It was a grand day when the marketers brought out the Peanut Butter & Mayonnaise flavor combination (to be served with pickles, bacon, hard-boiled egg slices, canned pineapple slices, etc.)
It had taken them long enough.
When my Grandmama would make you a bologna with mayo/Miracle Whip sandwhich she would first spread thick globs of butter on the bread before applying the mayo. I like butter, I like MW. But there is something about those two together that was gross. Maybe it was the mouthfeel.
I can confirm that #1 is correct. I actually spoke to the inventor of the new machinery that could separate the arils from the rind on the phone one time. I assume #3 is too just from observation. (I don’t know anything about #2)
I guess this is related, but I’ve always wondered why with all the foodie exotic adventurous eaters out there, there’s not more of a push to discover foods that have never been eaten. We have the technology to screen out the poisonous stuff. We could search the jungles and oceans for stuff that’s never been tried before. Why haven’t we? I can’t be the only one who’d be interested in something like that.
Bought some Klarbrunn sparkling water today. Two 12 packs for $5 bucks. One flavor is blueberry-passion fruit, the other is cranberry-grape. All 4 of those flavors have always existed, yet it took until now for a product to feature them.
The blueberry-passion fruit is pretty good. Haven’t tried the cranberry-grape yet.
Slightly redundant, but:
With a few exceptions, the whole concept of packaged, processed food that could have “flavors” of any sort was new in the 20th century. The entire infrastructure was built up slowly, as were people’s palates. I grew up in the 1970s, when fondue was an adventurous new fad, Julia Child was a cutting-edge chef (do you know what an omelette is, children?), and Red Lobster was a fancy night out. We had the most stereotypical American food for dinner every night: meatloaf, baked chicken, fish sticks, etc. All beer tasted alike, and all coffee tasted alike. What we would today call foodie culture was just getting started in the 1980s.
Further, as the 20th century progressed, people had more money and more leisure time. People finally had the wherewithal to experiment with niche foods and beverages.
TL;DR: Foodie Rome wasn’t built in a day.
(Bolding mine)
Ocean Spray Cran-Grape has been around since the 1960s.
It doesn’t go quite that far back ,but the Brian Regan skit from at least ten years ago features the cranberry salesman and how cranberries are in everything (the upload is from 2010, but there’s another one from 2007 with the same skit).
But, yeah, I remember cran-grape from my childhood in the 80s.
Just as with pomegranate, it’s not that there haven’t been foods flavored with what we now call “pumpkin spice”, which is merely a variant of a very common pie-spice blend containing cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, etc.
It’s just the name “pumpkin spice” and the fad of adding it to all sort of non-pumpkin-pie foodstuffs that’s new.
Blueberry and passion fruit is not a new combination either as far as dessert cookbooks go.
I think what may be throwing you is
(1) perhaps you don’t do much in the way of recipe browsing and are therefore unaware how well-known many of these flavor combinations are as recipe ingredients rather than as individual product “flavors”; and
(2) you’re reacting to the comparatively recent manufacturers’ marketing technique of “horizontal line extension”, where a brand can stake out a bigger percentage of supermarket shelves (and keep attracting curious consumers) by producing more varieties of the same basic product.
Yes, when I was a kid we added, say, lime to cola flavor by taking a wedge of lime and squeezing it into our glass of cola. Now there’s Pepsi Lime (and the former Pepsi Limón in Mexico) and Coca-Cola with Lime and Diet Coke Lime and so on and so forth (not all of those are still on the market).
It’s not really about coming up with new flavor combinations so much as it’s about coming up with another variety of your basic product.
Personally, I’d like to see LAY’S® retire its tired Sour Cream & Onion Chips and introduce Blue-Ringed Octopus & Hemlock Chips. “You Can’t Just Eat One, But if You Eat More, You’re Done.”
I have no idea why feijoas haven’t really made it internationally, I’m pretty sure they’re my favourite fruit, and they’re almost totally unavailable in the UK.
I’ve found them once, imported from Spain, iirc, and I’ve bought plants in the desperate hope I can grow my own. I wish some marketing company would take 'em up.
It’s a tropical fruit so I doubt you’ll be able to grow it outside to fruit-bearing point. Mostly grown in Brazil and northern Argentina. From what I read, it can withstand British winters but needs to be potted (I know I’ve heard that of other tropicals but don’t know what’s the reason).
In Spanish it’s called guayaba de Brasil; they may be mismarketed as regular guavas. If you got it from a Spanish grower it had to be from the Plastic Sea.
Nope, it can be grown outside, in the ground, in the UK. It’s not that reliable fruiting here, due to early/late frosts. The plant itself is pretty tolerant of below freezing temperatures, I’ve had them growing outside myself for 3 years, but the flowers and fruit get damaged by frost, and the fruit are quite slow to develop. I did get flowers from one of mine last year, (they’re young plants) but they need to be cross pollinated, and the other one didn’t flower yet, so no fruit.
It needs pretty similar conditions to kiwis, really; in fact, they took far less damage from this spring’s late frost than the kiwifruit did.
The place I got them from is a little hippy show that does occasional weird and specialist imports, all certified organic, and they said they couldn’t get 'em again when I asked, so maybe some very small grower.