How America Eats?

Yesterday, I wanted to make something for the library bake sale, but I didn't want to spend the evening with the oven heating up the house, so I found a recipe on Epicurious for No-Bake Chocolate Cookies. Rolled oats, sugar, whole milk, butter, cocoa, coconut, marshmallows, vanilla--decent enough ingredients, except for the marshmallows, but I knew that without them there wouldn't be the "glue" necessary to hold everything together, so, hoping that no one I knew would observe me in the checkout lane, I selected a bag of Kraft Jet-Puffed Miniature Marshmallows and put them in my cart.

The cookies turned out OK--more like the homemade candy I remember from my formative years in the Midwest than cookies, but I liked them well enough. (After sampling one, Norman Posner asked if they came with free insulin injections.)

Tonight, as I stood in my kitchen holding the remains of the bag of marshmallows and wondering with on earth I was going to do with them (they're too little for toasting and making s'mores), I noticed a recipe on the bag for something called "Watergate Salad." Curious--and old enough to remember Watergate--I looked at the ingredients:

1 cup JET-PUFFED Miniature Marshmallows
1 pkg. (4-serving size) JELL-O Pistachio Flavor Instant Pudding & Pie Filling
1 can DOLE Crushed Pineapple, in juice, undrained
1/2 cup chopped PLANTERS Pecans
1-1/2 cups (1/2 of 8-oz. tub) thawed COOL WHIP Whipped Topping

In what perverse alternative universe do these ingredients make something that can be called a salad? And--perhaps an even more frightening question--what else is on the menu if this is the salad?