framework for understanding why that was happening. I just knew that something was happening. That kitchen was a place where things changed states. And I think that's where a lot of my interest in how things actually work, It's why I'm an analyst. It's where it all started. Not just food, but things broadly. That curiosity about the mechanism underneath, the jello mold that I found embarrassing at the time was also, you know, in a way I could not articulate then, it was the beginning of something. I'm not going to say I have, you know, jello to thank for my career. That's taken it a bit too far. But I will say the lime green wobbly fish was present at the beginning. And, You know, and being curious about that, you know, that counts for something. I think so, yeah.

Marc: I think my grandmother's Jell-O, the copper Jell-O mold, like, it was prominent in her kitchen from what I remember. You know, it was like a decoration, you know. Yeah. So, yeah. For me, it's the hydrogel stuff, you know, itself. Yeah. Because what I actually find moving about this whole thing is if you, you know, okay, let me, you'll permit me for, you know, for a few seconds here. Yeah, okay. Is that the hydrogel is a beautiful material structure, and we encounter hydrogels constantly in modern technology. Contact lenses, wound care, targeted drug delivery, right? Mention all that stuff. Scaffolding for tissue engineering, which is really fascinating. The ability of a sparse protein or polymer network to organize water at scale and produce a material with the specific mechanical properties, It's just one of the most elegant structural solutions that chemistry has produced. And the food version of it, the version that exists at the intersection of weird marketing decisions and Victorian class anxiety and American consumer culture, is sitting in a supermarket next to the pudding cups. You know, for $1.30. And the gap between profound material science and a grocery aisle, you know, novelty, is smaller than it should be. And I find that kind of just really wonderful. We walk past this extraordinary chemistry every day without knowing it. And the grocery store is filled with this stuff. Jell-O is just one place where the extraordinary chemistry also happens to taste like, well, not exactly like strawberries, but something like strawberries.

Renee: Oh, that's the most you've ever said during a closing reflection, and it was completely worth it. So thank you.

Marc: Well, you know, you have feelings about hydrogel.

Renee: Hey, you're allowed to have feelings about hydrogel. I have feelings about the carrot mold, which is different, but equally valid, I think. All right, everyone, that's Nostalgic Nerds for this week. We started with boiled animal byproducts, But through Victorian class anxiety, mid-century domestic ideology, corporate tobacco conglomeration, Utah... And finish at the cutting edge of biomedical material science, which is, we feel, a complete journey. We've done it all.

Marc: Yeah, we covered a lot of ground for something that is 98% water.

Renee: Yeah, 98% water and 100% American cultural artifact. As always, if you have strong opinions about any of this, including and especially about savory Jell-O, like what did you put in your Jell-O when you were a kid? We want to hear them. We won't change our minds, but we want to understand you, for real.

Marc: Yeah, understanding is, you know, different from agreeing.

Renee: We do it all the time. I hardly ever agree with you, but I understand, right? Understanding is different from agreeing, and we are committed to both. If this episode made you feel something about gelatin or a bunch of grandmother's kitchen or about how American food culture was manufactured for you without your consent, tell someone or tell us or just sit quietly with the knowledge that your body temperature is enough to dissolve a protein network. And that is happening every time you eat Jell-O and it's beautiful.

Marc: Yeah. Okay. So until next time.

Renee: Until next time, don't put anything in Lime Jell-O that you wouldn't want to find there. You know, you know, you know you're doing it. So just seriously, just stop it. Just stop it. Yeah.

Marc: Oh, oh, shout out to Bruce.

Renee: Oh, right. So Bruce reached out to me over LinkedIn to say he was a listener in, guess where? Guess where? Australia. Bruce. Hi, Bruce. Thanks for listening in Australia. If you are in Australia and listening, find us on LinkedIn and tell us about it. You guys are by far the biggest listeners we have, and you really like the music for some reason. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, Australia, and reach out and give us a shout. We love hearing from you guys. So thanks, Bruce. Great hearing from you. All right.

Marc: Thank you, Bruce. Bruce.

Renee: Thanks, marc.

Marc: Thanks. Oh