Plastic: spawn of the devil

That's what we know now, at any rate. In 1955, it was a miracle substance. To everyone except the glass manufacturers, that is.

This is one of a great many peculiar ads run over a considerable time (details? me?) by the Glass Container Manufacturers Institute. They must have cost a bundle--they are all full-page, full-color. Most of them feature rather pretty photographs of things like sparkling wrapped candy in glass jars, or fifteen different colors of soda pop in glass bottles.

This one is just weird. You can't tell me that glass actually looks better with dregs of old ketchup stuck to it. The freshly-stabbed hamburger in the background doesn't help either, with its halo of grease and stigmata of sacrificial tomato-blood. And that knife, for heaven's sake--it's pointing right at us!

Who uses a steak knife to eat a hamburger?

Could this be a crude early attempt at subconscious advertising? The blood, the knife, the reference to blessings? Are they going for the Pentacostal market segment, or the repressed slasher market? I thought it might have something to do with Easter, but this is an October issue.

And did the Glass Container Manufacturers Institute win their holy crusade against plastic? They sure fought the good fight--this site lists 126 of their ads for glass bottles that ran between 1955-1969 ("The D'Arcy Collection of the Communications Library of the University of Illinois is a collection of almost two million original advertisements published between 1890 and 1970." There. Details). They don't seem to be in business anymore, but glass bottles can still be had with relative ease. This particular ad's mission appears hopeless though--would you ask your grocer to stock "foods like powdered milk, brown sugar, and cornstarch" in glass bottles?

Me neither.