Re: the fresh fruits/veggies - when I was in cub/boy scouts, one of the leaders ran a produce company. As a fund raiser, people could order all manner of fresh fruits and veggies he’d get wholesale, and we’d sell at some profit. It was a huge hit, mainly because the stuff just wasn’t available at such quality/freshness/variety in stores. Looking back at it, I bet it was just pedestrian stuff like fresh broccoli, or maybe berries out of season…
I grew up in the 50-60 on eastern Long Island. Yogurt came a bit later. As for cheese, it boiled down to cheddar, cream cheese, cottage cheese, parmesan (in a can) and American. No mozzarella, but we didn’t often have pizza (one place sold it, but it had a dodgy reputation). I didn’t like it because for me, pizza was from those horrible Chef Boy-ar-Dee kits.
Chinese food was Chun King, so I didn’t much care for it. Chinese takeout didn’t exist.
More recently, Seltzer had expanded rapidly in the past several years. Used to be, you’d be hard pressed to find it in a supermarket; now they have aisles of it.
When I was a yout Taco Bell seemed exotic. We went there for lunch in high school because they had…are you sitting down?..tacos.
mmm
Sometime in the late 80’s my Dad brought a bottle of oyster sauce home from the supermarket. There’s always been one in my refrigerator since.
When I was in high school in the late 60s, I went with some other girls to a conference in downtown Chicago. We stopped at a Jack-in-the-Box (not available in the suburbs) for a snack. They had something I had never even heard of before – tacos. The other girls thought I was nuts for ordering something so weird, but it was delicious.
Circa 1980 I brought a fruit salad to a family dinner. For color, I included kiwi. Several people asked me what it was, and I had to encourage them to try it.
I was a bit surprised, since I’d seen kiwis in magazines and they had been available in the local supermarket for some months by then.
I grew up in Buffalo and there were a couple Taco Bell-style places called Mighty Taco, but one day a hole in the wall joint opened selling fajitas. I think it was $2 for chicken, $3 for beef. No one had ever heard of these exotic things before. It got a glowing review in the Buffalo newspaper.
Now I live in LA and there’s a great hole in the wall joint on every corner.
I had never seen an artichoke or an avocado until I moved to California from Illinois in 1978. I’m not sure if they weren’t available in Illinois, or if I just never noticed them because my family never bought them.
I grew up in a small town and there where many foods I did not try 'till growing up.
I remember watching the Partridge Family and Keith talking about getting a taco at the taco stand. I did not know what a taco was but sure wanted to try it.
When our family visited Disneyland, we had an avocado for the first time we bought at a grocery store. We did not know what to do with it and just ate pieces of it plain, we were not very impressed.
A lot of US fast food places did not come to Canada for years, although we had seen them advertised. Carls Jr. is an example. Was not worth the hype. Starbucks is another example that did not impress as I thought it was supposed to have the best coffee everrrr.
I think it will have gone bad by now.
Growing up in a Midwestern WASP family, chili peppers and spices like hot sauce, garlic and curry were nonexistent. For religious reasons, coffee, tea, liquor and wine were also not present. Even soda was suspect as having devilish influences or too lacking in nutrition to be consumable.
I became acquainted with coffee, tea, liquor and wine when I came of sufficient age (or acquired an ID that said I was), but it was many years later, when I moved to California, that I learned about chili peppers and such, and I now love them to bits.
I never had a coke until I was about 12, and the first one (a puny 6.5 oz bottle) was so fizzy that I could not finish it.
Not quite what the OP mentioned, but I can remember the first McDonalds, first Burger King, and the first KFC ever within a 10 mile radius of my childhood house. All were considerable treats when they first showed up within driving distance.
Well, I can remember a world without frozen foods. The very first ones I recall were frozen orange juice just after the war (maybe '46 or '47) and then things like frozen beans and peas. I never saw an eggplant till I went to college in the mid 50s, nor had I ever had pizza. Chinese food was chow mein and chop suey. The first time I had a sea bass steamed with soy sauce it blew my mind, although, to be sure it is still a rare Chinese restaurant that serves it. Sushi (and any other Japanese food) was unimagined. The first time I had sushi was in Australia in 1984. Tropical fruit and anything but root veggies were unknown except in summer. There were hothouse tomatoes sold in cardboard boxes, but it was hard to tell the taste of tomatoes from that of the cardboard. On the other side I have not had since my grandmother stopped making it any gefilte fish worth eating.
Oh yeah! Coors had a reputation like some mystical unobtainable ambrosia when I was in college in Illinois. Very occasionally someone would somehow acquire some Coors, and judiciously distribute individual cans to his closest friends. I don’t think I actually tasted Coors until I moved to California after college. “Disappointed” is putting it mildly.
I moved to Florida When I was 11 (1979). Instead of drinking from the hose, the guys showed me, grab an orange off a tree, cut it in half, and get a big gulp of orange juice outa each half.:eek:
The best OJ ever, it was free and you could find it every 10 feet in any direction all over the neighborhood.
About 1971-72, we got the first taco place in Evansville Indiana… Taco Kid. If I remember correctly, tacos were 25 cents each. On Fridays, my mom would drive us across town and she’d buy a huge bag of tacos for dinner when my dad got off work. They seemed terribly exotic to me!
I was a sophomore in high school (76) - when I first had a taco…kind of. One of my friends was able to drive her mom’s car to school one day, so a bunch of us went to Taco John’s (I think it was TJ) during our lunch break. We had to drive to the other side of town. I had never had a taco and didn’t even know what was in one. They had been around for a while, but it was something my dad wouldn’t have eaten so that meant the whole family was out of luck! I remember being nervous when ordering because I had no idea what to get. The whole soft and hard shell thing confused me, so I ordered a taco burger, which was a taco on a bun instead of a shell. Seemed safest to me.
I wasn’t around when TV dinners first came out, but I do remember when they were first a Big Thing. I also remember when bottled water was first marketed and thinking what a stupid freaking idea that was. I also remember the first time people started eating Indian & Chinese food. That was the first time I liked vegetables that weren’t drenched in cheese sauce.
Wait, PapSett, you’re from Evansville??? I grew up there!
Like a fine wine, it gets better with time.
It’s basically like a copyright for plant varieties; nothing’s really going to stop you from growing some at home for your own use* (in theory you could be sued, but no-one’s going and checking Granny’s greenhouse), but commercial growers need to buy or otherwise acquire rights from the company that bred it, or who own the rights to the variety (rights can get traded). Otherwise there’s not a lot of incentive for commercial plant breeders to put effort into new varieties, they’d get one season then everyone else would have it.
*Actually, in this case I think it’s a hybrid, so planting the seeds wouldn’t get you the same plant anyway.
I have an 1970 Reader’s Digest book with recipes that spells it ‘yoghourt’, if you really want to wind up the Americans
I think it might have been a Northern/Southern thing, my Lancashire Dad had never tried it until after he met Mum, from Cheshire, but she was familiar with it as a kid. Dad had never tried a cheese that wasn’t Cheddar either.
The first time I tried sushi was in Australia in about 2004, it still hadn’t made it to where I grew up by then, though I’m sure it was widely available in larger UK cities by then.
I also remember trying pumpkin for the first time in my 20’s; as a kid in the '80s/early '90s, they just weren’t available locally, then we only got the carving ones in the shops. Mostly though, as my family grew a lot of our food and my Dad worked at the zoo where they got a lot of tropical fruit, we had a much better variety of fruit and vegetables than was generally available.
For non-UK persons wondering “how far apart are the northern county of Lancashire and southern county of Cheshire?” - they share a border.
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