By Canyen Heimuli and Madeline Brubaker
January 31, 2001 was a big day in Utah history, the day that Jell-O became our state snack. After long holding the title of the number one consumer of Jell-O, Utah was knocked down to second place in 1999 when Des Moines, Iowa beat us out for the number one spot. Since the snack was such an integral piece of our culture, students at Brigham Young University rallied to the cause. Official campaigns encouraged Utahns to “Eat more Jell-O!” and the petition started at BYU to make Jell-O Utah’s official state snack received almost 15,000 signatures. All the support shown for the snack urged state officials to pass the resolution, officially recognizing Jell-O as the state snack of Utah during the 2001 legislative session. The green jiggly treat was popular among the Utah culture due to its family oriented advertising and even had its own Olympics pin in 2002.
Almost 19 years later, where does Jell-O fit in now? The snack is still featured in world snack maps but opinions on Jell-O have changed. We have polled voters in the state about a number of topics such as their perceptions on pending tax reforms, their expectations on upcoming elections both local and national, and their feelings about medicare for all among other things.
In a recent wave of the survey, we asked our panelists a few questions regarding Jell-O. We asked how often one eats Jell-O and how they prefer to eat it, then took these answers and compared them to their religious and political views, age, and area to see if Jell-O is still an integral part of Utah’s culture.Here’s what we found:
In order to uncover trends in our response data, we decided to make a basic statistical model that predicts how often a person eats Jell-O based on their characteristics. In our survey, we asked respondents to tell us how often they eat Jell-O, ranging from “never” to “multiple times a week.” Using their responses, we created a scale with higher numbers meaning a person eats Jell-O more frequently, and lower numbers meaning they eat it less so. We then analyzed what factors increase or decrease that scale.
Many of these results were to be expected. Age is a significant predictor of how often one eats Jell-O. At the base level, respondents 65 years and older were the most likely to report eating any Jell-O, while fewer than 10 percent of 18 to 25 year olds reported eating Jell-O at all. Those millennials (including voters aged 18 to 34) who did report that they eat Jell-O do so far less frequently than older respondents.
Another curious result was the finding that those respondents in the 2nd Congressional District (encompassing much of Salt Lake City proper and south western Utah including counties like Garfield, Beaver, and Washington) were far less likely to eat Jell-O.
Does this mean that the area one lives in really makes one more or less likely to eat Jell-O? Not likely. This may be a spurious relationship, but since the metropolitan residents of District 2 make up a larger proportion of our registered voter sample, this could also be evidence of an urban-rural Jell-O divide. It can be said that these respondents have different cultural ways of life than those in more rural areas which, evidently, don’t as often include Jell-O.
Our next result also speaks to this phenomenon: political party identification is also a significant predictor of likelihood to eat Jell-O. In the earliest versions of our analysis, we created our model with political party as an independent variable and found that in Utah being a Republican is significantly associated with eating Jell-O more frequently and being a Democrat is associated with eating Jell-O less frequently.
Of course, we are not suggesting that political parties directly determine the frequency of eating Jell-O. Indeed, the word “Jell-O” does not appear in the GOP or Democratic party platforms, nor is there a Jell-O-related requirement for registering for or participating in either of the major parties. What the results do speak to is that eating Jell-O is correlated with certain cultures, ways of life, geography, and values.
Our last result adds one more element to this model: the inclusion of religious activity. Religious activity is positively and highly associated with eating Jell-O more frequently. In fact, this predictor turned out to be more significant than political affiliation. The majority of our respondents report being affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the next largest category of responses regarding religion were either atheist or agnostic (about 40%). Our scale of religious activity, then, is mostly conflated with being more or less active in the LDS church, and at the other end of the spectrum not being religious at all.
Points on the graph are coefficients from a multivariate OLS regression with “frequency of eating Jell-O” being the outcome variable. Green and red points are statistically significant at the 95% level.
Frequent Jell-O consumption, then, could be viewed as a proxy measure for a variety of social and cultural attributes; Jell-O yet remains the favorite snack of the older generation of more conservative, and more religious voters in the state.
The trends in Jell-O consumption follow strong patterns that will likely continue to shift as the culture in Utah changes over time. But whether or not Jell-O has a place on the table for your holiday festivities, our state snack is a hallmark of the unique culture of Utah.