Rating: 
Summary: Silliness at Its Near Best
Review: Try reading this well-researched gem while having the Food Network on across the room, and you'll find yourself indulging in the occasional scribble of a recipe bound to hit the update edition 40 years from now. Regrettable food has been with us for a couple hundred years and it's about time someone documented with both humor and affection one of its most hyperactive eras. Lileks is very adept, and altho his humor falls flat once in a while, one always has the comfort of falling back on the hilarious reproductions of original ads, recipes, pics. And at times he had me laughing so hard that my worried cats ended up recommending a nice beef brain gelatin mold to perk me up. I told them I would only consider such a thing if it were en croute and nested in a surround of bottled artichoke hearts interspersed with slices of the ubiquitous kiwi, sprinkled with a mixture of canned garbanzo beans and pitted calamati olives that had been in the brine a bit too long, and delivered to my dining table by a squad of egg & olive penguins.
I even got out my selfsame edition of Joys of Jell-o and hugged it and screamed at it that now someone besides my mother and I appreciated it for what it was, and that it was now truly in the silly cookbookette Hall of Fame !! Altho I haven't seen the crown mold she ordered from them at the time she first got the book for years, I swear I'm gonna find it soon. Not to worry, readers, we NEVER made that recipe - but she hung it on the wall in the kitchen as a warning to family members who had the gall to whine about some minor flaw in her marvelous meals that they didn't know what bad food was, and that she could prepare it any time they went over the line. Lileks also gives us an occasional peek into a deeper understanding of this era's social-cultural history than a humorous book on such a subject would normally reveal - his rundown on the effect of the Great Depression on the American psyche is very touching and probably quite accurate. This is a very perceptive writer who is not lacking in sensitivity to the era in which all this food took place. I would love to see him rip loose on a longer, more serious history of this period and its food, decor, and kitchen. All in all, having this book tucked into my extensive and constantly growing collection of 30's - 50's food company and kitchen appliance cookbookettes will explain a lot to my executors. They may not LIKE what they determine, but I won't be around to argue with them about it, so who cares? This is an author I'm going to keep my eye on. Check out his web page - it's got some great stuff.
Rating: 
Summary: Humorous descriptions of bland source material
Review: I bought this book expecting to find a collection of genuinely bizarre, ill-conceived food creations from our better-forgotten cultural past. While there were definitely a number of such entries in the book, the author too often focused on ascribing sinister motives and paranoid interpretations to perfectly ordinary photographs. In one example, there's a photo with a man throwing a log onto a campfire in the background, accompanied by speculation as to whether the thing in the man's hand was really part of a dismembered body. Similar speculations accompany other innocuous photos. The speculation is well-written and reasonably funny in its own right, but Lileks was definitely reaching when he tried to tie the text back to the source material. There were definitely a lot of examples of the kind of food the title promises (weird things involving Jell-O and lots of MSG), but I felt much of the book was padded out with things that didn't quite fit, and a good portion of the humor was working a bit too hard to try to stretch whatever laughs the source material was good for. I definitely think this book was funny, but like most high-concept pieces, it wasn't really satisfying.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointment!
Review: This book looked funny but wasn't, unless you find a lot of references to bodily fluids hilarious. The author claims to have found a bunch of 1950s cookbooks belonging to his mother and been inspired to reproduce selections from them with comments. These cookbooks are funny -- as it happens, I own one of the ones he includes -- but the level of his humor is fourth-grade, at best. The book has lots of descriptions of the cookbook pictures, comparing them to brains, blood, vomit, etc. enough!
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinarily mean-spirited book
Review: What an extraordinarily mean-spirited book. What could have been a light hearted nostalgic look at American culinary culture in the 1950s comes off as a rather nasty, unfunny sneer at ordinary middle class people and the food they ate. The reproductions of the advertisements are of a deliberately poor quality and are then lambasted for the funny colors. One would suppose that the color quality of a fifty year old magazine advertisement might suffer over time. This books leaves a bad taste in your mouth in more than one way.
Rating: 
Summary: Get ready to cry you will be laughing so hard
Review: I was given this book to read, while discussing bad Thanksgiving pasts with a friend. I could not stop from laughing out loud at some of the sections. The sight of the hard boiled egg penguins is reason enough to buy the book.
There are some sections that will make you cry from laughing, the lard section is a little long, but all and all this is a great book.
Rating: 
Summary: Cute but...
Review: Yes, food in mid-century America was funny and revolting. If you have never looked through your grandmother's cookbooks or seen vintage women's magazines this might be mind-blowingly hysterical, but otherwise it will just be cute and a conversation piece for your kidney-shaped coffee table. The author's sarcasm actually seems vindictive at times, like he was personally wronged by a meat casserole with jello topping. Which I guess, COULD happen... but it's kinda weird. Visit Lileks' website, because most of this is online.
Rating:
Summary: REGRETTABLE FOODS... HOW ABOUT FATAL FOODS!
Review: This book is definitely one of my all-time favourites. If you happen to be a product of the 50's or 60's, you will probably remember your mother slaving over a hot stove to put dinner on the table. Fast food outlets had not yet reached their prime and micro-waves were still tomorrow's dream. This book is NOT a cookbook, not unless you want to bring on a self-induced coronary! It is, however, one of the most hilarious books ever published. I can remember going to school and learning all about the "Canada Food Guide' and I imagine there is an equivalent guide in the U.S. as well. If one ate even half the recommended daily requirements, their size would be ten times that of Humpy Dumpty! "The Gallery of Regrettable Food" (and believe me, if you ate some of this stuff, you would regret it) brings to life a collection of advertisements and promotional material of yesteryear - some of which you will not believe! Food has never looked so morbid and falls somewhere between abstract art and the ambiguous splash of colour at the bottom of your compost bin! No wonder we are now overburdened with clogged arteries, high blood-sugar levels, out of whack hormones, immune systems gone awry, the horrors of cancer and endless unexplained aches and pains. If it is true that "we are what we eat," particularly the baby boomer generation, then our systems must be operating on maximum overload and ready to self-destruct! If you are a reader who grew up in the 50's era, buy the book; it is worth a million laughs and is sure to make your day.
Rating:
Summary: Way over rated
Review: This is a sad attempt at humor. From the reviews I expected that some of foods presented would be food items that someone actually ate. Check it out from your library before you buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: James Lileks is a very funny man. I've followed his writing since he wrote for the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota. He currently writes a great column for a poor newspaper in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has one of the best humor websites anywhere on the web, so I was primed for another great work. This book just isn't up to his high standards. I think it is too long with too much material to comment on and not enough variety in his descriptions. James usually can think of many different ways to look at a subject. He finds suggestions of ideas in the background of a picture that are usually hilarious. In this book, he comes up with the same observations too often. I would guess he was under pressure to finish it and make it a long book resulting in less than his best work. I really wanted to like it.
Rating:
Summary: Nostalgia and Laughter for the Strong of Stomach
Review: A paean to a time when creative uses for cabbage was considered a viable Research and Development project at any food company, this book is written with both affection and revulsion and in the inimitable Lileks style. More than an anti-cookbook (indeed, many of the "recipes" would be considered toxic by today's dietary standards), James Lileks has presented a look through cookbooks to what was in the minds of the people in this past era. By that I mean it asks, "What were they THINKING?" quite a bit. An extremely entertaining read by a funny, funny man with an amicable cynic's eye, a historian's perspective and a cast-iron stomach.
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