Camels on the Table, Plus Oats

If you haven't visited the Vintage Ads archive over at livejournal, your life is not complete.

Two not to miss are this Quaker Oats ad:


Here's just some of the text, which reports on a company canvass of oat consumption in 40 states, over four months, employing 130 men:

• Among the tenements: No oats, of course. "The average child is wan, anemic and nervous. The school teachers say that it lacks concentration."
• On [fashionable] the boulevards: "Boston consumes 22 times as much oatmeal per capita as do two certain states with low average intelligence."
• In the colleges: "Four-fifths of all college students were shown by this canvass to have come from oatmeal homes."
• Among the hotels: "The finest hotels...serve an average of one pound of oatmeal daily to each 18 guests... But the servants in hotels consume very little. Among the workers in lowly vocations very few are oatmeal bred."
• In the poorhouses: "We made a canvass of 61 poorhouses in 31 states, for types of the unsuccessful. We found that 93 percent of the inmates were not brought up on oatmeal."
• In the prisons: Less than two percent of the inmates in four state penitentiaries had oats in childhood. "But there, as in all institutions where the State directs the diet, oatmeal is a staple food." (And upon release, are they all now fine, upstanding overachievers?)

And this one from 1936 for Camel cigarettes, which includes an incredible quote from "food editor" Miss Dorothy Malone: "It's smart to have Camels on the table. My own personal experience is that smoking Camels with my meals and afterwards builds up a sense of digestive well-being."