: What is the story behind the old popular picture of a cook with OK sign? I saw this illustration many times in my childhood (post USSR Russia) on VEGETA package and some other food products

@Kimberly620

The chef is logo for PODRAVKA (a Croatian based company) Vegeta.
You can read more on Vegeta homepage www.vegeta.com/en/about-vegeta/history
And because something called "copyright law" wasn't something existing in soviet countries there was many copycats.

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@Ann6370331

This is a piece of "clip art." Clip art are random illustrations that were published in large books where one might cut out/xerox/photostat an image and paste it onto an artboard when composing advertising, packaging etc. They would show up all over the place and so their use as a logo is a bad idea. The Starburns logo you link to is what I would call an ironic or self-aware use of clip art.

Tracing its source is probably going to be very difficult: clip-art is probably published more often in other people's books of clip-art than actually used in practice.

It is probably loosely based on Chef Boyardee, an actual person who popularized cheap Italianate food. His first factory goes back to the 20s. Many of the early advertisements featured him in a chef outfit.

Clearly there is some liberty taken, but the man himself was kind of an advertising icon in the US, so the reference would not be lost on people. His company developed army rations for the US and, purportedly, USSR during WW2.

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