The Curious Case of the Communist Jell-o Box: The Execution of Julius & Ethel Rosenburg (Real World)

Michael Hoerger is a freelance graphic designer and independent researcher. Mia Partlow is a writer. They are the authors of Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified U.S. History. They live in Bloomington, Indiana.

"What started, in part, as a serially released zine has been turned into an intense and witty mash-up of classic shoe-leather journalism, culinary storytelling, and call for social justice. In graphic form, the authors dive head-on into public records to detail many unsavory factoids about Uncle Sam—such as how the police seemingly used a 1968 Chicago-area ice cream theft to silence Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Hoerger and Partlow's innovative method makes sense on many levels. Millions of pages of declassified docs can't readily be sifted through, the authors' logic goes, so an efficient way to track the federal government's inner workings is to look at a specific cultural institution—food—as an angle. This offbeat approach winds up working damned well in a little more than 100 easy-to-read pages, creating a sort of hybrid between Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals."  —Village Voice

“Sips of the CIA's secrets leave the reader realizing the enormous amount of activities the feds keep under wraps.”  —Portland Mercury

"This book contains some powerful new disclosures gleaned from FBI files and presented in a politically relevant form. Great research and a good read."  —Jeff Haas, author, The Assassination of Fred Hampton

"Mix ice cream, Jell-O, popcorn, Coca-Cola, and a milkshake with CIA and FBI secret files, some of the American empire’s biggest corporations, and the last ten presidents. What have you got? A recipe for revolutionary change. . . . It provides a stimulating taste of the government’s inner workings."  —Robert Meeropol, younger son, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and Executive Director of the Rosenberg Fund