Author James Solheim
EAT YOUR WOOLLY MAMMOTHS
Words and art by James Solheim
Eat Your Woolly Mammoths is about how food's oddities shape history and history's oddities shape food. Take the Jell-O Century (the twentieth) as an example. Starting in the time of Teddy Roosevelt, Americans competed to invent the most imaginative Jell-O dishes, mixing in everything from cow tongue to Spam. To bring this concept to life I combined historic images with my own off-kilter drawings. I put the face of Jell-O's inventor on an early baseball card, and gave him a real-life Spam Jell-O dish to hurl in a boys-versus-girls Jell-O war.
These historic ballerinas taught those guys a lesson about correct form in Jell-O hurling.
All the Jell-O delights shown here are actual dishes featured in magazines of the time, based on ingredients that included pickles, mayo, spaghettiOs, liver sausage, and much more.
Ancient Greece had celebrities and celebrity gossip just like us! Milo of Croton was their big-name athlete, so the rumors about him really got out of hand.
I drew a Medusa with colored pencil and added her to an actual photo of the ruins of Sparta.
Teamwork and art: the creepy statue sticking his head up out of the Spartan ruins is someone I worked hard to create and decided with some uncertainty to remove. But instead of just deleting him, I clicked the "hide" button in the Photoshop file that I sent to the publisher. When I got the files back to check over, the poor fellow had popped up again. I figured someone in the HarperCollins art department had rescued him—so I left him in. I'm kinda worried about that accusing stare he's giving me!
When I say I'm covering the history of food, I mean two million years!
