Fondue is Fun. No, really. It is.

In my recent travels I came across these beautiful, bewildering and pristine fondue bibs.

I was dumbstruck for a short spell when I first noticed them, as they raised all sorts of questions and my mind raced in many different directions trying to answer the heavy issues at hand.

The first direction my mind traveled was to a place where I imagined asking my husband to wear one while eating fondue. Asking an adult male to wear a colorful bib at the dinner table is something that you may try, but you do so at your own risk. But apparently, in the 1970's there were households where men sat around wearing bibs while eating fondue, probably getting nutmeggy cheese in their mustaches and beards and all over their bib, but not on their shirts. Maybe a colorful bib goes with a colorful polyester shirt quite well, it might even be camouflaged against this backdrop. The same could not be said of a Nike t-shirt, or a modern sensible cotton work shirt. No, most modern men would look and probably feel like they were being dressed up as a baby.

After recovering myself somewhat I realized these bibs were still new in the original plastic packaging which naturally led me to the image of a man standing up and saying no to the bib, probably sometime around 1982 when men had become much more uptight about a lot of things, including bibs and fondue.

Perhaps that's what brought these to the place where I found them, or perhaps it was something else. Every generation wants to separate itself from the icons of the previous generation and fondue was one of the casualties of the 1970's. You can't print "Fondue is Fun" on a bib and present it to a young Madonna fan in her lace gloves and Boy Toy belt in 1984 and expect her to buy it. You might as well be saying "Going to bed at 8 o'clock is fun", or "Hanging out with your parents is fun" or "Liver is fun". Perhaps these bibs were printed in the late 1970's as part of a last ditch effort by the Fondue Council to save Fondue. A last, pathetic battle cry as it were.

Fondue went deep underground in the 1980's, it's heart still beating, but hidden from view (like Voldemort) in the back of kitchen cabinets (not so much like Voldemort) (damn it, now I'm going to have nightmares). Occasionally, children who knew nothing about bell-bottoms with penny farthings embroidered into the cuffs played in the utensil draw and wondered what the weird two-pronged skewers with the wooden handle and colored plastic dot on the end were for. And so they experimented by jabbing them into their sister's arm. Thereby ensuring the fondue skewers were confiscated and disappeared without fanfare or explanation.

To be fair to everyone that came after the 1970's (and those that emerged from the cloud of the 1970's) there must have been some confusion as to what was being fondued during Fondue's heyday. Some anthropologist associates of mine have been studying these bibs for the past few weeks, and in spite of deep research, they have yet to identify the foods pictured on the bibs. For those who haven't tried modern fondue, in this new millennium we are likely to have warm chocolate with fruits such as strawberries and pineapple dipped in our fondue, or a cheese fondue with delicious breads and raw vegetables. But if I am reading these bibs correctly, in the 1970's a fondue was some kind of yellow and brown liquid, and for dipping you had a choice of small tufts of grass, whole unshelled walnuts, large beef bouillon cubes and an assortment of yukon gold unpeeled potatoes.

So while I thank the 1970's for bringing Fondue into the mainstream, I am grateful to modern food thinkers for reinventing this cultural classic for our sophisticated, yet less adventurous (and less drug-addled) modern palates.

Fondue is fun. It is certainly fun to think about. It is fun to imagine that because it has a French sounding name, I am eating ethnic food when I eat Fondue (and may end up as skinny as a French woman) (and as stylish). But, it isn't fun to ask someone to wear one of these bibs against their will. One, because it might rip while you are struggling to tie it on. And two; these have survived almost thirty years so are you really going to use them once and throw them away?

Value judgments aside; if you are the lucky person who snaps these rare bibs up, and you choose to use them, you may find that if you place them on your fondue prepped dinner table, everybody at the table might just start to smile and enter a warm, colorful and maybe even slightly psychedelic place and put a bib on themselves. Even men in Nike t-shirts.

See you soon at So Dishy for more perfect dining accessories!