'70s health food for busy people!

Need a few quick and nutritious meals to help offset all the hours of mixing gobs of butter with various carbs (Bread! Potatoes! Sweet potatoes!) for Thanksgiving? It's '70s health food to the rescue!

The back of The Busy People's Naturally Nutritious Decidedly Delicious Fast Foodbook (Sharon Elliot, with illustrations by Sandy Haight, 1977) promises "If you have time to read the title of this book[,] you have time to make just about any recipe in it..." I guess they had a sense of humor about that unwieldy title, but they didn't necessarily need to say that for me to get the point. Anyone who would let a rainbow-winged pineapple fly across the cover of the book has to have a sense of humor.

The recipes are on the very simple end of the '70s health food spectrum. There are no recipes that start with hours of cooking dry beans or rounds of kneading and rinsing the starch out of wheat flour to isolate the gluten.

Instead, it's blending prunes and a bit of molasses into lowfat milk to make Prunella (which I chose from among all the weird health shakes because before I was born, it's the name my mother says she jokingly told people she was going to give me). I'm not sure whether the picture was more or less disturbing once I realized that the prunes have faces. (Look at the eyelashes and ... uh ... suggestive mouth on the prune that's front-and-center.)

If Prunella isn't substantial enough, the book offers the carob-flavored equivalent of a meal-replacement shake.

Shake-a-Meal  is essentially those health-food "candies" loaded up with nonfat milk powder, honey, and peanut butter-- with some milk and ice to thin it out to a drinkable consistency. Nothing is quite like trying to drink a quarter cup of peanut butter for lunch!

No '70s health food book is complete without a few recipes insisting that anything can be a dessert if you pretend hard enough.

But NO! Cottage cheese scooped onto bananas with an ice cream scoop is NOT a banana split, even if it has nuts, seeds, and some softened fruit juice concentrate on top.

And finally, a spread with a fear-inducing portmanteau of a name and a nonsensical illustration.

What is Pesoyta? It's peanut butter, crushed soy nuts, and tahini mixed into a long-lasting spread/ dip, and illustrated as a huge mound of peanut-covered... uh... bird shit? Wearing a sombrero? For reasons? I'm not really sure about any of this, but the point is that it's quick and easy! And isn't that all that matters? ("Yes," the book whispers. "Yes." It needs you to believe this!) And maybe if you're distracted enough worrying about how many pounds of potatoes and stuffing you need this year, you'll be distracted enough to mindlessly agree for a few seconds, at least until the Prunella and Pesoyta pass your lips...