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1960 Horror Food: The Luminous Metrecal Diet In A Can

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1960s Horror Food: The Luminous Metrecal Diet In A Can

IN the 1950s and 1960s, Mead Johnson’s Metrecal promised to get you into shape. What that shape was, we people of the future can only guess at – and we guess it was a human form jackknifed over a toilet.

Mead Johnson spotted Sustagen, a composite blend of mix of skimmed milk powder, soybean  flour, vitamins, minerals, corn oil, minerals and vitamins spooned into hospital patients not up to eating solids. Pressing ‘Go’ on the random-name-generating computer, produced Metrecal, the weight-reducing miracle. It looked like baby powder. It tasted like baby sick. But – buy – it sure cured your appetite.

Take a drink and get slim. But do stick to the 900 calories of Metrecal a day.

This advert for the vile goop is from 1965:

 

 
The keen-to-be-slim could chow down on Metrecal milkshakes, Metrecal cookies, Metrecal clam chowder (New England style) and Metrecal tuna and noodles. Remember, so long as you kept to 900 calories a day, you’d be thinning. And nothing was better at building the new you than the liquid lunches, dinners and breakfasts.

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Posted: 25th, February 2014 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment