The human mind is a scary place. With hardly any effort, a single individual can think up something incredibly stupid and -- here's the cool part -- convince millions of other people it's a good idea.

While this may sound like the beginning of another tiresome political or religious rant, it's not. I am in fact talking about boiling your grandma. And not just for the heck of it, either. This is a serious column about dessert.

You didn't know that your grandma could be Jell-O, did you? It's true. In fact, practically any relative would work. You could also make gelatin out of a neighbor, a telemarketer, or even an extra hippopotamus you're not using.

Contrary to popular myth, the primary ingredient for Jell-O -- collagen -- does not come from cow hooves. Frankly, there isn't enough collagen in cow hooves to make a gummy bear, never mind fill a gelatin mold.

Dessert-grade gelatin, the kind strong enough to hold grapes and carrot bits in suspension, comes from an animal's hide and bones. Mostly cows and pigs, but also horses, moose and left-over lips of actresses.

I don't want to go into too much detail here about how gelatin is made. This is partly because many of you will be eating it soon, but mainly because some of you are loony enough to give it a try. I got into enough trouble over the catapult column.

Anyway, collagen is the primary ingredient in gelatin. It's what makes Jell-O gel. Without it, the stuff your crazy aunt throws into it would just sink to the bottom of the pan where it could be safely dodged.

I had an aunt who put -- and I am absolutely not lying about this -- tuna fish and capers in Jell-O. She called it Sunny Surf Salad. It looked and smelled like a coy pond but the old man made us eat it anyway.

Mercifully, I don't recall the taste. It was one of those dishes that takes a kid a year to eat because each bite had to be small enough to get it deep into your throat without accidentally tasting it.

If Sunny Surf Salad happened to touch a taste bud, it produced a gag reflex so powerful that your uvula stuck out of your mouth like a frog's tongue. It happened to a cousin. He knocked a picture off the wall.

People put all sorts of more acceptable things in Jell-O salad: fruit, vegetables, candy, tequila, etc. I'd eat one containing cigarette butts and wood screws before I'd touch another helping of Surf Salad.

Don't think you're dodging collagen by skipping Jell-O salads tomorrow. It's also in ice cream, yogurt, sour cream, marshmallows and, of course, the turkey.

Robert Kirby is a columnist. Reach him at rkirby@sltrib.com