Food Products From Your Childhood

Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen Big League Chew in a while.

Or those dots of hard candy stuck on wax paper you’d find at flea markets (never did find out what those were called) and buy by the dozen for pocket change.

Hell, I haven’t seen a flea market in years either, come to think of it.

Fun-Dip. Flavored sugar with more sugar on top!

Good I’m glad I’m not hallucinating those! I remember that they were only around our house for a very short time.

Do kids still eat Fruit Rollups at all? That are, you know, made from fruit, instead of that weird Fruit-by-the-Foot stuff they’re trying to pass off?

/hijack Way better though is the homemade fruit rollups-- I had a Mennonite friend whose mother made apricots preserved in this fashion. Unbelievably tasty.

I always called them “those dots of hard candy stuck on wax paper.” Haven’t seen 'em since the '60s. No brand name, no label. I found them at the corner store when I was a kid along with all sorts of other junk like Turkish Taffy and Joyva.

Actually, Joyva was the best kosher candy ever. Mmm, chocolate raspberry agar-agar. I loved all the Jewish products marketed with Arabian chic. :wink: The coffee-swilling Arab figure on the Hills Bros. coffee can also looked like a mystical Sufi figure, contemplating arcana of the Cosmic Mug like the mythical Persian king Jamshid who saw the universe in his cup.

There was also Stupid bubble gum, with cards that showed monsters instead of baseball players. Gruesome slimy warty monsters with tentacles, buck teeth, and bloodshot eyeballs on eyestalks. Each monster was given a conventional name, like “Jerome” or “Inez.”

I’ve always heard the dots on paper called candy buttons.

I am now far too old to be able to eat Fun Dip. Bought some last summer, and it was too sweet for me to finish. Had to give it to my friend, who is five years younger and apparently still has some of her baby taste buds left. (I gave her the flavors I hadn’t tried yet.)

I wasn’t born until the 80s, and I’ve eaten those. I haven’t seen them since I was maybe 8 or 9 though.

Wheat Nuts. I found them again about a year or so ago. Now I buy them online!

Oh, another one: Bubble Tape. I got a hold of a watermelon/strawberry roll and drove my dad crazy with the smell. The smell lingered long after the gum was consumed. We’re talking years of fruity whiffs from random eddies in my room.

Bubble Tape is a regular staple at our local WalMart checkout lanes these days. My daughter and husband are crazy about those nastyass Twizzlers. The smell of the things makes me gag! The strawberry ones remind me of the smell of pickled beets.
Urgh.

I remember the robot container that contaianed chocolate syrup. I can’t verrify the name though.

Carnation Breakfast Bars! I think that’s it! (Although wasn’t *Instant * Breakfast the stuff you mixed in milk?) Damn I wish I had one of those. I suspect I’d find them disgusting now but it would bring back memories. (What a thing to have for your madeleine.)

Ah yes. Although I don’t remember them being on wax paper…just regular paper that wouldcome off with the candy. So you’d end up eating as much paper as candy.

On a similar note what about the wax bottles filled with sugar water. Which involved chewing a lot of wax to get to the sugar fix.

And of course in the catagory of candy we will never see again, candy cigarettes.

Candy Buttons (those dots of hard candy stuck on wax paper) are still around. My kids have gotten them at those “fill your own bag” type of candy stores, the kind of place where all the candy is $1.99 a pound or something and you just pick out whatever you want.

The Blackjack and Beechman’s gums are still around. There was another one, too, Teaberry. I loved Teaberry gum.

Jiffy-Pop popcorn. My mom would never buy that. She thought it would ruin her stove burners, I think. We used plain old popcorn and popped it in oil in a pot. I had to get My Jiffy-Pop fix at the neighbor’s house.

Anyone remember Danish Rounds? They were like Pop-Tarts, but oval, and shaped like a twisted danish. Same idea, though with a fruity filling and hard frosting on top.

You all do know about Hometownfavorites, right? Lots of this stuff may be available there.

Millbrook white bread, like Wonder Bread only better. It came in an orange and white bag and had some sort of tie-in with the Peanuts characters – I think the parent company was Dolly Madison. They would run promotions where a Peanuts sticker came in the bag. When I was very little, the sticker was just loose in the bag with the bread, so you would pull it out and there were always crumbs stuck along the edges.

Man, I loved that bread. We had an on-going issue in our house because I liked Millbrook and my brother liked Wonder, and my mother insisted they were exactly the same. THEY WERE NOT. Granted, they were both enriched white bread with little texture or taste, and chock full of preservatives, but they were NOT the same. Millbrook was far superior in many ways, including the ease with which you could squash your sandwich completely flat before you ate it.

Shake-me-Puddings – powdered pudding mix which you poured into a cup, added water, and shook it up. Five minutes later it set as a pudding. No refrigeration needed. Great stuff.
Bonomo Turkish Taffy – vanilla, chocolate, banana, and strawberry. If it was cool, you could “smack” it and it would shatter into convenient-sized pieces (they encouraged you to do this). If it was warm, though, it would remain a sticky, plastic , bendable solid, and it would tenaciously cling to everything, especially the aluminum foil wrapper. Nothing matches the rush of suddenly biting down on an unexpected bit of foil with your metal fillings. Not around any more, which is probably just as well, since I’m sure it would pull my fillings out.
Apricot Nectar – as a little kid, I was addicted to this fruit juice.

Most of the other stuff I liked has either been mentioned or, like Pixy Sticks, wax bottles filled with sugary liquid, or “button candy”, still exists.

Fairy bread :smiley:

Does anyone remember fairy bread?

My staples:

Shake-A-Puddin’

Gorilla Milk

Carnation Instant Breakfast (the chocolate milk type stuff)

TV Time Popcorn. Home popcorn that came in a pouch, one containe for the semi-solid oil, the other for the popcorn. If you cut off a corner, you could reduce the amount of salt by pouring it out. You squeezed the oil into the pot, heated it, added the popcorn, and viola.

**Milk Shake ** candy bars. A rip-off of Milky Way, with little or no caramel, but they were delicious if frozen.

Lick-M-Ade. Basically, sugared Kool-Ade powder.

Regal Crown Sour Fruits. Came in cherry, grape, lime, and (my favorite) lemon. British candy, quite tart and very good. Do not exist any more. :frowning:

Fruit Stripe Gum – Yipes Stripes!

Chocolate cigarettes. No longer made, for obvious reasons. The same with bubble gum cigars.

Fizzies – fruit flavored Alka Seltzer tablets. You ended up with a watery carbonated drink.

Corn Flakes and Strawberries – Cereal with freeze-drive strawberries. They were supposed to turn to real strawberries in milk, but were either soggy and mushy or (if they didn’t soak up the milk) sour strawberry chunks (I actually liked those). Kelloggs also sold Corn Flakes with blueberries and with bananas, which were vile.

Leiderkrantz Cheese – never really had it, but it’s notable in that, not only is it not made anymore, but it is impossible for it to ever be made again (it required a bacteria strain that was in the plant; when the plant was shut down, the strain was lost).

Fuzzy Peaches, but I suspect these are still around…

Otter Pops They were sort of like popsicles, only there was no stick. You sucked them right out of the plastic wrapper, and each flavor was named after a different otter whose picture was on the front of the wrapper. I remember “little orphan orange” and “alexander the grape”, but I don’t recall the others. Yumm, I loved me some otter pops.

Otter Pops!! I loved those. Sir Isaac Lime, Strawberry Shortkook, Pancho Punch and Louie Bloo Raspberry were the other ones.