5 Old Ads From Back When Food Was Gross

5 Wrapped Bread, the New Hygienic Choice

Your first question about the following ad from 1954 might be about why something so elementary as bread would be advertised with a model in a gown — a gown that’s so important that the ad identifies who designed it in small text. 

Your second thought, once you get over the gown, is that this is an ad specifically advertising bread wrapped in waxed paper. What’s so special about waxed paper? Does it offer some special advantage over wrapping bread in plastic?

No, this wasn’t an alternative to bread wrapped in plastic, which didn’t exist yet. This was an alternative to buying bread unwrapped. That was the norm, once upon a time, much to the displeasure of customers who didn’t like bakers rubbing their hands directly on the loaves. Unwrapped bread quickly went stale. This was true even before sliced bread, back when the crust offered some — but not much — barrier to moisture.

People bought bread unwrapped and then had to wrap it themselves at home, to stop it from getting even more stale in a matter of minutes. Prewrapped bread later offered a wonderful new convenience. That’s even though waxed paper wasn’t very good at preserving bread. Be glad that you have modern wrapping. Plastic may have its downsides, but it means your slices stay fluffy for more than a single afternoon. 

4 Eat Mustard. Or Bathe With It, Whatever

The bathroom and the kitchen are very different arenas. Other than the peculiar compartment known as the medicine cabinet, we don’t like keeping actual edibles in the bathroom, and we don’t arrange personal hygiene supplies on the kitchen table. But in 1916, Colman’s Mustard urged you to dump mustard into your tub, and this seemed like a reasonable idea to people.

To clarify: This wasn’t merely a mustard-flavored bath soap. It was actual mustard, and if you didn’t buy the cartons specifically labeled “bath mustard,” Colman invited you to directly add mustard from your usual mustard pot, using a tablespoon. 

Observe the handbag one gentleman is carrying, which seems to imply something about the relationship between him and the other man already in the large tub. Then turn in delight to the mascot in the corner, named Muster Mistard — a mascot that Colman’s never used again outside of this campaign because it was simply too brilliant. 

3 Bulk Up Your Tuna With Mayo and Jell-O

Advertising canned tuna is tough today. It’s nutritious and tastes great, but people associate it with cat food and poor people. Ads will therefore zoom in on the tuna chunks to show their texture, making it look like a proper steak. 

In 1955, tuna sellers had a different problem. The stuff cost so much that few people could justify buying this luxury and eating it on its own. The solution was to explain to customers how 1.5 cans of tuna could make a dish that feeds four to six guests. All you need for the additional bulk is mayo and gelatin, which cost comparatively nothing. 

People did sometimes mistrust canned foods back then, associating them with ptomaine poisoning. StarKist allayed such fears by saying its canned tuna stays tasty and fresh, thanks to the Flavor-Lok Process — a process that, as far as we can tell, is a marketing term that never meant anything. 

2 Milky Way, a Source of Nutrition

Like we said, tuna is nutritious. It has protein and omega-3 fatty acids. You know what else is nutritious, according to the below 1931 ad? Milky Way bars. 

They have protein, and they have Vitamin D — “the sunshine vitamin,” which many kids really did used to lack. As for how much of each a bar has, don’t ask about that, because this is no time for numbers. Anyway, it was better for kids than eating crusts out of the gutter or maggoty gristle, or whatever else it was children snacked on back then. 

Interestingly, though the bar is named “Milky Way” and the company was named “Mars,” they weren’t going for a space theme. The company was named for the founder, Franklin Mars, and the Milky Way bar was named after a famous milk shake. 

People had been referring to a certain cluttered part of the sky as the “milky way” for thousands of years, but when the Milky Way bar first came out, they couldn’t count on buyers knowing about the Milky Way galaxy. In the early 1920s, scientists didn’t know what the celestial Milky Way really was and didn’t know that galaxies existed. 

1 Mmm, Cheez Whiz Over Vegetables

Some produce was better a couple generation ago. Companies have been selectively breeding fruits and veggies for their looks and for hardiness, so if you could go back in time to the 1960s, you might run into tomatoes that are a lot tastier than what you’d typically find today.

However, that only comes into play if you emerge from your time machine and really are able to get your hands on a fresh tomato. The target demo for the ad below doesn’t live on the farm and doesn’t grow food of their own. Food transport and food preservation were primitive compared to today. So, once vegetables reached their plate, they might taste of nothing, to the point that Cheez Whiz would be an improvement.

That’s not the only part of this ad that will confuse you. Read the text, and you will see that Kraft doesn’t suggest that you simply take the Cheez Whiz out of the fridge and pour it over that cauliflower. First, you need to heat it in a double boiler or a saucepan, because if you don’t, the Cheez Whiz won’t be liquid, and you can’t pour it anywhere. The ability to maintain cheese in a liquid state required further research by Kraft and further tinkering with the sodium ingredients. 

Even Easy Cheese — cheese you can spray — wouldn’t be invented for a couple more years. “Now that we have tech like this, we’ll probably soon go to the Moon,” people then finally said to themselves. And they were right. 

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