Patriotic Jell-O Salad
2003

Pages from a fictional cookbook

The piece unites several of Rosler's longstanding preoccupations: her interest in cookery books, food ways, and the political stories they conceal; her ongoing focus on the ways in which war and warmongering enter or are eclipsed by the narratives of everyday life; and her penchant for infusing these topics with a riotous, often grotesque deadpan humor. Jell-O is a synecdoche for mid-twentieth-century middle-American tastes and mores. It suggests a simpleminded preference for fun food over flavorful or healthy dishes. As such it also appears in the earlier Unknown Secrets (The Secret of the Rosenbergs). Here, the cheerful blandness of the recipe for a gelatin dessert mold, based on a recipe found on the Internet, makes no conscious acknowledgment of the violence implicit in the toy "soldiers and weaponry, cell phones, petrol or gasoline stations ... barbed wire fences, palm trees, tanks and Humvees," all buried upside down in a gelatinous substance possibly reminiscent of fruit-flavored napalm.