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.