Food for Thought (Short, 1949)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=ZavYMVXYam8
This educational short has a lot of absurd scenes: there's a rush to plate a loaf of sliced bread, regular meals of meat as big as a human head, and a lesbian teenaged daughter with a wedding ring.
It also has compelling characters: the generic overworked housewife whose love is conditional on good cooking, the father who can't eat spaghetti, and the daughter who loves pressure cookers so much she gets an advance on her allowance to buy one.
The narration is also top notch. There's a complete description about how pressure cookers work, lists of foods that one can make with a pressure cooker, and vaguely ominous warnings to not deviate too much from the cooking process.
-
Oliver
commented
Old classroom shorts like Food for Thought always make me laugh because they tried to teach nutrition with such serious narration. Watching them today is a reminder that people have been trying to understand what’s in their food for decades. Even now it’s surprisingly hard to know what’s in everyday drinks. I recently started checking numbers before ordering coffee using a simple tool at https://starbuckscaloriecalculatorr.com/ it’s interesting how small ingredient changes shift the nutrition a lot.