by Gwynn Guilford
Despite the Mormon enthusiasm for jello – Salt Lake City-ers eat twice the national average – Christy Spackman says bigotry lies at the heart of the general public's association of the two:
In adopting and making Jell-O “their” food, Mormons (or Lutherans or Methodists) are making a statement about their identity, accepting all of the food’s positive connotations of family-friendliness, child-centeredness, and domesticity. Outsiders, in contrast, often look in and see Jell-O as a mark of a lack of taste that renders this group strange, immature, and ultimately mockable.
Last year, a Mormon blogger took the issue less seriously. On her traditional Sunday dinner:
[M]y mom is actually pretty good at making jello, and most of the time it came out nice and jiggly, rather than sloppy and melty, like mine tends to. But then sometimes she would pull out all the stops and make her green jello with pineapple and cottage cheese. Cottage cheese. With the jello. INSIDE the jello.
But she's had worse:
For the record, jello shots made with vodka taste way worse than jello with cottage cheese. I didn’t figure out that people weren’t eating them for the taste until after I had a couple. I mean, hello, somebody could have at least WARNED the Mormon that they were trying to get drunk on the jello. I was totally unprepared, coming from a world where EVERYBODY brings jello to a party.
The Dish 