My grandmother married a northern Wisconsin man and lived in one small town up there for the rest of her life. One year, sometime in the late 1980’s, she gave all of her granddaughters (note the gender) the Ladies Auxiliary Cookbook from her town. The salad section included not one single dish we would consider salad: no greens, in fact no fresh vegetables of any type. Every “salad” was a jello salad, some with canned fruit in them and some with canned vegetables in them. Full stop.
How any of these people lived a long and healthy life, I’ll never know. They’d eat about as many fresh fruits and vegetables in a month as our family does in a day. But really, when you’re in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, etc. in prior generations…how much fresh produce could you get from October - June every year, back before we were shipping the stuff worldwide every day of the year? Jello might have been the only way to stomach canned peas, beans and corn every day for months.
