On March 17, 1993, according to the Jell-0 Museum Web page, technicians at St. Jerome Hospital in Batavia, New York, apparently having nothing better to do, hooked an electroencephalograph up to a bowl of lime jell-0. They were amazed, the story goes, to discover that America's favorite gelatin dessert exhibits brain waves "identical" to all adult human being. Unrecorded but obviously relevant is whether the adult human used for comparison happened to work as a technician at St. Jerome Hospital.



But while lime Jell-O seems an unlikely candidate for the Nobel Prize in much of anything, it does hold the distinction of being a big hit in Salt Lake City, which consumes more of the green jiggly stuff than any other American metropolis.

For a brand name that today is recognized by 95 percent of Americans and found in 66 percent of their homes, Jell-O got off to a rocky start. The first person to patent a gelatin dessert, in 1845, was Peter Cooper, the inventor, manufacturer, and philanthropist best known for pioneering the railroad locomotive in America. But making Cooper's gelatin took the better part of a day and the product was not very popular.

A scant fifty years later, however, carpenter and cough medicine purveyor Pearle B. Wait and his wife, May Davis Wait, of LeRoy, New York, fiddled a bit with Cooper's gelatin, and by 1897 had developed easier-to-make strawberry, raspberry, orange, and lemon flavors. A name was needed for the product, and May came through with a winner-Jell-O.

Given the spelling "Jell-O," May Wait was probably thinking of jelly, not gelatin, when she dreamed up the name, but the two words share a common root. The Latin gelare means "to freeze," and as it percolated into various later European languages took on the connotation "to congeal" (in fact, congeal itself is a descendant of gelare). Both gelatin and jelly were originally applied to a substance produced by boiling animal bones, skins, etc., to release collagen, which jells into a semisolid as it cools. (Fruit jelly, which does not come from animals, jells because of the pectin in the fruit itself.) Today's gelatin, including that found in Jell-O, comes from the same animal sources but is so rigorously purified that many vegetarians consider Jell-O perfectly acceptable.

In subsequent years the Jell-O brand changed hands several times and today is owned by Kraft Foods Inc., which markets more than 150 products under the Jell-O name, including puddings, pie fillings, and Jello-O Pudding Pops. And in January 2001, all that lime finally kicked in and Jell-O was declared the "Official State Snack" of Utah. EEG testing of the Utah legislature might be interesting.