[MUSIC]
Sirius XM podcasts. [MUSIC] Hey, everyone. It's Dan here with another sportful Reheave for you. And this is one of those episodes we did years ago.
And I still think about it all the time. Certainly episodes just stay with you like that. It's a mysterious story. It's a mystery of sorts. And unraveling it touches on themes of American history,
sexism, medicine, food, dynasties, wealth passed out from one generation to another. And it all centers on one family's complicated relationship with Jello. This story was originally reported by Dan Bobcaw for Business Insider. I think you're really going to like it.
“Now remember there's this pork for that episode.”
You want us to pull out of the deep freezer? Drop me a line. Send me an email or voice memo to [email protected]. Tell me your first name, location. What episode do you want us to reheat and why?
Thanks so much and enjoy. Please note this episode deals with eating disorders. My sort of odd and tangential claim to fame here is that my great, great, great uncle by marriage. Order, Francis Woodward bought the patent to Jello from its inventor in 1899.
For $450 and then sold it for 67 million in 1920s.
This is this pork full. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
“Ali Robottom is an heir to the Jello fortune.”
That 67 million, the her great, great, great uncle made back in the 1920s. It's worth nearly a billion dollars today. That money has filtered down through Ali's sprawling family over generations. And lately, Ali's become obsessed with Jello. How Jello has shaped America with messages like this.
Ali's also been thinking about how that Jello money shaped her family. Jello funded Ali's grandmother and mother. And now it's funding Ali. But it's also been a shadow that they can't escape. Jello became a twisted metaphor for all the bad things that happened in their lives.
To the point that they started to wonder, "Are we cursed?" To tell this story, I'm going to turn the mic over for this episode to reporter Dan Bob Gough. In the late 1600s, a guy in France boiled some animal bones in skin, and figured out how to extract the collagen. The jiggly, clear substance became known as gelatin.
Jump ahead 200 years, and a self-taught engineer named Peter Cooper, turned it into a powder that became a dessert when you added hot water. But it didn't catch on, and he started working on glue instead. A half-century later, a cough-start maker in the Royal New York branched into foods, and added flavors like strawberry to the instant gelatin.
His wife named it Jello. But he couldn't get people to buy it either. So in 1899, he gave up and sold it to someone who finally turned it into a hit. That guy was Ali's great, great, great uncle.
“You know, the one who bought Jello for a few hundred and sold it for millions?”
From that point on, Ali's family was loaded, but they were never again directly involved
with Jello's business or manufacturing. For years, they stayed in Jello's hometown, the Royal New York. This is where until the mid-60s, the Jello factory turned those bits of old bones into a shiny dessert. In that small town upstate, it was a Jello economy. The family's wealth put their name on buildings.
Whenever one of their kids got sick, the local gossip pages would write about it. When it got cold out, a limousine would pick them up from school. Ali heard the stories as a child, third hand from her mother. And I loved hearing about the light elements of those stories, the feasts and servants and butlers and a limousine.
Ali's childhood was more stationwagon than limousine. But that 1920's fortune still meant her mom didn't need a day job. And it's Ali got older. She wanted to understand where she came from, where her money came from. And so she started with the earliest inheritor in her family line, her grandmother, Mitch. So, Mitch was the young woman growing up in the Royal New York.
My mom did always say that she had a very soft, even tone and that she really rarely raised her voice.
Which seems in keeping with her character. I've read a lot of her letters and they're very restrained. She had brown hair which she wore swept into a neat bun at the back of her head.
She wore very neat earrings and very fashionable outfits for the time.
A lot of sort of trim wists. Mitch's yellow money helped make her life more exciting than the average married woman in the 1940s and 50s. She met and married her husband Bob during a stint as a reporter in Honolulu. Then the two lived in Lima, Peru for several years. And as he flew commercial planes around the world.
She had always wanted to travel and to write.
And so the idea of living abroad with her dashing husband was, you know, obviously really fetching. But then she had kids and her adventures hit a dead end. She found herself feeling isolated in Lima. She didn't have the support and status she got in the Roy from her place in the Jello royalty. So she and Bob left Lima behind and returned to their home town, Jello's hometown, La Roy. In some ways, it felt sort of like a letdown.
La Roy was drab, suburban, and snowy. But it was the easier choice, the safe choice. She was sort of a social butterfly. So she had a lot of girlfriends and an acclimated. Mitch's family was in the Roy. Her cousins, her aunt. And being close, meant they'd make sure
“to get that inheritance. So I think, you know, Mitch made a sacrifice herself. She had wanted to travel.”
She had wanted to write, but moving back to the Roy meant that she was in the society there.
Also, her life in the Roy looked a lot like what Jello marketing promoted back then. It was very wedded to the idea of the housewife and the strong American family where daddy goes to work at 9 a.m. every morning and comes home and has a martini in the evening. And the kids all gather around the table. And it's it's happily ever after with a white pick at fence. Mitch's husband was more of a beer drinker than a martini kind of man.
Mitch would fetch him a bottle from the fridge when he got home every day, playing the role due to sleep, if unhappily. Meanwhile, their maid was in the kitchen making dinner, sometimes pouring fruit into Jello molds. Back then, Jello's makers wanted Americans to put all sorts of things into Jello. Onions, radishes, carrots, peas. There was a Jello salad with mayo and anchovies.
A ham and celery loaf made with lime Jello. Hmm, bright crisp vegetables, anchovies, shimmering Jello. There's a salad boy. What is going on? That's not even the worst of them. It was prunes, unflavored gelatin, chili sauce, cottage cheese, mayo and sweet pickles. This is Ruth Clark. She runs a blog called mid-century menu,
the tessel recipes from the 50s and 60s.
“Really, it was very soft and the only thing that was hard in it were the chunks of sweet pickles.”
So, otherwise, everything's just kind of like glooping around in your mouth. It was very, very strange and very gross. It was like having a mouthful of like silly putty. This was definitely not the finest hour in the history of American food or American food marketing. What was Jello saying to women at the same time that mids was in the right? Oh, so much about where to stay physically, which is in the home, and how to make it in particular.
So, I think, especially because initially, Jello was this mystery food. It was a scientific experiment in a way. This terrific new busy day dessert is ready to eat. Once we're talking about the 40s and 50s were really talking about time periods that privileged, growth, and innovation.
Or let the children make it themselves. It's that easy. All right. And cleanliness. So, old recipes might be seen as dirty. Creamy, nourishing, so delicious. Jello, oh!
It says, though, the whole marketing campaign for Jello recipes was basically,
you can hide whatever you want in a Jello mold, old chicken, wilted lettuce, put it in some Jello. How nourishing? Jello really fit well with that identity in part because it literally is a food that you mold. So, it encapsulates and contains what feel like messy ingredients like shredded vegetables or leftovers or whatever. It can all go
“into the Jello and become neatly contained. And I think, you know, especially in an era”
of American history where we were really privileging, sameness, a lot of people probably had to do a lot of stuffing and hiding of their own trauma. In the mid-50s, Mitch and Bob took their kids to Italy. Alley's mom Mary was 12. And just like Mitch had realized in Peru, Mary saw there was life outside
Their small town of La Roy.
herself that didn't look like the rest of the Jello aristocracy. But while they were abroad, Mitch found out she had breast cancer. And again, she reluctantly returned to La Roy. She had a mastectomy, but she remained ill, eventually bedridden. And for months, no one in the family talked about the cancer. Mary resented her mother for taking them back to La Roy, resented the sickness. It also scared her. There was a time and it really shaped my mother's life
as sort of the last time that she saw her mother, which was in the winter and her mom had been
“worsening. But I think people weren't really talking about it. And the family wasn't talking about”
it certainly, but it was, it was happening. What was unsaid is that the cancer had come back. Mitch was dying and Mary wasn't prepared for it. No one was apparently. Perhaps most of all her husband. Her mother came out of a bathroom on the first floor of the house and was very concerned. And the other room, Bob, Mitch's husband, was calling the ambulance and Mitch was saying to my mother, but please hide me. Don't let them come for me. The subject's being. If they
come and take me, I'm never coming back. And my mother was completely bewildered by this and
frightened. I'm sure. And didn't know what to do. And so she said to her mother like, "Okay, I'll take care of you, but then ultimately, couldn't figure out what to do and just
“had her sit down and then my mom ran and hid behind the tool shed in the backyard while the ambulance”
came and took her mother away." And that was always told us sort of the last time that she saw her mother and her mother's last words to her being like, "Hide me." A couple weeks later, Mary received a phone call from her cousin telling her Mitch had died. Everything fell apart. Like, it was like a somebody turned off the lights and things just fell apart. Mary left the Roya as soon as she could. She wanted to escape the small town life of
Jello fame to carve out her own path, not her own terms. She went to boarding school, then Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal arts college just north of New York. But she kept having nightmares about Mitch's death. She turned to drugs in alcohol to cope. By 19, Mary ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Someone there asked her, "What's your deal?" Jello, she said.
“I think that loss and the turmoil that ensued felt like a curse to my mom.”
In Ali's family, there's been an idea for generations that all the family's problems came from Jello. A Jello curse. Ali's been hearing about it since she was five. The men in the family had their idea of what it meant. Alcoholism, addiction, existential boredom. The family had a history of all of those problems and also suicide in early deaths from mysterious causes. Mary heard about the
curse when she was little. And at first, it was like a scary bedtime story. She had learned as a child
that the curse was specific to her family, specific to the men and her family, and how it haunted them because of the connection to Jello and the great wealth that Jello had brought the family. But then, after Mitch died, Mary struggled with grief. A number of men took a advantage of her vulnerability, abused her. And she eventually became addicted to drugs in alcohol. The curse started to feel very real to Mary, a curse that affected women. In over her life,
she began to see Jello and everything it represented has a kind of parable. She could see it when she turned on the TV or opened a magazine and got a blunt reminder of where her money came from. The Jello ads made her cringe. So it seems like she's looking up at someone who's taller than her. And Ali showed me some old Jello ads from this time around 1970. In one, a woman with co-oft Auburn hair grimaces up at the camera, her hand over her mouth. And the quote at the top of the
image is, "This is the guess what happened when I back the car out deer putting." So the idea being that this woman messed up and now has to atone for it by offering her husband a slice of pie. Jello isn't alone here. It didn't invent sexism, and it was far from the only mainstream company with ads like this. But even so, something about these ads feels especially biting.
It's always a woman serving Jello to what we presume to be her husband.
And once she says, "Congratulations, dear, but what exactly does a vice president do?" And another, she's holding a Jello cream pie, clearly to a tone for the new $950 for a coat she bought.
You can even see the price tag on it.
When these ads were published, Mary, her mother, was in her 30s.
“Ali hadn't even been born. Then later in the 70s, Jello found a new face for the product.”
They always cheerful, friendly, and seemingly unthreatening.
"They'll call me. Why not make new sugar-free Jello instant pudding?" Bill Cosby hocked Jello in the 70s. In the 80s, in the 90s, it's one of the longest celebrity endorsements in history. For a lot of that time, especially in the 70s and 80s, the ads were still about mom and the kitchen, making Jello for her family.
The kids love Jello pudding, and you know it's made with fresh milk, so it's wholesome." Bill Cosby is at the kids' table. He's never the one making the Jello. "And you haven't made Jello pudding for them since last night." "Last night." But seeing him perched at the kitchen table in a woolen sweater,
was enough to reinforce those all-American family values, those Jello family values. Coming up after battling her addictions, Mary turns to art. Plus her daughter, Ali, opens up about the role that Jello played in her own struggles with disorder eating. That's coming up after the break.
Welcome back to another "Sportful Reheat" I'm Dan Passman. Hey, check out my Instagram when you get a chance. I share what I'm up to,
what I'm eating, all of my hot takes that don't always make the cut here on the
"Sportful." Although I don't know why anybody who want to cut out my rants,
“about the best way to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but the point is that”
that stuff is on my Instagram, and we have a lot of fun there. Also, sometimes I'm debating what should we do for this episode, not put up a poll, because you're a chance to actually have input into the show. So you can do it right now while you're listening, follow me on Instagram at the "Sportful." Again, that's at the "Sportful."
Now let's return to Dan Bobcoff in the story of the so-called "Jello Curse." In her thirties, Mary had controlled her addictions and found some comfort and expression in art. She painted nude women with bold gestures and brush strokes,
but she never promoted herself or the work. She'd give away her paintings for free.
After all, she had "Jello Money." Then, she married, and at 40 years old,
“she got a surprise. She named her "Allie." What was your mom like as a mother?”
She was very present and very childlike with me, which seems almost kind of strange looking back on it. I think, like when I look at old movies or whatever, I'm a little like, I'm like, "Oh, I don't think I would be that kind of mom." Oh, my darling. Oh, my darling. Oh, my darling." You can never really know a family from the outside, but when I see some of her childhood videos,
I see a happy kid in a loving mom singing to her child in the bathtub with a puppet on her hand. But "Allie" sees something different. I noticed this in a lot of my childhood videos, like, she's acting when she's talking to me, like, she's created a persona, and that's where we meet. In another video, it's "Allie's First Birthday Party." Mary's sitting next to a
plastic white picnic table. Allie's purse on her lap. They blow bubbles together. Allie giggles. In just to their left, on a platter, a lime green jello mold glissons in the sun. What's your first memory of jello? My first memory of jello, it was at, I don't know if people are familiar with the grocery store chain
stop and shop, but they had a salad bar that had jello in it and cottage cheese and whipped cream and cantaloupe melon. And other things I'm sure, but those were the things that my mom and I were selecting at the time, which I realized now, she must have been on some kind of diet. Jello followed Mary and Allie throughout their lives, and weirdly, Mary and Allie seemed to follow Jello.
During my adolescence, my parents divorced. My mom was again struggling to find her footing, and we started weight watchers together. I'd already had some struggles, like in my very early adolescence,
With restricting what I was eating, but I think, I don't know, like I had sor...
and she was worried for some reason, and she was going to do weight watchers, so she was just like,
“why don't we do it together? It was her idea. It was her idea.”
As in a lot of things, at that time, I was like, fine. I feel betrayed by the fact that you've told me to start weight watchers, so I'm going to start weight watchers, but then I'm going to get better at it than you are. And so it felt like I got to get my number smaller than hers. Weight watchers assigns points to food, except there are a few foods that are zero points. You can eat as much of those as you want, and one of those was sugar-free jello.
We would just put it in the bowl, on the table, in between us, and eat it together with spoons. It was kind of an interesting time with us making jello together, because it was at once
this sort of bonding experience, but it was also like bonding over this ultimately destructive
act. Like we were both trying to change our bodies as a way of feeling better about ourselves. And jello also, it doesn't really fill you up. It's not nutritious, and it tastes horrible. The started when Alley was a teenager. By the time she got to college, the mini fridge in her dorm room was stocked full of sugar-free jello cups. She refused to eat almost anything else, and before long, it turned into a full-on eating disorder. And that was a horrible horrible time.
It was a time that was really fraught for my mom, and I, and then ultimately, she gave me an ultimatum, and I went into treatment when I was in my early 20s. What did she say to you? She said no more money if you don't go to treatment. In that work. It did. Yeah, because I didn't know what I was going to do otherwise. Eating all that sugar-free jello, sometimes only sugar-free jello,
was a habit that helped enable Alley's disorder. But it was the thread of losing the jello money that compelled her to seek treatment, and a paid for that treatment. That jello money her mom was threatening to cut off, was paying her rent, and other big costs. Then when she was better, jello money would allow her to become a full-time writer. She didn't need a day job to pay the bills. So it's no wonder she didn't want to give up the cash, even if it was a little cursed.
“The idea of weight was such a big thing in your life. What do you think that came from?”
There's this idea, at least for me, in my life, of what happens when you are not for whatever reason allowed to speak of your trauma, and how it becomes important in situations like that to shut off the body, but then also give yourself something else to focus on. I think at that point in my life, my parents were getting divorced, and it was pretty messy, and I think I was also on the verge of adolescence, and womanhood, and it felt like I wasn't ready for that. I had no
protector? All they got better, but what her family saw as the curse was reappearing in other ways. Now, Mary was sick, cancer, just like her mother, Mitch. Then, as Mary began treatment in Connecticut, she and Allie became obsessed with the new story from their jello hometown, La Roy, New York. It was about a group of young women known as the
La Roy girls. For months, doctors in La Roy, New York, have been trying to figure out what it caused 12 girls to have severe ticks, almost like Tourette syndrome. Stay with us. Now, back to the Jello curse and reporter Dan Bobcough.
“Welcome back. What's been going on in La Roy, New York in the past months?”
So, in 2011, in 2012, and this is the story that my mom became really obsessed with. The strange illness has made at least a dozen teenage girls sick at the same high school. A group of girls who were living in La Roy, New York. All I used to cheer every day came down with a mysterious set of ailments. I would go to art class. I used to
I used to go to two art classes every day. Ticking twitching threats like symptoms. I was always so
I was always so active and nobody knew what was causing them. Everybody was always happy to be around me. And these ailments seem to spread like wildfire among the scoop of girls. So, the town freaked out, as they should, looked for all sorts of contaminants and environmental factors. And it's important to reiterate the state health department says it's confidence.
Students, there are not at risk because of anything in or at the high school.
But ultimately, that after every physical test was run and every possible physical problem was
“ruled out, the girls were issued a diagnosis of conversion disorder.”
What is a conversion disorder? Conversion disorder is sort of what it sounds like. It's the conversion of emotional stress or trauma into physical symptoms that the person experiencing those symptoms experiences as real and involuntary. Seeing these girls suddenly struck Ali that something like this had been her experience too. After recovering from anorexia, one of her hands occasionally became paralyzed, stuck in a claw shape she couldn't uncurl.
But she'd never known what was going on. Doctors had called her experiences stress related.
She got heart palpitations in migraines. Panic attacks so bad she had to go to an emergency room. She and Mary had both come to understand their ailments, partly through conversion disorder, or as Mary might have said, as symptoms of the curse. So the case of the Leroy girls captivated Ali and her mother. But I also really related to what felt like to me at their age like an inability to understand the scope of my own trauma or to own it and certainly to speak it.
So it may total sense to me that they couldn't say like what it, what it was that they may be needed to say. And so their symptoms were coming out sideways because that certainly had happened to me. What did your mom think? My mom really thought that this was not only a response to the individual traumas in each girl's life, but the larger patriarchal character of the town in which they lived. One that she oftentimes described is sort of brigadine like nothing
ever changed and that as being a problem specifically for women. She also saw it as sort of an intergenerational phenomenon wherein like women and young girls in this case are responding to the pain and the trauma that's passed down genetically from one generation to the next. Eventually the Leroy girls started to get better. One of them was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome and the rest were treated for conversion disorder. By the time high school graduation
rolled around, everything was back to normal. In Jello the food obviously didn't cause any of this. Years later the neurologist who treated them stands by his diagnosis of conversion disorder. As to Mary's belief that it was caused by some kind of inherited trauma, we can't say for sure. An increasing number of studies are showing that traumatic experiences in your youth can alter your DNA. Then those changes can be passed to your kids,
especially through women. But the research is pretty new. Still, it sounds like a more scientific version of what Mary would call the curse. The curse is something that you've been thinking about since you were five, right? Yeah. And so, was it mean to you? It means not something that's at all specific to where I come from or my family, but rather something that's specific to American
“culture. I mean, I think it's a particular brand of patriarchy that's wedded to American”
capitalism and epitomized by the Jello brand. But I think you could look at other products and see it too, but Jello because it was so invested in women's lives and freedom or lack thereof, I think is a particularly apt emblem of the curse. And so like although my mom had grown up learning about this Jello curse that people said was specific to her family, really she discovered that the curse was collective. Jello left the Roy in the '60s and moved its manufacturing to Delaware,
but much of the family stayed and just before her mom died, Ali headed back to the Roy. It was summertime and it was green and beautiful and a little bit suffocating, which is something that I've often times felt about, upset New York. It feels like landlocked and there's trees closing in and mountains closing in and there's this triumphant windfall and I feel it,
like I just have always felt sort of a palpable difference. I like couldn't wait to get out of there.
How do you feel about your own inheritance and money? It comes from the Roy. It comes from Jello.
“Honestly, I see it and I have to say I'm like fairly early into my life. It's like an air.”
My mom died three years ago and she left me her slice of Jello.
Her slice is worth a couple million dollars.
I really feel like it comes from her. Like I don't really think about that. I know she did.
“And obviously she grew up with Jello as much more of a presence than I did, but it feels to me like”
her. Maybe I am breaking the curse in some ways as I really don't see the money as a curse at all. In 2015, Jello made its final appearance in Alice relationship with her mother. It was a few months before Mary died from the cancer she'd had for more than a decade. So at this point it was spring, March of 2015. My mom had gone for surgery in January and had
seemed to be improving, but then was no longer improving. So my husband and I flew to New York for
her birthday and to see her through another hospital stay, sort of in an emergency capacity. And decided to have a little birthday party for her. It was going to be her 70th birthday and the only thing that she could eat was Jello. And she preferred black cherry. So we bought a bunch of that. And since we didn't have a mold, we just put it in a Tupperware bowl, which we then flipped into the sort of odd cylinder shape and topped with whipped cream in a couple candles.
There's a video of this. She and her husband seem excited. They got it to work at all. I went upstairs and got my mom and led her to the table and we all sang happy birthday. And she was sort of shuffling to the table and a white bathrobe with her hair.
“A total mess. But she was trying to be delighted by the whole production. I think she was”
ultimately really fatigued. I have pictures of it and she looks just tired. But that was pretty much
the last meal she ever ate. Ali Robotham's book is called Jello Girls, a family history. Our thanks to Dan Bobcuff and his whole team. This story originally aired on the business insider podcast "Household Name," which later became the podcast brought to you by. It shows not around any more, but they got a lot of other great food stories in their archive. This episode was originally
produced by Claire Roland Sin, Sarah Wyman, Dan Bobcuff, and Anna Maserakis, with help from Anne Sany, if you've had the corn felled in me. We had editing help from Peter Clowning and Gianna Palmer, sound design and original music by Casey Holford and John DeLore, with additional engineering by Dan DeZula and an original music from Black Label Music. This update was produced by Johanna Mayer and mixed by Jared O'Connell. Our team also includes Emma Morgan's churn,
Andreas O'Hara and Tracy Samuelson. The sport plays a production of Stitcher, our executive producers are Peter Clowning and Daisy Rosario. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. I'm Shalita from Wallkill, New York, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better. This re-heat was produced by Gianna Palmer. It seemed that producers the sportful today includes me, along with Managing Producer, Emma Morgan's churn, and senior producer,
Andreas O'Hara. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Music helped from Black Label Music. The sportful is a production of Sirius XM podcast, our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
“And hey, did you know you can listen to the sportful on the Sirius XM app?”
Yes, the Sirius XM app has all your favorite podcasts. Plus, over 200 ad-free music channels curated by Gianna and Era. Plus live sports coverage is your podcasting app have that, and there's interviews with a list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. Right now, sportful listeners can get three months free of the Sirius XM app by going to SiriusXM.com/sportful. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
