Downfall of Jell-O salad: Boundary spanning and a shift in taste

Abstract

Combining recent work on market categories with a historical perspective, this study examines how broader cultural frames can shape boundary spanning rules—taste for variety and atypicality, and a shift in the rules. Focusing on Jell-O salad, an American dish that is known to mix all sorts of food in aspic and had been popular until the 1970s, this article traces how this salad dish that used to be accepted as a delicious mixture of distinct food (variety) has become seen as a disgusting blend traversing established categories of food (atypicality). Using 247 Jell-O package inserts, recipe books, pamphlets, and magazine advertisements between 1905 and 2005, the present study employs a mixed method approach: a historical process analysis and an event count analysis of the prevalence of Jell-O salad. Results show that the salad is no longer interpreted as a dish serving a variety of favorite food items because the main ingredient, powdered gelatin or Jell-O, has become available to all and dissociated with middle-class cultural frames. The results challenge an implicit assumption of the boundary spanning rules; once a mixture is considered an assortment, it tends to be favorably seen as a creative mix not an atypical hybrid. By evidencing how changes in the relationships between food and cultural frames affect the taste for variety, this study advances current understandings of category spanning and crossing social dichotomies of food. Show more