'80s Pop Culture In A Fork: My Awesome '80s Diet

Feeling a little on the weak side tonight, so I'll tackle a light topic: Food in the '80s.

Unlike most aspects of '80s living, the food trends of the '80s did hit me right at home. Which meant I spent a lot of time noshing on healthier fare and being aware of diets. It also meant eating that was at the time thought to be attuned to my mother's diabetes. Using margarine instead of butter, drinking diet sodas and sugar-free Kool Aid, having sugar-free Jell-O and Cool-Whip for dessert -- all of that mingled both with the diet-crazed '80s and my mother's doctors' admonitions to follow a healthier diet. Other food trends also made their way into my family's regular food eating. Hamburger Helper, which debuted in the '70s and was many an '80s working woman's savior, was a regular feature for dinner and a cause for celebration for little girl me. Always served with an iceberg lettuce and tomato salad (thousand island and Catalina dressings both available), Hamburger Helper always felt like some reward or special treat and still tastes (to me) like home. (My favorite flavor was always beef stroganoff.)

But back to the sodas -- the first soda I ever drank was TaB Cola. Once the target of ridicule for its distinctive saccarhine taste and even temporarily taken off the shelves when the "saccharine as possible carcinogen" scare was going on, TaB is a sort of acquired taste. You take the first couple of sips of the soda and can't believe anything could taste that bitter or artificial, but then you drink some more and it starts to taste pretty good. Almost fruity, even. By the time you've finished off a can, you can't wait to get into the next one. And that's how it starts. For me, that taste is the taste of my lost childhood, especially since so few retailers these days actually stock it still. I may have moved on to Diet Coke and other diet sodas, but TaB will always be that first soda for me. One look at that ubiquitous pink can and it's instant flashback time to a time when I would come home in my Catholic school girl uniform, peel off my sweater and skirt, take my penny loafers off, walk around in my school shirt and the shorts I wore under the skirt, grab a TaB from the fridge, and sip away as my parents started on dinner.

This is not to say that my childhood was sugar-free. Oh no. I too enjoyed cookies and pie and cake and ice cream. It's just -- I remember them being more "occasional" foods, goodies eaten during special occasions or every once in awhile. And I don't remember seeing them all that often around the house. Usually when I would eat cookies they were store-bought. Same with pies, though at least you had to bake them at home (oh Mrs. Smith's, where would my childhood be without you?). Cake came from a mix. And ice cream was a rare treat indeed, usually reserved for the once-monthly trips to McDonald's where, if I was good, I would get a small strawberry sundae or maybe even a cone. Usually what constituted as "ice cream" around the house was actually sherbet, predominantly the peach or pineapple flavors. Sherbet, touted in Mom's diet books as being a healthier alternative to ice cream, is now something I don't really crave, having converted to the dark side of ultra-creamy ice cream.

Not all of my old food biases from the '80s have been converted. For example, I still can only stand just a little bit of butter in my food. I still feel strongly that the taste of margarine is actually a "buttery" taste and cannot comprehend anti-margarine bias. I don't really know what cake made from scratch tastes like and don't have that curiosity thanks to Betty Crocker. My blood runs cold whenever anyone laughs at the concept of Hamburger Helper or TV dinners or anything else that was meant to be a quick fix and eat type dinner concept. I'll only drink regular sodas if I'm having to work a graveyard shift (so I can stay awake better) and can't fathom drinking those all the time, I in fact find a lot of things "too sweet", and I wonder how certain families could afford having a parent stay at home long enough to fix a fully home-prepared and -cooked dinner every night and secretly wonder if those "like Mom/Grandma used to make" families have been solidly middle class for generations.

I guess that's what my '80s really boils down to as far as food goes. See, I was still living in a solidly blue-collar, lower middle class socioeconomic ring during that decade, and I know for a fact both my parents worked outside the home on a full-time basis because they couldn't afford to do otherwise. By the early '90s, which is when my parents moved up in their respective jobs (my mom with the most impressive leap, comparatively), we were finally able to work towards entering the regular middle class and that's when we started broadening our food horizons. But a lot of the "from scratch" food nostalgia that gets propagated by the food-oriented mass media comes from a background of generations of solidly middle class families, whose female members were historically able to make the time and effort to making things such as pie crusts and homemade cookies and who passed that down to the proceeding generation. The '80s was one historic moment when all of that really didn't make that much of a difference because everyone was busy and convenience (and affordability) reigned. But by the time the true cultural '90s rolled around and people started murmuring about going back to their "food roots", the fissures in the pavement started to show and it became more obvious who was working hard in the '80s because they wanted to, and who was working hard because they HAD to.

So I will continue to enjoy Cool Whip (that's another thing -- I've never had "fresh sweet whipped cream" before) and sugar-free Jell-O. I will continue to insist on buying pre-made pot pies and cookie dough to bake up in the oven and ooh and aah at the results. I will drink my TaB and eat oat- and fiber-rich cereals and find no difference in the pleasure values between those and the sugary "kid" cereals that cost just as much. I will not have bread snobbery except for the recent development of my preferring whole wheat bread to regular white. I will enjoy iceberg lettuce and tell everyone about that. I will refuse to stop feeling more comfortable with the taste of margarine than I am with the taste of butter. And I will eat premium ice cream with the knowledge that my dessert is a luxury, not a necessity, and that I would've never gotten to eat that when my age was in the single digits.

(Wow, two serious posts in a row. I must be going for some record here.)