Brands and products you miss, that went out of business or changed

[frazzled]

34. Just like the auto industry, these food industries failed to keep up with modern times

I ate some of this crap when I was a kid, in the 1950s and maybe up to 1967 or so. But honestly, America's eating habits have changed radically over the past 30 years or so. And not just because of the health consciousness and improved taste for fresh and chemical-free, nonprocessed foods that has developed in the US. But also because of the "changing demographics" of the country we have been talking about for the last week or two.

There's an entire new generation of immigrants who never encountered this food and have grown up on their various ethnic cuisines, in addition to modern American cooking of the healthier variety that has arisen over the past decades. I remember a Vietnamese girl I was tutoring to pass the state graduation exam (she'd failed it twice). I thought we'd made a significant enough amount of progress over the year that she might finally pass it. And then the teacher handed us a sample reading passage from the previous year to use as a practice test. It was a newspaper editorial about "Lo-Fat Twinkies." She didn't have a frigging clue what these were, and both she and I became immediately dejected about her prospects for passing, given the outdated, culture-specific bias of the sample.

Wake up prepared food industries, before you die out altogether, like the automobile industry nearly did before until, on its deathbed, it realized it had to produce more fuel-efficient, better designed cars.