retro food links, this is why you're fat

Great Retro Food (and other) Stuff


Dearly departed Burger and Chef from Burger Chef Memories.

I adore retro things, things from the past, retrograde and ancient, you name it, I'm there. I realized a while back I have this weird fantasy about being in the seventies and having really fantastic long blonde hair, wearing teeny white mini-dresses and going to Monaco and whatnot - I figure I could pull off the damn Mom-jeans even, I'm skinny - own lots of platform shoes. I have perennial inappropiate crushes on the men in 70's ads with their puce-colored super tight bell-bottoms and their large sunglasses and hair at odd lengths. Burt Reynolds is after all my ideal for masculine beauty. Maybe this was all preordained.

Anyway. I love seeking out retro stuff from the internet and extra double points if it's related to food in any way. The way people eat, and the way it's changed from even say 20 years ago to today is fascinating to me. We came from a country that considered garlic a dangerous and possibly deadly spice to a country where eating Ethiopian, Laotian, Japanese and German in the course of one week is perfectly normal, where even TGI Friday's has pot-stickers on the menu, where you can get sashimi in the middle of Kansas. I believe this is overall good and right and just, but glances at the past are interesting to me too - I wonder if it's possible to detect that seismic shift in the ads of the past. But we can't forget that people were skinnier back then and did seem to be healthier despite surviving on starches. They lived in the era when processed food was considered to be healthier then the real stuff and when edibles made in a lab were superior but they lived anyway. I'm not sure if that has anything to teach us, really, other then that perhaps we should lay off the organic food a bit and occasionally eat something blue (at least us superior yuppies of course, the poor and the inner-city denizens, well, they got bigger problems.)

Here's some of the best stuff I've dredged up lately from the internets.

Found In Mom's Basement: the most awesome retro advertising blog I have ever seen.

http://pzrservices.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/02/29/mac_cheese_ad_1975_copy_2.jpg

Sardine King: Vintage California sardine labels. Curiously compelling.

Amazing historic food website - and I mean real historic, like, the stuff Jane Austen was eating.

This is Why You're Fat: delightfully disgusting food.