§. Semper Gumby

What kind of a thing is Jell-O? Pliable, elastic, and translucent, it is without real substance. It is a void – but a sweet and entrancing one. When we think of Jell-O, we think of how it looks and feels more than how it tastes, and its manufacturers know this. It is impossible to imagine a Jell-O ad in anything less than shimmering full color. Early advertisements in black-and-white are mystifying: What is that odd little structure on the table? But, even in full, glossy color, the real draw of Jell-O can only be depicted obliquely. How could one capture the jiggly, wobbling delight of a tower of Jell-O in static print? How can one advertise a product whose most sellable attribute stands in opposition to the medium? To answer these questions, I turned to the pages of LIFE magazine, whose issues between 1935 and 1980 have been, courtesy of Google Books, scanned and hosted online.

Faced with the bland rigidity of print, Jell-O’s advertising campaigns emphasize the product’s elasticity in other ways. An advertisement printed in the middle of the second World War reassures us that “You can still say ‘Welcome’ in wartime” (LIFE, 4 Oct 1943). Are you running low on Jell-O? Don’t worry, for “whipped Jell-O fluffs up to twice the amount.” Low on food in general? “This easy, quick Jell-O trick will convert a few small portions of vegetables into an appealing, hearty salad.” (Ibid.)

The war ends, but society is still in a state of upheaval. “Cook leaving? Don’t fret. In less time than it takes to ring up an employment agency, you can make your family a bowl of delicious, appetizing Jell-O Gelatin dessert” (LIFE, 9 Feb 1953). What if mother herself is off to find a job, or is stretched too thin by the postwar economy to have time to prepare dessert? A pair of advertisements issued over the summer of 1955 show first a pair of girls, then a pair of boys, preparing the oh-so-easy Jell-O Pudding themselves: “Mom’s sure busy, so why shouldn’t we do it?” (1 Aug 1955).

“Semper Gumby,” the Navy Marines are said to assert: “Stay flexible.” Jell-O is malleable, supple, adaptable. It is responsive to its container; to your budget; to changing tastes; to shifting national narratives; to the contingencies of global war and domestic drama alike.

§. A food without history

Gelatin desserts are not inherently ahistorical. Jell-O has its roots in older gelatinous foods, like aspic and blancmange, along with other contemporary desserts, but it stands apart from its counterparts. Blancmange was a dense conglomeration of ingredients that often included rice, flour, and minced fish; most other jelly desserts, like panna cotta, are cream- heavy, dense and fragrant. Jell-O is very little but sugar, water, and gelatin – and it tastes this way.

Jell-O advertisements never list their ingredients, or, like so much of the food advertising of the era, boast about their quality. One ad speaks in vague terms about the dessert’s possible nutritious value: a baby states confidently that “my doctor agrees that Jell-O is just the thing for babies” (26 Nov 1956). Perhaps wondering what the ingredients of Jell-O are is missing the point of the enterprise, but behind this non-dislosure is a certain level of abjection: gelatin is, of course, made from the residue left by boiling the skins, tendons, heads and hooves of animals, usually pigs, a grisly origin concealed by the jolly rainbow abstraction of the finished product.

The flavor of Jell-O is independent from historical baggage or the tradition of food culture. It’s emptied to the point of lacking definite qualities. Advertisements simply say “delicious,” and, really, what more could there be to say? All you need to know is what is on the box: orange, lime, grape, strawberry, flavors that are more like colors than flavors. What is grape, aside from the flavor of purple?

It was this abstract nature that, in my combing through advertisements, became apparent. Jell-O is as immaterial as a material can get. Jell-O doesn’t just gleam; it is a mirror, capable of perfectly reflecting and enclosing its milieu. After the United States annexes Hawai’i, a new flavor is added: pineapple, the new taste of yellow.

§ The food of the future

Jell-O is the most modern of foods. It represents the intersection of food and science; advertisements for the dessert reflect the giddy euphoria of futurism. Jell-O is a novelty product that is constantly declaring itself to be “new.” (25 February & 28 January 1957). Jell-O is new, and Jell-O is now.

LIFE magazine advertisement, 10 March 1952.

Making jelly desserts used to take days – rendering the animal parts required to produce gelatin, skimming off this gelatin and drying it, mixing it with the creams, sweeteners, and fruits required to overcome the flavor of fat and gristle, then chilling the mixture in the icebox. Now, with chemically-processed Jell-O instant gelatin and a temperature-controlled fridge, luxurious desserts could be made in the span of an hour. The future had come to the kitchen, and just in time.

LIFE Magazine advertisement, 2 May 1955

Fun to eat : if ingredients were made irrelevant by Jell-O’s desserts, so, too, was flavor. The reader of the advertisement knows already what chocolate pudding tastes like; what matters more here is form and speed. Jell-O: a hollow, but fast, shell. Jell-O, like the future, is indeterminate and flexible. Even more so when it’s made increasingly formless: like capital itself, Jell-O proliferates through the market with the most acceleration when it is at its most liquid.

Jell-O pudding, unlike the original fruit Jell-O, never sets. Its creamy texture doesn’t jiggle as much as ooze, and, unformed, it begins to spread into other markets. With the novelty of the jelly dessert on the wane in the decades following the war, Jell-O pudding becomes the company’s star product and most versatile player. In the late sixties, a new advertising campaign is printed. Each of the dozen or so ads feature an image of a conventional dessert, along with a caption that states the hidden, but proliferate, ingredient:

Jell-O Pudding’s advertising campaign in LIFE Magazine between 1967 and 1968.

§ Locked in

Anticipating the step out of the limelight of the classic jelly dessert decades was the decline of its savory relative, the Jell-O Salad, decades earlier. The product of the heady futurism of the interwar years, as well as the corner-cutting frugality of the wartime ration regime, jelly salads emerged as a trend, persisted as an economizing solution, and then disappeared from Jell-O’s public image entirely. Seeing them now comes as a shock.

These salads, however garish and unappealing by today’s culinary standards, fell more neatly within the tradition of historical gelatin dishes; blancmange could very well be made from the same fish-and-vegetable base, and the second, cottage-cheese-based salad is more or less a more savory variation, with chunks, on the sweet and creamy panna cotta. But this brief union with culinary tradition was not to last. Towards the end of the decade, Jell-O savory salad freed itself again from the strictures of history and was let loose into modular, recipe-free futurism.

Fighting back, one assumes, against the trend of Tupperware parties, Jell-O offered in the spring of 1959 a simpler solution: store your food in food. In one of the countless “It’s National ____ Week” advertisements,° Jell-O urged homemakers to keep their leftover food from spoiling by encasing it in a block of Jell-O. During “National Use-Up-Your-Leftovers-in-a-Jell-O-Salad Week”, readers of LIFE magazine economized in the kitchen by casting the leftover bits of the weekday meals into a block of lime or lemon Jell-O. The advertisement depicts a chorus of spoons each delivering its load to a mostly-off-screen bowl of lime Jell-O. Green beans, corn, carrots, peas, celery, golden beats, raw red onion, cauliflower, olives, and cheese tumble into the mix.

Jell-O fits any container, and is a container itself.

°This is far from the most catchy tagline of this series, which includes “National Jell-O-at-its-Sundae-Best Week” (24 Aug 1959), “National Jell-O-For-After-School-Snacks Week” (7 Sep 1959), “National Jell-O-to-Drink-Is-Even-Better-Than-You-Think Week” (3 Aug 1959), “National Jell-O-With-Fruit-To-Boot Week” (21 Sep 1959), and the transcendental and limit-stretching “National You-Can-Do-The-Jolliest-Things-with-Jell-O-And-Ice-Cream Week” (25 May 1959).

§ Crystallography

Jell-O is depicted in its advertisements as distinctively crystalline in form. Recipes have names like “Jewel-Top Jell-O” and “Crown Jewels,” and the dessert is described many times as “crystal-clear.” The reader of LIFE Magazine is encouraged to fill a sherbert glass with Jell-O and gaze down at the “tart, cool, green-crystal flakes” (4 Feb 1946). We, too, are invited to join the crystal-gazing. The full-colour advertisements bid us to look at, and into, the Jell-O, and it is indeed hard not to. Who could resist the rich ruby-red or emerald-green depths, or not be dazzled by the light that, glistening, plays across the perfectly geometrical curves and facets? This is dessert as spectacle.

LIFE magazine, 20 December 1943.

The rations of the second World War hit the dessert company harder than most; sugar was the first commodity targeted, and Jell-O were forced to scale back their production. Then the war ended, but the ration on sugar continued, even as others, such as those on tires, were ended.

In a series of advertisements published in LIFE Magazine, Jell-O expresses a mixture of frustration, fatalism, and sachirine optimism. Below a cartoon depicting a rotund society woman complaining about the sugar rations – “How can you talk about the war being over? My grocer is still out of Jell-O most of the time!” – reads the company’s oddly barbed retort:

Three months later, another advertisement in LIFE revisits this issue, though with a less overtly antagonistic tone: “We wish we could do a little crystal-gazing on the sugar situation – and tell you exactly when Jell-O and Jell-O puddings will be back in full abundance. All we can say for sure is – sweeter days are coming!” This second, oracular advertisement was printed on the 20th of May, 1946, five years into the ration. The restriction was lifted within the year.

Like a psychic’s crystal ball, Jell-O is able, in its glimmering depths, to show both what has happened and what is yet to come. Through it are refracted the dreams and desires of the past – more specifically, the ways in which the past situated itself in the future. Is Jell-O is the fantasy of postwar America: quickly rebounding, infinitely moldable, immaculately modern?

§. Liquid architecture

Top: Jell-O advertisement in LIFE magazine,
13 November, 1944.

Bottom: Bureau of Technical Cybernetics, at
Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, January 1968.

Top: Jell-O ad. in LIFE Magazine, 18 March 1946.

Bottom: “Except for agricultural and other rural pursuits, all activities and all the population would be concentrated in one gigantic urban complex […] called "Metropolis." (Gillette, The Human Drift, 1894)

The thinness and malleability of the Jell-O mixture before it solidifies, combined with the firmness with which it sets, opens up entire thresholds of aesthetic possibility. Jell-O is the concrete of the food world, a perfect, liquid architecture of the future. Intricate geometrical configurations are possible, from prismatic spires to globular, perfect domes. Cakes, like brickworks, must rise slowly and with great labor; with Jell-O, miracles of modern design can be constructed overnight.

Of course, by the time that these advertisements were printed in LIFE magazine, concrete was, to some readers, commonplace. But another, excitingly versatile construction medium was making its debut. If they pour like concrete, Jell-O structures shine and refract light like plastic – that other material of modernity.

Speaking of plastic: Nowhere in the advertisements for Jell-O are the molds required to form such complex desserts marketed, which leads us to ask: Where are people getting these incredible molds? Are they sold alongside the Jell-O in stores? Or, are consumers stuck repurposing household items – bundt cake pans, Tupperware – to make their primitive structures? Like so much of the architecture and planning of modernism, Jell-O’s promises of exciting, revolutionary new forms fall flat and inert the moment they are confronted with the realities of everyday life.

But in the advertisements, Jell-O is radiant and utopian. Its contours are bold, dynamic, and of a shimmering modernity. Like its architectural counterpart, Jell-O imagines, through aesthetics, entirely new modes of social organization. Indeed — what does Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International look like but a whimsical tower of Jell-O, slouching under the weight of its dreams and about to slide off of the plate?