21 Once-Popular Foods That We All Stopped Eating

We've all suffered from a bit of nostalgia at some point, a sort of sad longing for days gone by. If that sounds familiar, you should count yourself lucky it's the 21st century. Just a few hundred years ago, says The Atlantic, nostalgia was considered a mental illness "treated" by everything from shaming to being buried alive.

One of the things thought to cause nostalgia was eating strange, unfamiliar food, and it makes sense. There's a reason that familiar staples are called comfort food, after all, and food connects us to not just others, but to our past, and especially to our childhoods. Tastes and smells can be a powerful thing, and some foods bring back memories of holidays with the family, of birthday celebrations, and hot summer days that seemed to last forever.

So, let's take a walk down memory lane and experience some nostalgia — here's some once-popular foods that have just sort of... disappeared.

There was a time when every kitchen had a big tin of Crisco kicking around somewhere. It's what made all those homemade chocolate chip cookies taste so amazing, but unfortunately, we know now that it's horrible for you. It was just partially hydrogenated vegetable oil processed into a solid, which means it was pretty much a bucket of trans fat.

Crisco has changed their recipe since then, says NPR, but it hasn't reclaimed a place in our kitchens. Part of the reason for the fall of Crisco is likely the massive shift in how it's been portrayed. NPR says it was first marketed as a super-healthy alternative to lard, and even through the 1980s it — and other trans fats — were promoted as much healthier than saturated fats.

All that changed in the 1990s, when we started to realize just how bad trans fats are. Even though the Crisco of today isn't the same as the Crisco of the '80s, it's hard to recover from the devastating findings that your "healthy" wonder-food is slowly clogging your customers' arteries.

Given what we know now about the dangers of smoking, it's pretty shocking it wasn't that long ago candy cigarettes were marketed to kids — complete with knock-off packaging that advertised "brands" like "Kamel" and "Winstun." It wasn't just an adorable gimmick, either. Mother Jones reports that a 2007 survey done of 25,000 people found those who "smoked" candy cigarettes as kids were about twice as likely to become adult smokers.

The first candy cigarettes were actually chocolate, and they were made by Hershey at the turn of the century. The chalky, more realistic-looking ones came in the 1920s, and they were actually banned by one state — North Dakota — between 1953 and 1967.

They were still pretty popular, though, as manufacturers advertised they could make you "Just Like Daddy." They were never actually outlawed — Big Tobacco blocked legislation that would have taken away what was essentially free advertising — but after the truth about smoking came out in the 1980s, parents were suddenly less keen to encourage their kids to pick up a deadly habit. You can still get them, technically, but they're called "candy sticks."

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. There's another part of the story, too — the BBC notes they were the brainchild of bacteriologist Betty Cronin, who was inspired by the search for a way to keep business high after the need for supplying wartime rations to the troops ended.

They ultimately kick-started our love for everything pre-wrapped, already prepped, and simplified, but then a weird thing happened. 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.

For decades, fruit juice was an important part of almost everyone's breakfast. In recent years, however, breakfast had changed. In 2014, Quartz reported orange juice sales were particularly hard-hit, sinking about 40 percent over the previous 15 years. Three years later, they were reporting the trend was continuing in America and in Europe.

That's a huge difference from the previous decades. For around 50 years orange juice was present at most breakfast tables — at it's peak, an average of 75 percent of American households had orange juice in the fridge all the time. The drink's heyday started after World War II, when scientists finally discovered how to process it and get it to your table while making sure it still tasted like oranges. But in the late 1990s, price increases due to insect blight, a decline in the number of people who eat breakfast, and an increased awareness of just how much sugar is in orange juice, started a steady decline.

That's presenting some serious problems for Brazil, who produces most of the world's oranges. The decline is so bad that they're looking elsewhere for what they can do to fill the void, and that speaks volumes as to just how out of love we've fallen with this one-time favorite.

If you completely forgot this childhood favorite even existed, you're not alone. Sure, you can still find them occasionally and there's even at least one gourmet sloppy joe food truck out there, but they're nowhere near the weekly dinnertime staple they once were.

Eat A Sandwich took to social media to try to find out just when was the last time someone had a sloppy joe, and answers varied but hovered around, "Some time in the 1990s." No one really knows why they fell off our dinnertime radar, especially considering that many people that were asked remembered them as tasting pretty good.

There were a ton of theories, though, and many are legit. It's possible it's a health thing, and they're just too high in sodium for people. The name might be turning people off as adults, and they haven't been targeted with the same kind of makeover foods like grilled cheese have. One response was the simple, straightforward, "Because we're not 11."

There's a good chance you forgot that tapioca pudding is even a thing, right? The pre-made stuff comes in a tub-like container from the refrigerated section of the grocery store, and it regularly gets passed over these days in favor of more popular snacks like Greek yogurt. You can even find it on the shelf with the individual packs of Jell-O and pudding, but it's usually on the top shelf collecting dust. And even that packaged stuff doesn't hold a candle to the homemade kind that Grandma used to make — so, what happened?

It's not entirely clear, but culinary historians and genealogists over at Aunt Lil's Kitchen have recreated some of the recipes from the era before pre-packaged convenience food, and suggest scratch-made tapioca fell from popularity because it was a time-consuming and rather difficult process. We may have made it easier by just opening a package, but with that, we've given up delicious, comforting, homemade goodness. It's just not the same. 

According to one writer for The New York Times Magazine, it probably fell out favor for two reasons: most chefs' inabilities to cook it to proper consistency, and the disgusting associations made with it when it's tasted at an improper consistency. Unfortunately, improper cooking was all too common, which is why the pudding earned the nickname "fish eye pudding." With a nickname like that, it's no wonder people stopped eating it!

The ever-popular, ever-coveted Ecto Cooler was finally discontinued in 2001 after an impressively long run (aside from a brief reappearance for the Ghostbuster reboot). But as much as we all miss the Ecto Cooler, we're still not buying many of the juice boxes Hi-C carries. 

Business Wire says sales of kids' beverages have been on the decline since at least 2008, and there are a few reasons for that. Healthy Children warns parents about the sugar content in kids' drinks, and one little box of Hi-C Wild Cherry contains 27 grams of sugar. (That's more than the American Heart Association recommends for an adult woman have in a whole day!) And Romper points out they're not exactly environmentally friendly, either. A juice box can take 300 years — at least — to disintegrate, and anyone who wants to set a good example for their kids is opting for reusable containers.

McDonald's had a hand in forcing us all to stop drinking Hi-C, too — more accurately called Hi-C Orange Lavaburst — when they decided to stop carrying it in 2017. Business Insider says social media was outraged, but adds that McDonald's doesn't care what you think

When we talk about offal, we're talking about some of the dishes your grandparents and great-grandparents probably survived on. Those are things like liver and onions, steak and kidney pie, tripe, and sometimes even brains. We don't really need to say why these fell out of fashion, right? They're absolutely not in line with almost anything in today's palate, and the idea of eating kidneys is just, well, gross.

But offal was a staple during times when nothing went to waste, and was popular more recently than you might expect. According to The Atlantic, there was a huge push during World War II to make eating offal standard American fare. Times were tight, meat was rationed, and a huge amount was going overseas to feed Allied troops. On the home front, the government recruited the help of social psychologists to help make offal more appealing to the masses — and it worked. Kind of. That's probably why your grandparents stirred kidneys into stews, but it's also likely that once we had abundant access to things like hamburgers and steak, we quickly abandoned the inner icky bits.

Millions start the day with coffee, and the market for caffeinated beverages has exploded over the past few decades. Coffee drinkers have benefitted from industry players trying to top each other with premium blends and preparations, with Starbucks, Dunkin, McDonald's, and other fast food coffee purveyors offering up carefully roasted blends and varieties more flavorful than what previous generations by and large had to make do with: a big tin can of pre-ground coffee made by the likes of Folgers or Maxwell House.

The appeal of Sanka was that it offered both convenience and a lower caffeine option. Coffee fans could prepare a cup of Sanka — freeze-dried coffee crystals that when rehydrated with hot water, approximated a serving of coffee — but with the powerful stimulant of the caffeine removed. Introduced in the early 1900s, according to The New York Times, Sanka became so well-known and frequently consumed that the product name became interchangeable with all decaffeinated coffee. ("Sanka" is derived from a French word for "without caffeine.") General Foods won the rights to market the product in the U.S. in the mid-20th century and aggressively advertised on early television. When Kraft bought out General Foods in the mid-'90s, it stopped actively shilling Sanka as much and made it a sub-brand of Maxwell House (via BrandandUSA). Today, it's still available, but as a hard-to-find specialty item.

According to the Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition (via ScienceDirect), the first inexpensive butter alternative came out of France in 1869, made out of churned milk and beef tallow. In the early 1900s, the development of hydrogenation — a process that turns liquid oils into soft solids — made modern margarine possible. Various vegetable oils at an industrial level were far cheaper than butter, allowing food manufacturers to mass produce a product that looked, tasted, and melted like the real thing, but at a fraction of the cost. 

By the late 1960s, margarine sales in the U.S. and Europe nearly equaled that of butter, with consumption driven by conventional wisdom in the 20th century which held that plant-based kinds of margarine were healthier than butter. Margarine companies delivered on that public need by rolling out scientifically concocted fake butters with less fat than ever, processed from different oils and oil combinations.

But as thinking changes, so do tastes. According to Quartz, consumers in the U.S. came to see butter and margarine as interchangeable, roughly equal in terms of total fat, and products that shouldn't be over-consumed. Since butter tasted better than the thing that aimed to imitate butter, grocery buyers re-embraced butter. Since 2000, margarine sales have dropped by 32% and butter sales have risen by 83%.