DARK TIMES LIE BEHIND ICONIC CHILDREN’S TREATS
A descendant of the Jell-O fortune gives an interwoven memoir and story of the classic American brand
Jell-O ell O might be the glistening dish of picnics and potlucks, but for Allie Rowbottom — a descendant of the Jell-O fortune — it’s both a burden and an abyss. In Jell-O Girls, she weaves together her family history and the story of the classic American dessert to produce a book that alternately surprises and mesmerizes. Despite its title, this isn’t a bland tale that goes down easy; Jell-O Girls is dark and astringent, a cutting rebuke to its delicate, candy-colored namesake.
It’s also the kind of project that could turn unwieldy and even unbearable in the wrong hands. But Rowbottom has the literary skills and the analytical cunning to pull it off. Like a novelist, she can imagine herself into the emotional lives of others, while connecting her story and theirs to a larger narrative of cultural upheaval.
It helps that Jell-O is such a potent metaphor. At the company’s old factory in Le Roy, New York, “trucks arrived each week heaped with the dusty remnants of tissue and bone”, Rowbottom writes. With the addition of sugar and dye, these scraps were transformed into a product that not only concealed but in some ways defied its origins. From crushed animal parts emerged something sweet, clean and dainty, which trembled to the touch.
This marvel of beauty and convenience also turned out to be exceptionally profitable. Rowbottom’s great-great-great-uncle purchased the Jell-O business in 1899 for $450. He sold it 26 years later for $67 million, plenty of money to fund several generations of heirs.
“Jell-O Girls” could have easily devoted itself to the tragic fates of those heirs, or what the family called “the Jell-O curse.” A number of Rowbottom’s relatives succumbed to alcoholism and suicide. More money meant more money, but sometimes it also meant more to lose. A great-uncle who divorced and mismanaged his way out of his own fortune threw himself from the roof of a Sheraton hotel.
But Rowbottom’s interest is in the women of her title — namely, herself, her mother and her grandmother. Alongside this lineage she also includes a set of strangers: A group of Le Roy girls who in 2011 suddenly started twitching, exhibiting Tourette’s-like symptoms without an obvious cause.
Jell-O girls are supposed to be good girls; Rowbottom’s mother, Mary, believed she would be exempt from the family curse if she played the role that was assigned her. “All she had to do was stay cute, stay pretty, stay silent.” But the painful death of Mary’s own mother, Midge, from cancer when Mary was only 14 showed her that compliance wasn’t protection against suffering. Midge had given up her own artistic ambitions to get married and have children — to be the good wife and the good mother, like the doting women in the Jell-O ads.
Mary, born in 1945, followed a typical boomer trajectory — from placid 1950s childhood to ‘60s rebellion. Jell-O paid for Mary’s life as an “orphan-artist”, and for an expensive stint in a psychiatric clinic, but she didn’t think it was good for much else. She couldn’t stand the stuff, for one. She also thought the cheerful branding campaigns sold a lie, reducing a woman’s worth to how smoothly she managed her domestic affairs.
Rowbottom traces all of this with a sure hand, drawing details from her mother’s unfinished memoir and shaping them so that they make sense in her own. Much of the writing is lush yet alert to specifics. An ailing Midge, her chest hollowed out by a mastectomy, “sat at the dinner table in her bathrobe, soft blue with pink rosebuds scattered over the fabric like the cherry blossoms that littered the front lawn each spring”; a terrified Mary, hiding from her dying mother behind a toolshed, watched “the red and blue ambulance lights bounce off the icy ground”.
Jell-O, meanwhile, gets the full semiotics treatment, as Rowbottom shows how it went from a modern, scientific foodstuff to a relic of soul-killing suburbia. As sharp as her insights often are, this is a book in which Everything Signifies. Even a digression about the catacombs in an Italian monastery includes some Jell-O symbolism. You occasionally want to tell Rowbottom to ease up: Sometimes a Jell-O mould is just a Jell-O mould.
The product history is mostly illuminating, though, as Rowbottom shows how the brand tried to keep up with the times. Women’s changing roles were a p particular spur to innovation. A 1970s J Jell-O cookbook pitched itself to indep pendent women, with a recipe for a G Green Goddess Salad Bowl (lime Jell-O, s sour cream, anchovies — for starters) that g gestured at health food, even if it didn’t q quite deliver it.
The cookbook also included a chapter o on “Salads for the Slim Life” — a reprise of the one constant refrain through the brand’s history. Aside from wartime and the Great Depression, when food was scarce, Jell-O has long touted itself as a diet food. In the 1920s, the company released a low-calorie version called D-Zerta (an unnerving name more suitable for a chemical weapon), and saw its fortunes buoyed by the dieting craze of the mid-80s.
Rowbottom herself was born in the mid80s, and shows up about halfway through the book. An only child, she struggled with an eating disorder and, like her mother, a hand that would stiffen into a curved claw at stressful moments. When the two of them learned about the girls in Le Roy, they immediately became obsessed. These girls, living in a declining industrial town, were dealing with their own traumas; could their twitching have been what some neurologists said it was — a conversion disorder, the logical response to a culture that doesn’t help them process their emotions?
Emphasising such cultural explanations is a bold move, one that goes directly against Susan Sontag’s old admonishments against illness as metaphor. Mary herself was wrongfully dismissed by doctors who insisted she was “hysterical”, when in truth her body was riddled by carcinoid tumors. But then Rowbottom’s book is too rich and too singular to reduce to a tidy argument.
At her own wedding she longed to embrace her dying mother even though she was also scared of her. “I found her unfamiliar, rouged like a corpse, her tumid ankles peeking out, inflated and purple,” Rowbottom writes. The sentence is both gorgeous and grotesque; she knows that lived experience is more unruly than the stories we tell to contain it.