Shell Research: as delicious as rocks slathered in crude

For reasons I am at a loss to explain, someone at Shell Research once believed that their mission could be made attractive to the public if it was summarized in this advert featuring a slimy petroleum salad.

Shell Research

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Antinous / Moderator

If you’ve looked at cookbooks of the era, the petroleum salad isn’t that much more unappealing than what people actually ate.
Anonymous

Seems like cute ad; a new “salad” for your highways. Not a real salad, obviously. But I suppose I’m of the right vintage to read it as it was intended. :/
Mr. Sleepy

Read the fine-print, fool– it’s a jokey, a play on ye olde word. There talkin about make ashphalt (not a REAL salad that somebuddy might eat at a restarant.)
Graham Anderson

I did an internship at Shell Research in Thornton when studying chemistry at Brunel. It was awesome – they had the best canteen ever. No crude oil salads in sight. They had a full silver service restaurant for VIPs too. Yummy.
hungryjoe

The best way to market anything to Americans is to make it look like food. Everyone knows this.
Robert

To be fair, it isn’t salad, but “salad”. I’m pretty sure the public back then knew what quotes around a word meant, and instantly knew what Macadam was. Or perhaps they didn’t, and the ad was a bomb just as it would be today.
MustWarnOthers

Peggy, come into my office, NOW!
imorgan73

Don must have slept in that day.