2As I moved from one book to the other, it occurred to me that there are interesting parallels between JELL-O and Reader’s Digest. Both products use a deceptively simple blandness to bring a formerly elite product to middle-class America. Both are packaged and processed for easy consumption. Neither product is particularly filling. And Joanne Sharp probably would be intrigued by how the history of what was once marketed as ‘the American dessert’ is braided with that of the Cold War. An early JELL-O promotional booklet pitied Russian housewives ‘who know nothing about JELL-O [and] must often be at their wits’ end when called upon to serve a dessert at a moment’s notice’. 3 During the height of the Cold War, the Rosenbergs scandalously were said to have used a JELL-O box to communicate with their co-conspirators. And in the post-Cold War world, JELL-O continues in its role as arbiter of American identity through references to the Russian ‘other.’ JELL-O’s website tells the story of American astronaut Shannon Lucid simultaneously enlightening and disciplining her child-like Russian colleagues on the Mir space station with measured gifts of JELL-O. 4 I make these links between Reader’s Digest and JELL-O not to denigrate the study of either product but rather to consider further the implications of Sharp’s admonition (inspired by Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Louis Althusser) that we examine the intersubjective relationship between individuals and societal discourses of order. I concur with Sharp’s call for us to consider the artifacts of middle-brow/middle-class/middle-American pop culture not as media-manipulated signifiers that dupe the unwitting masses but rather as objects that, through their consumption by individual Americans, lead to reproduction of the norms and understandings around