A non-American contribution to the thread:
Kinder Surprise (chocolate eggs). I bought one some weeks ago for the first time in many years, expecting to experience that flavor I remember so well… major, major disappointment. They taste identical to Kinder chocolate now, and they used to have their own unique flavor, which was far superior.
I used to enjoy the occasional Mcdonald’s milk shake, back when they used ice cream or ice milk. Nowadays, it’s all frozen yogurt, which tastes nasty and has just about as much sugar in it, if not more, than the milk shakes used to. Yogurt does not belong in shakes. Shakes are supposed to be a treat, not a regular thing.
Movie popcorn used to be popped and topped with tropical oils. Bad for the heart, but delicious in the mouth. Nowadays, it’s popped and topped with something that’s supposed to be heart healthier. My personal take on this is that it’s healthier because people won’t eat so much of it. The concession stand is NOT the place to look for healthy foods.
High fructose corn syrup. Ever since we started using this stuff instead of cane or even beet sugar, we’ve seen massive rises in obesity and diabetes. Is the HFCS itself causing this, or is it just because HFCS is put into foods that never had sweetening agents in it before?
And strawberries don’t seem to taste as good as they used to. And it seems to be a waste of money to buy watermelons any more, the flesh has the same texture, but there’s no flavor.
Milky Way bars were perfection itself. If I wanted chocolate and caramel, I’d buy a Twix bar!
Also, Odwalla orange juice used to be up there with fresh squeezed. Then someone got sick from it, salmonella if I recall correctly, and they started pasteurizing it, ruining the only thing I liked about the stuff. Sorry, but I think great-tasting orange juice is worth a couple fatalities a year. Who’s with me!?
I agree!
I remember strawberries used to come in the green paperboard buckets with a net over them. Now they are all in these plastic containers. You would think this should make no difference, but I think something coincidental about strawberry production happened that changed both. Strawberries (or any produce) aren’t grown for flavor, they are grown for shipping.
Only the very center of a watermelon tastes good now. 75 percent of the watermelon is too bland.
It has been years since I had one, but hasn’t Milky Way (as sold in the US) always had caramel? The caramel-free version is 3 Musketeers.
http://www2.kelloggs.com/ProductBrand.aspx?id=228
I guess they are still available. When did you last try them? They even look different - darker and dryer - than I remember.
Wikipedia tells me that the European version of the Milky Way doesn’t have caramel and is similar to 3 Musketeers.
It’s unclear from the article, but it sounds like caramel was always part of the American Milky Way…
My thought exactly.
I’ll add my Mom’s chocolate chip cookies. Not sure if its the Splenda or something else she substituted in the name of “better for you” but nowadays they come out tiny and rock hard. 
Totally. They gave away free fries for awhile, but they were not very good.
Nah. The tacos are the same as when I was growing up(25 years ago). In fact, they improved their menu in my book. They now offer the amazing Baja Gordita and the great Beefy 5-layer burrito.
However, the Mexican Pizza(I remember when it was the pizzaz pizza) has dropped some items. I believe it no longer automatically contains black olives. Is this right? I preferred the original version, anyway.
Years ago, I needed some frozen pie crust, because my pie crust making skills have never … um happened, or whatever
Oronoque Orchards were this little obscure brand – limited in distributions, often not in stock, with a little homemade-type storyline. And they were awesome, light flaky, they had a tough of honey in their ingredients. They did cool stuff too, like when you bought a 2 pie crust pack, there was a little round of “extra” pie crust without a pan, that you could use to cut into strips as a topcrust, or decorations or whatever.
Years later, I noticed, there’s nothing special about their crusts. They’ve gone mainstream, and the taste is bland. I thought maybe the touch of honey was gone, but probably, based on how this thread has gone, they’ve gone with “healthier” fats = less tasty.
OK, here’s my question. I really liked Pomi Pomegranate Juice when it first came out, but a couple of years later, it’s bland, it’s gotten too tart, or not as flavorful. Again, same story, when new and obscure = yummy, when it goes mainstram = blah. I really liked Odwalla’s Mango Tango smoothies, a couplea years ago, they were fresh clean creamy mango flavored smoothies. Now, they seem to be lacking in flavor – same ingredients in the list, but somehow, less sweet, weaker flavor, acidity balance seems wrong. I gotta ask the SDMB, what causes this – a reblending that is necessary because suppliers jack up prices, or what?
Thank-you thank-you! People don’t even believe me when I tell them about the old bars, they claim they were always with caramel. Yuck.
Someday, I’m going to give someone a copy of 1984 with warm caramel mashed up between the pages.
Anything artifically sweetened with anything but saccharine. I grew up drinking saccharine. If I wanted a sweetner that tasted like sugar, I would use sugar.
To this day, I have to have saccharine in tea. Otherwise, it do not taste right.
Chocolate Teddy Grahams. A few years ago they went all whole-grain on me and I’ve since been able to limit myself to just one box per week.
Whole wheat spaghetti. Tastes grainy.
[QUOTE=Mahaloth]
Nah. The tacos are the same as when I was growing up(25 years ago). In fact, they improved their menu in my book. They now offer the amazing Baja Gordita and the great Beefy 5-layer burrito.
[/QUOTE]
Perhaps it’s different where you are, or perhaps it’s that I ate Taco Bell stuff much longer ago than 25 years, but when I was a kid or in college they made tacos using ground beef instead of meat mush, and their menu was pretty basic…they had tacos (you could buy them by the dozen), burritos, re-fried beans (sort of) and…tacos. That was about it. No nachos, no Baja Gordita or 5-layer burritos, no Mexican pizza…tacos. Burritos. Re-fried beans (such as they were).
And while I won’t say they were great Mexican food (they weren’t), they were decent fast food that was sort of Mexican like. Today, I can hardly stomach the stuff and rarely eat at Taco Bell unless there aren’t any other choices.
-XT
Kraft BBQ Sauce. One of my favorite meals as a kid was baked BBQ chicken with Kraft sauce. When I started living on my own, i figured out how to make it myself (i know i know, it’s terribly simple), and it was delicious. And then they changed the sauce…it is not good anymore
Speaking of 3 Musketeers, that used to be my favorite candy bar until in the late 80’s they switched from regular nougat to chocolate nougat as the filling.
Milky Way was, until about a decade ago, chocolate and nougat (less fluffy than Three Musketeers) with just a drizzle of caramel along the top.