Youth Will Be Served

Childhood obesity? This depression-era ad has kids singing the virtues of fat as an essential source of calories in impoverished times.

Mmm… delicious healthy fat! Few adverts are as revealing of their times as this entertaining and innovative musical short from the depression era. Fat in food is often a dirty word today, but here it is celebrated as an essential concentration of much needed calories. Though we shouldn’t always trust the nutrition advice of advertisers, you can also learn that you’ve been pronouncing margarine wrong all these years.

The distinctive direction comes from Anthony Asquith, a prolific British filmmaker whose late silent era films like A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) had put him in the top tier of British directors along with Alfred Hitchcock. ‘Puffin’ Asquith - as he was commonly known - was the son of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and though his career rose and fell he worked in the British film industry into the 1960s.