Taste is a powerful thing, capable of conjuring
up some pretty potent memories. But what about all the once-popular foodstuff
people just don't have a taste for anymore? Why have we let go of the food trends of the
past? Here are some once-popular items that just
sort of disappeared. Remember Sunny D? The not-quite-orange juice drink that kids
craved in the '80s and '90s? "We got soda, OJ, purple stuff — and two
kinds of Sunny D! Alright!" What happened to that stuff, anyway? The Tab says Sunny Delight hit shelves in
1968, long before we were really paying attention things like artificial ingredients. It was insanely popular, and not just in America:
when it hit the UK in 1998 it came in behind only Coke and Pepsi in the drinks market. That's weird, because it's essentially 5 percent
fruit juice and 95 percent watery corn syrup, a combination that 100% tastes like your mouth
post-vomit. Credit Sunny D's downfall, however, to shady
marketing and bad PR. The Food Commission, an independent consumer
commission in the UK, started to call out manufacturer Procter & Gamble for their misleading
advertising that suggested there was some sort of nutritional value to the stuff, when
there definitely wasn't. And in 1999, a 5-year-old Welsh girl turned
a yellowish-orange color after drinking way, way too much of it: she overdosed on beta-Carotene
pigment, which gives Sunny D its unusually orange color. Yikes! Sunny D overhauled their recipe and rebranded
in an attempt to shake their super unhealthy image. It's still on store shelves, but it's not
nearly as popular as it once was. Cottage cheese has a long history, as it dates
back to a Colonial era when nothing went to waste — not even the leftover milk that
was scraped off the cream. It was consistently produced from then on,
but it wasn't until the 1950s that it became super trendy. By the '70s, Americans ate about five pounds
of the stuff a year per person, on average. "Pick me up in the dairy case. [Giggles] I'll be wearing blue and white!" Somewhere along the line, though, people became
less enamored with cottage cheese's weird texture and aggressively bland taste. Part of the problem is likely that it's hard
to make a cottage cheese that's consistent, but yogurt? That's much easier to make, much more of a
consistent product, and manufacturers have developed so many flavors and types that everyone's
bound to find something they like. Not surprisingly, the more old-fashioned cottage
cheese got kicked to the curb. While not many people are reaching in the
freezer to pull out a TV dinner these days, they changed the way we eat. They were first developed in the 1950s, and
according to The Atlantic, they were created by Swanson as a way to package and sell Thanksgiving
leftovers. Swanson sold 25 million meals the first year
their TV dinners hit the shelves, and sales steadily climbed until 2008. That's when sales dropped with such startling
speed that Nestle was ready to unload their frozen food division, valued at around $400
million. Since then, sales have continued to drop or
remain flat, and with more and more people valuing freshness over convenience, it seems
as though the day of the TV dinner has passed. Congealed salads Congealed salads were popular for a long,
long time. The basic idea has been around since the 1400s:
gelatin, made from boiled animal bones, skin, and tissue, is used to encase anything from
vegetables to fish in a mold of jiggly goodness. Serious Eats says there are a few reasons
they were popular. They were a practical way to use leftovers,
they were versatile, and The Daily Meal adds they were also a bit of a status symbol, because
if you could afford the refrigerator you needed to chill them in overnight, you were doing
pretty well. They stayed so popular that by the 1960s,
Jello released savory flavors like mixed vegetable and celery, but once we moved into the 1970s,
congealed salads were on the way out. You can, however, still find people making
Jello salads, as they've managed to stay in vogue in certain regions, particularly in
the south. As for the rest of the country … not so
much. Think back to almost every backyard BBQ, cookout,
and family reunion you went to as a kid… there were at least a few bowls of ambrosia
salad, right? There are a ton of ways to make them, but
most involve Jello, whipped cream or Cool Whip, cream cheese, and chunky bits from pineapple
and oranges to coconut and pecans. Sounds… interesting? Serious Eats says ambrosia salad dates back
at least to the late 1800s, and adds that it likely became popular because at the time,
all those ingredients were special, exotic treats. It became linked with Christmas traditions,
and it just sort of stuck around in the South. So while there's a small portion of the population
that is trying to give ambrosia salad a makeover and re-popularize it, many people are just
happy this weird stuff is going the way of the dodo.
