Gallery of Regrettable Lenten Food (2024)

There are many to choose from, but here’s my favorite from the 2024 updates:

Ever caught a pineapple fish?

(More below…including 2024 updates)

What to cook for those Lenten meals? Such a dilemma!

Me, I always have dreams of various interesting vegetable-based stews and soups, but you know what it always ends up being?

Cheese pizza. Lots and lots of cheese pizza. With maybe some pancakes and eggs tossed in there for variety.

For some reason, I went on a bit of a rabbit trail one night a few years ago..I have no idea how I happened to think that there might be a treasure trove of Lenten-themed vintage food advertisem*nts out there…but I found a source (since offline) and in the years since, have found ads from other sources.

But then I thought,Wait. The Era of Regrettable Food was also pre-Vatican II…when Catholics abstained from meat every Friday anyway…whatwerethe Lenten regulations right before the Council? Why would Lent-themed advertising even be a thing if Catholics were going meatless on Fridays all year?

Turns out that the Lenten observance was, indeed, different: fasting every day of Lent except Sunday, of course, fasting and abstaining from meat on all Fridays and Ash Wednesday, and on the other days, meat allowed in one of those “one regular and two small meals” of the fasting days. So that explains the advertising directed at helping the cook be creative within those constraints since less meat would be consumed for several weeks…hence Lima Loaf.

(Too bad they changed that. Really. It lends a sense of greater body/soul continuity to the season, in my mind. It’s also kind of insulting that they thought we couldn’t handle that mild of a regime any longer, but what else is new. )

Of course, not all of this is regrettable. Some is just quite normal – vegetable soups, hot cross buns and pancakes and such. Some is surprising – using Lent to even advertise peanuts! – and a reminder of a time in which religious practice was just considered…normal and as amenable to commercial exploitation as any other part of life!

Added in 2023:

This year, I found a couple of interesting items that point to how retailers targeted their Lenten marketing. First, via Ebay, is a Shopper’s Guide for Vintage Foods distributed by IGA. I’ve looked to see if I can find a digital “copy” of this anywhere, but so far, no luck. For now, you can just peruse the Ebay listing and get a sense of it.

Secondly, a page from a guide for retailers on how to set up Lenten sales – don’t know where I got it from, sorry – it’s been a few weeks!

So enjoy, and may these be an inspiration…

of whatnotto cook during Lent, that is….

(You should be able to right click on each ad for a larger version)

See Also

Ceasar Salad and Grilled Chicken Breast

2019 Update. Here are a few more. None quite match the Tuna Dreamboats, in my mind, but they’re fun nonetheless. And interesting – again, from a time when the family needing to eat Lent-centric food was a worthy market to pursue.

I was also looking over all of these again and was a little puzzled by the Birds-Eye ad above – why is it a big deal to eat CORN during LENT? And then I realized – well, that’s because people ate far more seasonally then, and so the sales pitch here is that frozen corn during Lent would be a treat because it would give you the fresh taste you wouldn’t expect until summer. Supposedly.

And notice the contrasting appeals between the Banquet and the Knox Gelatin ad – Banquet echoing St. Basil the Great and encouraging us to “give up cooking for Lent” and rely on their frozen meals – and Knox suggesting “While you’re keeping Lent…make unusual dishes!”

It’s not obvious, but the Lent angle on the Quaker corn meal ad is over on the right – it’s a “Young Idea for Lent.”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Click on images for full screen version.)

2020 Update

A few more:

And this year’s winner, no competition:

Update for 2023: Even more!

I would like to see your family’s reaction if you poured tomato soup and some melted cheese over some saltine crackers and called it a day…

2024…even more!

These last two are especially interesting to me. The first, since it’s a beef extract, but still acceptable (as are broths and stocks), and the second because it’s selling a diet meal supplement as a Lenten meal!

On a less gruesome note, there were, in that era (as there are in ours) many cookbooks and handbooks to help a Catholic homemaker make her home…Catholic. Some are still in print and are very good. One that I have was published by the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. I have a post on it here, with a reader evaluation of a modern reprint. But in case you don’t want to head over to that old post, here’s the first page of the Lent section, so you can see how substantive it is:

If a healthy penitential attitude is to grow with our children, it should be fed with their daily Lenten bread.

…ortuna-olive-cream of mushroom soup biscuit ring.