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Slow Burn
Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Fruit Snacks, Waterbeds, and Lobster Tanks
00:52:38
How fruity candy got a “healthful” rebrand, the rise and fall of the softest (and sexiest) bed, and more listener questions.
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- [00:01]
Willa Paskin
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- [01:20]
Steve
There were like a couple solid years, like maybe fourth, fifth grade, where I had them with me every day.
- [01:26]
Willa Paskin
Fruit snacks are pouches of colorful little fruit flavored drops that when Steve was growing up, were made by a number of companies and shaped like everything from fruits to animals to Mickey Mouse and Scooby Doo.
- [01:38]
Steve
The thing that most comes to mind is shark Bites, which were the king of fruit snacks back in the day.
- [01:44]
Willa Paskin
Just when you thought it was safe to eat fruit snacks, here comes Shark Bites, a beating frenzy of fruity fun.
- [01:51]
Steve
Hammer, the great white was the biggest of the shark bites. So he was like the king, right? And then you had like the mako and the tiger shark and they all had different flavors. And like, I would take those shark bite fruit snacks and play with them. You know, they were kind of like a toy too, right?
- [02:06]
Willa Paskin
Shark bites have since been discontinued, but fruity bites in pouches have not. And Steve still buys them sometimes not as a toy because they still seem wholesome to him.
- [02:17]
Steve
So, like, when I'm sick, I might pick up some orange juice and some chicken noodle soup and also some fruit snacks because it's like, they're tasty. They're an incentive to put something in my stomach. And there's vitamins in there, right? Like, there's vitamin C in there. I think I still have in my head, like, oh, there's some value to this.
- [02:39]
Willa Paskin
Recently, though, Steve found himself re evaluating fruit snacks. It was Late one night, after he'd put his own kid down to bed and he gave fruit snacks a cold, hard look. And what he realized rocked him.
- [02:55]
Steve
They're just gummy bears.
- [02:59]
Willa Paskin
So you're saying, like, up into your adulthood, you were just like, oh, these are, like, mildly healthful. And because you hadn't thought about it and then you finally concentrated on them and you were like, it was candy.
- [03:11]
Steve
Yeah, yeah, there's. There's something that went on where these things could be marketed as not candy. And they ended up in the snack aisle, and then they ended up in my lunch bag every day for two years. You know, that's weird. That's. That's amazing to me.
- [03:29]
Willa Paskin
Steve was so taken by his fruit snack epiphany, he wrote us an email about it.
- [03:34]
Steve
I think I realized it was candy probably within days of writing. And then I was just thinking about it solidly for two days. The more I think about the term fruit snack, the more it tickles me because, like, fruit is a snack. You pack an apple in your lunch bag and you have a fruit snack. But they took this product, which is basically gummy bears, and then told us, no, this is a fruit snack. What's the story behind that? There must be some origin story for the fruit snack.
- [04:12]
Willa Paskin
Well, Steve's in luck. There is an origin story for the fruit snack. And we've got it. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. We get a lot of wonderful reader emails suggesting topics from for the show and at the end of the year, we try to answer some of them. It's our annual inbox episode. We're starting with a story about, yes, the dubiously named fruit snack. But we'll also take a look at perfume drenched magazines, the singular plight of lobsters, and whatever happened to that horizontal liquid sensation, the waterbed. Thank you for writing us with your questions. We've got answers after the break. This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money. When you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. It's great when you can get someone a gift they wouldn't necessarily get for themselves. That little bit of luxury they don't know they're missing. For quality gifts at an affordable price, check out Quint's. They have really nice earrings. I have a delicate pair of hoops I wear all the time. Check out their sweaters. They have cashmere. I have a nice little cotton fisherman number. Whatever you're looking for. All Quint's Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. How do they do it? By partnering directly with top factories and cutting out the cost of the middleman, which passes the savings on to you. Gift Luxury this holiday season without the luxury price tag, go to quince.com decoder for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com decoder to get free shipping and 36065 day returns. Quince.com decoder like our listener, Steve, I snag a couple of soft, squishy fruit snacks whenever my kids have them because I find them delicious. And Steve is right, they do look a lot like Gummy bears, which were invented in the early 1900s in Germany, one of many different candies that humans have made using fruit over the centuries. But it turns out that despite fruit snacks resemblance to gummy bears, they are more closely tied to another treat. Fruit Corners. Fruit Roll Ups are the chewy snacks made with real fruit that you unroll, peel and chew. Steve ate Fruit Roll UPS as a kid, and I did, too. I'd rip that smooth sheet of red off its thin cling of plastic and wrap it around my index finger, turning the whole thing into a kind of chewy, damp lollipop. Growing up in New York, I'd sometimes do this with a boutique product that called itself the Original Fruit Roll. It was sold on specialty store counters and in Jewish delis. It came individually packaged in brightly printed cellophane with the brand name right on top Jore. And as we dove into Steve's question, I was delighted to learn that Jore, my Proustian Fruit Roll up, is a pivotal player in the rise of the fruit snack. And also that Jore has a factory right in Brooklyn. And so Decoder Ring producer Max Friedman and I went for a visit.
- [08:24]
Ray Shalhoub
Hey.
- [08:25]
Max Friedman
Hi.
- [08:25]
Steve Gardner
Hi.
- [08:25]
Willa Paskin
I'm Willa.
- [08:26]
Ray Shalhoub
Ray. Come on in.
- [08:27]
Willa Paskin
Thank you. Ray Shalhoub is the manufacturer of Joreu fruit rolls.
- [08:33]
Ray Shalhoub
I've been doing this full time now for 48 years. I just turned 70.
- [08:38]
Willa Paskin
Last weekend, Ray welcomed us into the factory, which is on a quiet street not far from an expressway. It's flanked by a martial arts academy and a Preschool. And if you walked by its black and glass windows, you would never know that inside, they're churning out 15,000 fruit rolls a day. Inside, it's an open warehouse with large packages of sugar, citric acid, and dried fruit in neatly stacked pallets on the ground.
- [09:04]
Ray Shalhoub
It's a cold process. We don't do any cooking. It preserves the integrity of the fruit. You get the good mouthfeel for it.
- [09:10]
Willa Paskin
The machines are custom made in stainless steel, but they're also satisfyingly legible. Like you can tell what they do just by looking at them.
- [09:19]
Ray Shalhoub
We grind the dried fruit up on the grinder there, pump it in through here, gets metered out on a little cellophane conveyor.
- [09:29]
Willa Paskin
Each one efficiently grinds or mixes or flattens, and then passes the fruit along to the next station on a conveyor belt.
- [09:36]
Ray Shalhoub
And then back here, the ladies on our custom rolling machines, they roll it by hand. And then we get it packaged over here, beginning to end. It takes about three days to make one piece.
- [09:46]
Willa Paskin
The resulting confection, the Jore Fruit Roll, is sweet, but tarter, rougher, and less processed than a regular supermarket fruit roll up. Even though Jore really did inspire them, the story goes like this. Ray's grandfather and great grandfather, a Syrian immigrant, both owned sweet shops in New York City, where Ray's dad, Louis, worked as a kid. When Lewis got back from the Korean War, he decided he didn't want to run a retail business himself.
- [10:16]
Ray Shalhoub
There was a Middle Eastern tree called Amerdeen. It was a dried apricot paste, and it used to come in big sheets and rolls, and he used to tear it off a penny's worth. He got the idea of putting them in individual sheets. So one day he just closed the shop. He rented a basement down the block, and he used to buy the apricots, grind it up and mix it with a little sugar. And with the letter press, press it by hand. And my mother, while she was pregnant with me, used to hang it up on clotheslines to dry. And that's the way they started over there.
- [10:44]
Willa Paskin
In 1960, Lewis sold his first Jore fruit roll, named for his sons, Joe and Ray. Initially, the product was called shoe leather, then fruit leather, and the only flavor was apricot. Through the 60s and 70s, the company grew. Ray and his brother Joe joined the family business. And then they got some formidable competition.
- [11:07]
Ray Shalhoub
The big guys got into it. General Mills came out with the fruit roll ups and just dominated the market there.
- [11:12]
Willa Paskin
Did you feel like they stole your stuff? I mean, stole is a strong word.
- [11:18]
Ray Shalhoub
They Borrowed an idea, but they did it very well. I mean, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in sales still.
- [11:31]
Willa Paskin
The General Mills version of the fruit Roll debuted in 1979 as Fruit Roll Ups. The company had already had enormous success turning something a little homespun and crunchy into a mainstre product when they'd transformed the hippie staple granola into Nature Valley granola bars. But Fruit Roll Ups blew granola bars out of the water. They were sweet and smooth, and their kid centric commercials promised they were made with real fruit. I want real fruit and bun roll up in one. I love my fruit Roll up. Fruit Roll Ups were an instant success. A modified Middle Eastern delicacy that became overnight a a Middle American sensation. And they did it by finding the sweet spot. They were healthy, seeming enough for parents and tasty enough for kids. Other companies started looking into what other squishy, gummy fruity confections they might make, kicking off a kind of arms race in a new market category called fruit snacks. In the 1980s and 90s, the term fruit snack did not describe any one type of product product. It described any gummy fruit confection that basically wasn't marketed as candy. That included Fruit Roll Ups, but Also starting in 1985, little fruity pellets first brought to market as Sunkissed Fun Fruits. Sunkissed Fun Fruits. They're made with real grapes, oranges, cherries and strawberries. Sunkissed Fun Fruits were like a cross between a fruit roll up and a gumdrop or a gummy bear. But sunkissed front fruits like Fruit Roll Ups worked hard to avoid the candy connotations of those other treats. So did General Mills when they debuted their similarly shaped fruit wrinkles. By 1988, these bite sized treats had officially overtaken fruit rolls in popularity, even as the fruit snack category overall came to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As the 90s dawned, these treats had so successfully convinced parents they were healthy enough to just toss into lunch, the company started to backburner their fruitiness and focus on appealing to kids with fun. Soon there were Gushers and Fruit by the Foot and Fruit String Thing and yes, shark bites. As the decade wore on, brand partnerships abounded. There were Garfield fruit Snacks and Dark Winged Duck fruit Snacks and even NSYNC Fruit Snacks. And no, they did not actually look like any members of NSync. You couldn't bite off Justin Timberlake's bleached bond curls, but one of them was shaped like a boombox. Fruit Rollups even made a series of Commercials set among giant chemical vats making the product appear more artificial than ever. It's new factory explosion, fruit roll ups of blaster fruity flavor colors and factory parts peel out. All of this created an opening for a company that might want to sell a more low key apparently fruit forward treat. Which is exactly what happened in 2001 when the grape growers cooperative Welch's licensed its name to a candy company that started making Welch's fruit snacks. They may have been late to the party, but Welch's fruit snacks have dominated ever since. So much so that when I hear the term fruit snacks now, they are the only thing that I think of. And not only do they have the promise of real fruit right there on their packaging, they're actually shaped like pieces of fruit. So it makes sense that our listener Steve, like so many others, would have thought of fruit snacks as ambiently nutritious, even if not so much.
- [15:26]
Steve Gardner
They claimed it was real fruit. Well, horse manure.
- [15:29]
Willa Paskin
Steve Gardner is a public interest lawyer.
- [15:32]
Steve Gardner
It is not real fruit and even its ingredients may have once started out as real fruit. By the time they got to be ingredients, they no longer were anything close to it.
- [15:46]
Willa Paskin
Steve's retired now, but he worked for years for the attorneys general of New York, York and Texas and at the center for Science in the Public Interest specializing in food fraud.
- [15:56]
Steve Gardner
When it comes to food marketed to parents as healthy for their children, I do get really pissed off. That was always my motivator as to what case we would bring is which one pissed me off the most.
- [16:10]
Willa Paskin
He sued the makers of many food and drink brands you've heard of, including 7up, Tropicana, Capri, sun, and most Germanely for our purposes, the companies behind fruit roll ups and fruit snacks, which he admits do contain some fruit juice, the.
- [16:25]
Steve Gardner
Juices that it promotes are mostly what are called strip juices. Strip juices are juices that have been stripped of pretty much all of their beneficial aspects. They're reduced from apple juice, which ain't all that good for you anyway, not much to it, to sugar water.
- [16:45]
Willa Paskin
So fruit snacks are nutritionally pretty close to candy. The rub is that Steve says there is just about no judge who would stop a company from using the word fruit in a product name so long as it contains any small trace of fruit byproduct, including a stripped juice. This is why, to answer our listeners question, all these products can be sold and marketed like something better than candy. But Steve also believes that when companies start claiming that their products contain quote real fruit, there's a case to be made that they've gone too far.
- [17:22]
Steve Gardner
Broadly speaking, state consumer protection laws prohibit false, misleading, or deceptive practices in any trade or commerce. Telling someone it's real fruit is both false and deceptive.
- [17:36]
Willa Paskin
And Steve has successfully made that case against companies like General Mills, Though even when he wins, the results can be unsatisfying. In a settlement about only their strawberry fruit roll ups, General Mills agreed to remove any images of strawberries from the packaging and to relabel only the strawberry ones with the actual percentage of real fruit they contained. But the company admitted no fault or intentional fraud and didn't change the product. Steve says that's typical of what's considered a victory in his line of work.
- [18:09]
Steve Gardner
I'm trying to think of an instance where a company that used to sell a product that was not fruity was not healthy, just junk improved it. They usually would come out with a different product and pretend it was good.
- [18:25]
Willa Paskin
Steve has also sued the company that makes Welch's fruit snacks, Though the case was dismissed. Since then, they not only crow about real fruit, they boast of using whole whole fruit. And they recently appointed celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay as their CFO or chief fruit officer.
- [18:43]
Steve
All the fruits you see here, they're.
- [18:45]
Willa Paskin
Actually in the snacks.
- [18:47]
Steve
Welshes are made with whole fruit as the main ingredient. They are the real deal.
- [18:54]
Willa Paskin
Meanwhile, on the quiet streets of Brooklyn, Jore fruit rolls have survived by not trying to compete with the big guys.
- [19:01]
Ray Shalhoub
There's machinery available now where you can mass produce this product, but what you have to do is, I like to say, dumb down the ingredients where you can't use actual dried fruit. And once you start doing that, you're producing the same product as the big guys, and you're never going to win that way. So even though we're limited with our production, we sell everything we make. We're happy.
- [19:22]
Willa Paskin
When fruit roll ups were introduced in the late 70s, Jore lost a lot of supermarket accounts. And it wasn't clear they were going to make it through through the 80s. But they had a loyal following among middle Eastern stores, and they eventually gained a new and loyal customer base. Kosher supermarkets. They sell 3 to 4 million fruit rolls a year now in nine different flavors.
- [19:41]
Ray Shalhoub
Apricot, strawberry, raspberry, cherry, grape, fruit punch, sour apple, pineapple, and watermelon.
- [19:51]
Willa Paskin
As our producer Max and I were leaving Joray's Brooklyn factory, Ray gave us a box of different flavored fruit rolls. We immediately sat down outside right near the door to sample them for ourselves. Wow, they really taste exactly like I remember them. You Want some?
- [20:06]
Steve Gardner
Sure.
- [20:08]
Willa Paskin
That one's good. Somehow we didn't get any apricots.
- [20:12]
Steve Gardner
Oh really?
- [20:18]
Willa Paskin
We'll be right back. It's always nice to get more for less. So here's a life hack that can automatically put some extra cash in your pocket. Discover will automatically double all the cash back you've earned on your credit card at the end of your first year with Cash Back Match. So you could get money for this holiday season and get more next holiday season. It pays to Discover see terms@discover.com credit card this episode is brought to you by public.com interest rates have fallen, but you can still lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account@public.com that's a pretty big deal because when rates drop, so can the interest you earn on your investment. A bond account allows you to lock in a 6% or higher yield with a diversified portfolio of high yield and investment grade corporate bonds. So while other people are watching their return shrink, you could be earning regular interest payments. But a yield is not locked in until you invest. So check it out. The good news is it only takes a couple of minutes to sign up at public.com lock in a 6% or higher yield with a bond account only at public.com decoder brought to you by Public Investing member FINRA and SIPC as of September 26, 2024. The average annualized yield to worst across the bond account is greater than 6%. Yield to worst is not guaranteed. Not an investment recommendation. All investing involves risk. Visit public.com disclosures Bond account for more info. We're going to tackle another question now. This one comes from Alana Traven, a listener in New York who cares about aromas and always has. I have been searching for a Cygnus or scent since 1986 when I was 13. I wanted to subtly define myself in a way that classmates would recognize. I just left the room because they could still smell a trace of my perfume. She started with innocent smelling, easy to acquire drugstore perfumes, but then she leveled up. I found out about high end perfumes by reading magazines. It was so deeply exciting to flip the pages and find a perfume ad with a sample. The ad page was thicker stock. It had a flap along the side and you could lift it up and release a whiff of perfume. These scented magazine pages seem to be everywhere in the 1980s, but they're not anymore. Which brings us to Alana's question. Were these ad pages imbued with real perfume? And who came up with the marketing device? Did it boost sales. And when did they stop appearing in magazines?
- [23:25]
Max Friedman
Actually, I have a Vogue magazine from May 1986. This is intact. Should we look at it?
- [23:32]
Willa Paskin
Jessica Murphy researches, writes, and teaches about fragrance.
- [23:35]
Max Friedman
They're usually called scent strips, the things that show up in magazines and also used to arrive in mail order catalogs. Yeah, I found three scent strips in this.
- [23:46]
Willa Paskin
That number of scent strips used to be par for the course. They were once cutting edge, at least compared to what came before.
- [23:56]
Max Friedman
There was this cliche that you'd walk past the perfume counter and some overzealous perfume sales associate would start spritzing you with perfume whether you wanted it or not. And this stereotype had existed for decades.
- [24:08]
Willa Paskin
In the 20th century, department store perfume counters were the primary place you could actually try on a perfume. But that began to change thanks to a technological breakthrough in, of all places, the cash register industry. A research chemist at the National Cash Register Corporation was trying to make cash register tapes that could be changed without getting purple ink all over a clerk.
- [24:33]
Max Friedman
So he came up with a process that produced tiny capsules of ink that were safely sealed within minuscule polymer bubbles so you could handle the tape and not get the ink all over yourself.
- [24:45]
Willa Paskin
And then about 20 years later, in the 1960s, a number of other companies discovered that this same process could be used in another way to encapsulate scent.
- [24:57]
Max Friedman
Instead, they were areas on a magazine ad page where you could scratch and sniff the way a deodorant or a cleaning product might smell. And that technology was also used in some really great children's products, like scratch and sniff books and the wonderful scented stickers.
- [25:14]
Willa Paskin
I loved my scratch and sniff stickers. I had a whole collection of them. And it was actually while working on a scratch and sniff project in the 1970s, that a big printing company made a big discovery.
- [25:26]
Max Friedman
And they realized that if a couple sheets of the pre coated scratch and sniff paper got stuck together, when you pulled them apart, the scent was released without you having to manually scratch at it.
- [25:39]
Willa Paskin
So it's like the ripping and the opening that makes them smell more.
- [25:43]
Max Friedman
Exactly, the ripping open of the scent strip breaks these microscopic encased molecules and releases the scent.
- [25:51]
Willa Paskin
And so the scent strip was born. All sniff, no scrap. A number of perfume companies started experimenting with this new innovation, but it was a small company called Giorgio, not to be confused with Giorgio Armani, that demonstrated how powerful it could be.
- [26:09]
Max Friedman
Giorgio was a boutique in Beverly Hills. They only sold their perfume at that boutique initially and through mail order. So to find out what it was like other than Traveling to Beverly Hills, you would smell one of these things that came in the mail and that inspired so many people to buy the perfume. The scents were astronomical for Giorgio just due to the scent strip.
- [26:32]
Willa Paskin
Between 1981, the year they started using scent strips, in 1983, Giorgio's sales jumped from 15 to 60 million dollars.
- [26:42]
Max Friedman
Other brands realize they can't afford to ignore the success of the scent strip that Giorgio has had. And then everyone is doing it.
- [26:51]
Willa Paskin
Do the scent strips smell exactly like the perfume?
- [26:54]
Max Friedman
We were told it was the same. I've always had a suspicion that they don't really convey the fragrance the same way you experience it in a liquid that you apply to your skin. But I think they're good for getting you into the proverbial ballpark. Like, is this something I'm absolutely going to hate? Or, you know, maybe this is something I should give a chance.
- [27:14]
Willa Paskin
Potential customers seemed to find them helpful too, and they became utterly ubiquitous.
- [27:21]
Max Friedman
It was said that Vogue only wanted to have three scent strips per issue to keep them feeling a little special. But other magazines might have four or five within a single issue.
- [27:31]
Willa Paskin
Scent strips had solved a long standing consumer complaint. You no longer had to go to a department store to try on a perfume. You didn't have to leave, leave the comfort of your home to get a spritz. But quickly, people started complaining about a new problem. Scent strips effectively spritzed your house. They do, like, emit an odor before you rip them open, right?
- [27:56]
Max Friedman
They do. And there was a backlash. People were saying that sometimes they could smell it before they even open their mailbox. And then you would go to the doctor's office and there would be magazines on the waiting table, and you would smell those before you even pick them up and open them up all the way. So it felt like there was no escape.
- [28:15]
Willa Paskin
Magazines started accepting requests for scent strip free issues. In 1992, the New Yorker announced they would no longer carry scent strips at all. Even so, it wasn't snobbery that really did the scent strip in. It was the decline of magazines in the 2010s.
- [28:33]
Max Friedman
That's been the big change, right? Is that there are far fewer magazines in general and fewer beauty magazines in print than there were 20 or even 10 years ago.
- [28:43]
Willa Paskin
Scent strips still exist, but they the magazines they appear in are less common than they used to be. Today, people who want to try on a perfume before they buy it are far more likely to order an online sample set than to come across a scent strip. But that's not because they don't Work.
- [29:01]
Max Friedman
Ooh, let's try. All right, here's Mirabella.
- [29:04]
Willa Paskin
Jessica pulled out another magazine, a 1991 issue of Mirabella with a scent strip ad for the Estee Lauder perfume called Knowing.
- [29:13]
Max Friedman
I have, like, a general sense of what this smells like.
- [29:16]
Willa Paskin
She ripped it open in front of me.
- [29:20]
Max Friedman
It still has a lot of fragrance. This is fascinating. And I'm actually amazed how beautiful this scent strip still smells. It's sort of a greenish, mossy floral with a little bit of rose, maybe.
- [29:32]
Willa Paskin
Could you. And you couldn't smell it just on the magazine anymore though, right?
- [29:36]
Max Friedman
No, definitely not.
- [29:37]
Willa Paskin
Okay, good. So we just all had to leave our magazines in a corner of our house for 30 years.
- [29:43]
Max Friedman
Wait a couple decades and they won't irritate you when you're sitting there in the living room.
- [29:53]
Willa Paskin
Our next question comes from Sarah Fentom, a radio producer in St. Louis. I grew up in the 90s, and I remember some of my friends, parents, especially if they were maybe, like, single divorcees or had a lot of money, had waterbeds, you know, those groovy, sexy, swaying mattresses. I remember them being, like, a thing when I was a kid and how fun it was to sort of go and flop around and, like, blob around on a waterbed. And I just never see them anymore. And so I wonder, like, was this a maintenance problem? What happened to them? How did they get so popular in the first place? And do people still buy them? To answer Sarah's question, we thought we'd go to the source, the font, the spout, to the inventor of the waterbed.
- [30:51]
Charlie Hall
Hi, Willa. As a kid, I was always making stuff, building stuff in my garage.
- [30:56]
Willa Paskin
In the late 1960s, Charlie hall was living in the mecca of the counterculture, the epicenter of the sexual revolution. San Francisco.
- [31:06]
Charlie Hall
I lived in Haight Ashbury, right there before, during, and after the Summer of Love. And I saw it all and was part of it all.
- [31:14]
Willa Paskin
But Charlie wasn't just a hippie. He was a graduate design student, and his invention started as homework. He wanted to design something you could sit in comfortably for hours.
- [31:26]
Charlie Hall
The first evolution was a jello or gelatinous filled chair, very free form kind of frame. And you'd sit down in it and it would gradually swallow you up.
- [31:35]
Willa Paskin
Was it like a blob?
- [31:37]
Charlie Hall
Like, what I didn't tell contained blob? Yes, that's kind of a good way to describe it. And in order to make it more viscous, I put in cooking starch, the kind of stuff you could use to thicken a Cherry pie.
- [31:46]
Willa Paskin
As Charlie worked on this chair with the pie like filling, he started thinking about another piece of furniture that really should feel as good as possible.
- [31:56]
Charlie Hall
The thing you spend most amount of time in is your bed. So why not have the most comfortable bed possible?
- [32:02]
Willa Paskin
Charlie was focused on reducing pressure points, the places where the blood flow to your back or your butt or your shoulder gets blocked and you toss or turn to release it. By now, he'd given up on the pie filling. It was more trouble than it was worth, and decided that he could make do with just water. And so that's what he built for his next assignment. A truly forgiving waterbed.
- [32:27]
Charlie Hall
The first night I slept on the bed, I found, well, gee, this is really, really comfortable. However, as it cools down after it was filled with warm water, it was not comfortable.
- [32:37]
Willa Paskin
So Charlie tweaked his prototype. He added a heating system for the water that plugged into the wall. But the whole thing was still really heavy, like 2,000 pounds heavy.
- [32:49]
Charlie Hall
My apartment, it was a pre earthquake San Francisco Victorian. It listed a little bit to the right if you looked at it from the front curb. But I think when I filled up my waterbed, it corrected the lean of the building.
- [33:03]
Willa Paskin
Charlie's bed weighed way too much to bring into school. So he had his design classmates come over to his apartment to check out his therapeutic invention.
- [33:11]
Charlie Hall
There were some looks at it. They probably didn't accept the fact that it was going to be the most comfortable bed possible. And everybody said, well, this is weird.
- [33:21]
Willa Paskin
But as they looked at it more, they began to realize it might have some other uses because it moved and.
- [33:27]
Charlie Hall
It was warm and it was undulating and it was just kind of sensual. So they got wild ideas. This is going to be a fun product to sleep on or play on either one. And someone went down and got a gallon of cheap wine, and the party started.
- [33:42]
Willa Paskin
Turns out that the summer of love and the dawn of the sexual revolution was a great time to have invented an undulating bed.
- [33:50]
Charlie Hall
Well, as some of the advertising went on waterbeds, it was like, waterbeds are good for two things and one of them asleep.
- [33:57]
Willa Paskin
Charlie started a waterbed business called Interspace Environments. They initially sold them out of San Francisco head shops before getting their own storefront downtown, selling to a famous clientele.
- [34:08]
Charlie Hall
Early purchasers were one of the Smothers brothers had a waterbed and also someone in the Jefferson Airplane too. I remember it got hoisted up to their, their, their room.
- [34:18]
Willa Paskin
Was your sense that people were buying them because they were sexy?
- [34:23]
Charlie Hall
Yes.
- [34:24]
Willa Paskin
Hugh Hefner put in an order for the Playboy mansion, upholstered in green velvet. And competitors selling copycats sprung up all over the place. People who sleep on a waterbed, city.
- [34:35]
Max Friedman
Waterbed, sleep better than you do.
- [34:37]
Willa Paskin
And when you sleep better, it's written.
- [34:40]
Max Friedman
All over your face.
- [34:41]
Willa Paskin
Soon, waterbeds were kept catching on all over the country, so much so that they were even being lampooned on primetime series like the Carol Burnett Show. Come on in. Water's fine. I'll just try the shallow end. Whoa. And Charlie insists that the waterbed's rise wasn't just about sex or novelty. For some people, they really felt better than regular mattresses.
- [35:08]
Charlie Hall
If you went into a store, people walk around, lie down on one, there to be the big smile comes over the face of someone who lays down on a waterbed that's the right temperature, and they sink into, and it just feels more comfortable.
- [35:23]
Willa Paskin
By 1978, the New York Times reported that one out of five Californians was sleeping on a waterbed. By 1986, it was one out of every five Americans. And as waterbeds became more mainstream, so did the ad campaign selling them, which no longer talked about sex quite so much.
- [35:43]
Max Friedman
Daddy, can I have a waterbed?
- [35:44]
Jan Whitaker
Please, Daddy, can I have a waterbed?
- [35:46]
Charlie Hall
You'll sleep like a baby on a superior waterbed.
- [35:50]
Willa Paskin
For two decades, waterbeds were a serious player in the mattress market. But then our listener Sarah is right. That market sprung a leak, and the waterbed craze deflated.
- [36:03]
Charlie Hall
The advent of things like memory foam started to emulate what waterbeds did. The whole direction in bedding changed after that to pillow tops, memory foam, all those things. And some mattresses come reasonably close to waterbed comfort without having water in them.
- [36:20]
Willa Paskin
These new mattresses were light and easy to move, and they could never leak. They took the key insight of the waterbed. The comfort is king or queen or double or twin. But did it without the hassle. Waterbeds today only make up around 2% of mattress sales, and their legacy has largely become a punchline, some goofy relic of the past sent up by Saturday night Live. Splashing in the night the water around me brings me rest the ocean is my friend because our water beds are the best. But Charlie thinks they deserve more respect.
- [37:00]
Charlie Hall
It certainly was not a fad. It lasted far too long for that, and it made major influences on the industry. Waterbeds changed bedding in America, and what happened was people were no longer looking for firmer is better and coil count and all this goofy stuff. They were looking for the core reason you buy a mattress? Comfort.
- [37:20]
Willa Paskin
And that's what people are still looking for and what Charlie's still getting from his own invention.
- [37:27]
Charlie Hall
I noticed the difference dramatically when I go back to sleep on a conventional mattress in a hotel or whatever. It just doesn't cut it. Water beds are more comfortable than any bed out there I've got four of.
- [37:48]
Willa Paskin
When we come back, we move from waterbeds to water tanks and the creatures who have to live in them. Audible's best of 2024 picks are here. Discover the year's top audiobooks, podcasts and originals in all your favorite genres, from memoirs and sci fi to mysteries and thrillers, from romance and well being to fiction. Audible's carefully curated list in every category is the best way to hear 2024's best of the year in audio entertainment, like the star studded production of George Orwell's 1984, which both honors and reinvigorates the terrifying classic. It's one of the best original dramatizations out there. A romance that hits the spot like Emily Henry's funny Story or heartfelt memoirs like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's Lovely one. Listen to the year's best fiction, like the Women by Kristin Hannah and Percival Everett's brilliantly subversive James Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com decoder and discover all the year's best waiting for you.
- [39:02]
Max Friedman
This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices and that's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive Car Insurance quote with rates from other companies so you can save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states and situations. Prices vary based on how you buy.
- [39:39]
Willa Paskin
On to our next question. Hi, this is Melissa from Mobile, Alabama on the Gulf of Mexico. My husband and I celebrated our 32nd anniversary in the Canadian Maritimes this year where we had the best steamed seafood and lobster. Got me thinking about when grocery stores at home here in Mobile had tanks of live lobsters. Why are they the only things sold alive in the grocery store? Over the years, a lot of people, from David Foster Wallace to sketch comedy shows have considered the lobster and observed how strangely we treat them.
- [40:13]
Steve
Who am I and why am I.
- [40:17]
Willa Paskin
Condemned to boil a life when all that I have Done is live my life. Whether it's the stock pot or at the grocery store, we treat this animal of all animals unlike any other. How did that come to pass?
- [40:32]
Jan Whitaker
I think it's strange, you know, because normally people don't want to see the food live that they're going to eat.
- [40:39]
Willa Paskin
Jan Whitaker has written about lobster tanks for her blog Restauranting through History. And she says the way we now treat lobsters was once how we treated a lot of animals we eat.
- [40:48]
Jan Whitaker
Well, I mean, in the 19th century, I think people knew more about where the food came from. They were not so squeamish about killing animals because, you know, even in cities, people would raise chickens and kill them and eat them.
- [41:02]
Willa Paskin
In the late 19th century, there was even a restaurant in Brooklyn where customers could go into the backyard, pick out a chicken and watch it get slaughtered.
- [41:11]
Jan Whitaker
That wasn't a marketing device. It was just like, make sure that you're getting a good chicken instead of one that's got a disease or something.
- [41:21]
Willa Paskin
Diners had pretty good reason to be mistrustful of restaurants and food purveyors more generally. Refrigeration and food preservation was rudimentary and food safety standards non existent. Killing something yourself or watching someone else do it was a way to ensure it was fresh. I grew up hearing about older relatives who would buy a carp and keep it alive in the bathtub until they were ready to turn it into an appetizer. And at a restaurant, customers really might want to see that their food was fresh because they were paying more for it. Though not yet for lobsters, most diners didn't even know what a lobster was. Instead, the sea creatures swimming around in swanky restaurants were fish and turtles.
- [42:05]
Jan Whitaker
Turtle soup was a real delicacy, whereas lobsters were not. It wasn't really a big restaurant item in the 19th century. You know, lobsters were considered poor people's food. They were not the luxury thing that they later became.
- [42:21]
Willa Paskin
Infamously and perhaps apocryphally, they were fed to people in penitentiaries. They were not rare or expensive, but abundant and cheap and extraordinarily regional, A staple of the North Atlantic and really of Maine, which was and remains the hub of the lobster industry in America. By 1880, lobsters canned in Maine were making it all the way out to California. And by the turn of the century, it was possible to transport some live lobsters across longer distances. And so a smattering of restaurants started putting them in tanks for the same reasons as the chickens and the fish and the turtles. To tell Customers, they should pay for the real thing. But over the course of the 20th century, food safety and preservation techniques improved dramatically. Consumers no longer needed to see their food alive to know it was safe. And we came to accept and in fact expect that the animals we ate would come to us already dead. And those tanks of turtles started to disappear. But lobster tanks did not. Instead, they went in the opposite direction. Red Lobster is where America goes for sea po food. If you love seafood, this is the place. When the very first Red Lobster opened in 1968, they amazingly did not actually serve lobster. But soon enough, it was on the menu. By 1983, it was the largest table service restaurant chain in the country. And placed prominently at every single location was a lobster tank serving as a show stopping marketing technique, a mini aquarium novelty that brought people in the door. Lobsters and tanks were also increasingly a showpiece in grocery stores across the country. And you could take their contents home and like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie hall, try to boil them alive.
- [44:18]
Max Friedman
Put it in the pot.
- [44:19]
Willa Paskin
I can't.
- [44:20]
Max Friedman
I can't put it in the pot. I can't put a live thing in hot water.
- [44:23]
Willa Paskin
What do you think we're gonna do, take it to the movies? Here you go.
- [44:25]
Max Friedman
Oh, good, Hallie.
- [44:25]
Willa Paskin
I'll say. Okay, it's in. Lobsters were a kind of accessible luxury, available no matter where you lived, but still a little pricey and a little special. And in fact, as you can hear in that clip from Annie hall, having to kill them yourselves is part of their specialness. They aren't like anything else. But why not? If advanced food safety made it okay to eat already dead chickens and pigs, why do we still kill lobsters immediately before we consume them? The answer you hear from people is if you don't, they just don't taste right.
- [45:04]
Jan Whitaker
They have to be eaten fresh, more or less. I mean, you know, you can have frozen lobster, but it's not as good. And if you want fresh lobster, you pretty much have to keep them alive until you eat them.
- [45:17]
Willa Paskin
This is the justification that undergirds are unique to treatment of lobsters. If you want to eat a lobster correctly, there's no choice. But is that true? Do you have to eat them that way? To answer this, I reached out to a man named Ben Sturgeon. Do people tell you all the time that you have the perfect name for your job?
- [45:36]
Ben Sturgeon
Occasionally, yeah, occasionally. And my. My mother's maiden name is Roach as well, which is another fish.
- [45:40]
Willa Paskin
Ben, a veterinarian, runs a UK nonprofit called Crustacean Compassion. And he's a big fan of lobsters and the larger group they belong to, Decapod Crustaceans. Decapod basically just means crustaceans with arms.
- [45:56]
Ben Sturgeon
I love the strangeness that the decapods kind of bring to this world. You know, they really are the aliens of. Of the deep sea, in my opinion.
- [46:04]
Willa Paskin
Ben's organization was started in 2016 by two women who saw a live crab in a supermarket fridge, shrink wrapped and trying to escape, and were horrified to find out that this treatment was totally legal. So is keeping crustaceans in unregulated, overcrowded, scungy tanks and letting untrained supermarket shoppers boil, steam, amputate, and barbecue them alive, because presumably we have to eat them as fresh as possible. And Ben says lobster meat does present challenges that beef and pork don't.
- [46:38]
Ben Sturgeon
The animal itself, you know, has certain limitations in the way we can store it. The very simple thing to say is, you know, there is a. The difference between seafood meat, if you like, and land mammal meat.
- [46:49]
Willa Paskin
In short, seafood meat starts to break down and get smelly and mushy much more quickly than land mammal meat. When Ben uses the highly scientific term seafood meat, it's important to know that he's talking about all seafood. It's not just lobsters that get stinky quickly.
- [47:08]
Ben Sturgeon
It's about the same. Yeah. In crustaceans of any variety. And with fish, well, we are.
- [47:12]
Willa Paskin
We are very accustomed to frozen fish, but I'm also thinking, like, frozen shrimp. Frozen. Why not frozen lobsters?
- [47:20]
Ben Sturgeon
Nobody really knows is the blunt thing to say. There seems to be this expectation of their eating as fresh as possible.
- [47:26]
Willa Paskin
Ben says there's no scientific reason that a lobster needs to be killed immediately before eating any more than a salmon or trout or shrimp does. It's mostly convention and our ideas about freshness. They keep lobster tanks a thing. And even if a just killed lobster does taste better, we wouldn't kill a chicken or a turtle or a fish right by our table just because it's a little yummier. And men says that when lobsters get boiled alive, they can feel all of it.
- [47:55]
Ben Sturgeon
Science in the last 10 years has demonstrated that these animals are sentient. In other words, that they feel pain, they feel joy. They have complex neurological systems.
- [48:05]
Willa Paskin
Ben's organization isn't advocating that people stop eating lobster altogether, but he does want lobsters to be treated like every other animal who don't have to experience the supply chain alive. He says the relatively compassionate way to eat these crustaceans is to kill them soon after they've been caught. What do you find is the biggest sticking point when you're like talking to people? Is it just that it's people are used to it being celebratory and expensive and they don't want to give it up?
- [48:35]
Ben Sturgeon
People find it very difficult to relate to a crab or a lobster or a prawn and things like that. I think what you're looking at is if you like an inside out animal, its skeleton is on the outside because that's the protection it has. So I think people actually have some difficulty really just becoming aligned with that animal. When you look at a land animal when it's fluffy or looks at you with big brown eyes or whatever, you can kind of put your anthropogenic view onto the animals. You can ascribe human feelings to it.
- [49:04]
Willa Paskin
Or maybe another way to put it is lobsters look like giant bugs, like sentient rocks, and that means they're just not quite cute enough to be considered we were at a party. Severe love fell in the gate. Someone reached in and grabbed it. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. We have a Slate plus episode available to subscribers right now. That's all about something I've been thinking about a lot lately. Gift guides. I really like gift guides, but there were so, so many this year. It started to weird me out and I was lucky enough to be able to talk through my ambivalence with the culture critic Anne Helen Peterson, who has been thinking and writing about and making gift guides for her newsletter, A Culture Study. It becomes less and less of a lift if you think about it. Cuz you're like, oh, I'm going to click on the best gift guides and then I can just like keep clicking and not actually doing anything. I can keep like soft brain scrolling instead of reading an article, reading the book that I actually want to be reading at this time. You know what I mean? Oh my God. The book I'm supposed to be reading at this time has been sitting on the side of my bed for like days. All I'm doing is looking at the things to buy. You can listen to me and Annie think through gift guides, why there are so many and how they make us feel. By signing up for Slate plus right now, Gift guide season may be open over for the time being, but trust me, the gift guide deluge is not. It's coming back next year and the year after and the year after that. If you aren't already a Slate plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page or visit slate.comdecoder/ to get access wherever you listen. We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, so sign up now. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us@decoder ringlate.com this episode was produced by Max Friedman and Sophie Kodner. Decoder Ring is also produced by me, Evan Chung and Katie Shepherd. Derek John is executive producer. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. Be well, and we'll see you next year.