That’s exactly right. My grandmother made a jacked-up version of the jello fruit mold. She incorporated Cool-Whip into part of the Jell-o, and made the fruit coctail settle to the bottom. So, you got three layers, essentially: fruit at the bottom, a lighter colored layer of jello-cool-whip, and then pure jello on top.
It wasn’t better than a real pie or cake, but it was definitely edible and likable.
I moved to New England in 1989 from the Central Valley in CA. When I went to the grocery store in the northeast in January, I was appalled. The fruits & veggie section was like something out of a WWII movie. Everything looked like a wilted paper maché simulacrum of real fruits and vegetables. Tomatoes were a pale off-red. There was a whole section of something I’d never seen before: KALE. Eew. No fresh herbs. Stacks and stacks of potatoes and onions in bags. 2 kinds of apples: Hard-as-a-rock Granny Smiths, and mushy-as-hell Macs. Bananas? Brown. Oranges? Expensive, and dry interiors. Berries? Nonexistent, except Cranberries rotting in their plastic bags.
I don’t know how I survived. I gorged on tomatoes, avocadoes, artichokes and every fresh vegetable and fruit known to man when I visited home in CA. Distribution to the northeast is much better now, but back then 20 years ago it was TERRIBLE.
