Making A Boob Of Yourself

Margot’s new tits were the only topic of conversation. She’d used part of her divorce settlement to get herself a pair of double-Ds. You couldn’t miss them and that was the point. Wow, you thought, when they entered a room. Just, wow. That’s just the swelling, Margot said.

But they pretty much remained the same size, even six weeks later, when she threw her Boob-Job Pot-Luck. It was part celebration, part a chance for her to show off, and part an advertisement for her plastic surgeon, who promised to be there to answer any questions us ladies might have about joining the Double-D club. I don’t think any of us had any intention of fixing our tits, but who could resist? Her surgeon was rumored to be a real stud.

Most people brought variations on the boob theme: half grapefruits with a maraschino cherry in the center; rounds of bologna with a perky olive each. Someone brought to watermelons. Val brought pears and went around asking people if they got the joke. But Pat’s contribution stole the show: cylindrical blobs of cheese, fruit, sour cream and marshmallow which had been frozen into shape and served on a bed of lettuce with a single raspberry on the top.

When the party started, they sat there on the table hard as rock, which would have posed a problem for anyone brave enough to try to eat one, but once we were in full swing, they’d begin to soften. It was a very warm day. By the time we left, there they sat, each raspberry sitting amid a lumpy puddle of what looked like puke. Not even Pat ate one.

The plastic surgeon was a stud, by the way. Margot ended up marrying him. They divorced when he got caught having an affair with another patient. I’m not sure what Margot looks like today. Neither does Margot.

Salads For Every Occasion Card #5 Frozen Salads, Betty Crocker Recipe Card Library, 1971

See also: The Ides of Salad

1982

“Oh Winston,” whispered Julia. “I had the most wonderful dream.”

“Really?” Winston replied, softly, careful that his voice not be detected by the microphone above the bed.

“It was of a meal served to us as a reward. We got to eat the same things the Inner Party members eat. You wouldn’t believe the foods! Such luxury!”

“How could you imagine them?” Winston asked. “Have you ever seen these foods?”

“Once, I caught a glimpse of a poster unfurled in an office. There were blocks of green things that looked frozen solid, and a plate with brown things on it, and some kind of red object filled with yellow bits. There was also a glass bowl with yellow and red shiny things in it.”

“Sounds delicious,” Winston said, shifting his weight silently.

“Very probably,” Julia said wistfully.

“How could you tell they were foods?” asked Winston, his curiosity piqued.

“The plate and the boxes, mainly,” Julia murmured, “but I don’t know. I could be mistaken.”

“Best, perhaps not to think of it,” offered Winston. “The Thought Police wouldn’t like it if they caught you fantasizing about imagined foodstuffs.”

“You’re right, Love,” sighed Julia, and turned on her side.

Microwave Miracles, Sanyo, 1982

Also from this book: Iron Feng, One Potato, Two Potatoes..., All Wrapped Up, Circumcised Apples

Wonderful World of Freezer Living

Home Economics: A Primer

Clarence Birdseye

In 1925 a chap named Clarence Birdseye submitted US Patent #1,773,079; a method for flash freezing foods, and utterly changed the way we eat. He sold his patents and the Birdseye name for $22 million right before the Great Depression hit in 1929 to Goldman Sachs and the Postum Company — which became General Foods Corporation.

In the early 1970s, for reasons known only to a handful of designers who had ingested a batch of really bad acid at a party, home appliances were only available in white (for squares) and avocado (for hipsters). This meant that everywhere you looked you saw a dull green, the kind nature usually reserves for edible items which have gone off and will give you a bad case of e-coli.

These two things found their perfect counterpart in the Sears Company, which produced one of the era’s most bizarre pamphlets: Wonderful World of Freezer Living. Check out the cover, on which the ghostly image of a transparent woman is superimposed upon a cornucopia of pottery and fiber. Her featureless gown looks like alien garb, and her fixed expression does nothing to bring her down to earth.

 Sears marketed their giant freezers by appealing to a housewife’s grasp of economics: instead of storage units, they were “Time Banks” in which you stockpiled leisure time futures. For every pre-packaged meal or ham hock you shoved in there, you received the potential for free time to balance life’s busy account. It’s actually a pretty complex argument that plays hard and fast with the average person’s grasp of the perceived value of opportunity.

“Each time you store food in you Coldspot freezer during the coming months and years, it will be very much like depositing money in your Bank savings account — storing it up toward some special goal. Your Coldspot freezer is a TIME Bank that lets you deposit extra time in the form of future meals prepared on the days you have time to cook, and allows you to withdraw that time later for civic or public service activities, special family outings, shopping trips — or a leisurely weekend without the drudgery of meal preparation. The time you earn by cooking and freezing good meals ahead of time will be yours to use precisely as you wish, whenever you like . . . with no penalty of thrown-together family meals to pay.”

— Jean Shaw, Director, Home Economics Lab, Sears, Roebuck and Company

You can freeze a lot of stuff, as this booklet will tell you. But the one thing you CAN'T freeze (or earn) is time. What the photo does a pretty good job of preserving is a moment in time — when housewives, giddy with freedom threw on floor-length gowns to while away the afternoon in their all-green living rooms.

Notice what’s in that freezer: no home-cooked meals there. Just Banquet TV dinners and massive slabs of raw meat. Even, if you look carefully, frozen peas.

Clarence Birdseye may have given us the freezer aisle, but most of all he was the consummate home economist: he cooked up an awful lot of dough. 

Wonderful World of Freezer Living, Sears and Roebuck Company