1980s Food Fads That Should Stay In The Past

For better and for worse, a lot of what's a regular, everyday part of eating for millions of Americans was established in the 1980s. It was a time of great innovations in food science and food marketing, propelling changes in how and what people ate as well as an era in which slowly ingraining habits became fully entrenched. For example, it's when value meals became a fast food must have, new flavors and trends in snacks, booze, and mall food courts emerged, and it's also when families still gathered around the table to eat since-disappeared casseroles.

The 1980s was also such an aggressively optimistic brightly optimistic period, at least from the standpoint of Reagan-era politics, glamorous and superficial MTV-inspired pop culture, and the snazzy fashions of the era, that it encouraged much spending, trying new products, and unbridled consumerism. Fads came and went at such a rapid speed, with stuff suddenly becoming very cool and then very cold. That applies to food, too. Here's a look back at some of the fads and trends most associated with food in the 1980s — where they can mostly all safely remain because in retrospect, they are totally bogus and, like, not radical, dude.

In the United States in the 1980s, traditional fast food like burgers and fries remained extremely popular despite a push for healthier eating left over from the 1970s and millions committing to fitness plans like Jazzercise and Jane Fonda workout tapes. In 1981, the similarly conflicted Doug Sheley — he'd operated several Wendy's franchises and also owned a share in a gym — got in on both broad cultural trends by launching D'Lites of America. 

It looked like it sold typical fast food fare, but everything had reduced calories or healthier ingredients subbed in. Wheat buns were used instead of white ones, and lean beef and reduced-calorie mayonnaise, cheese, and dressings were utilized. D'Lites also offered baked potatoes and vegetarian sandwiches, and most locations had a salad bar. After D'Lites grew to 100 outlets, customers grew tired of the concept and patronized the restaurant less and less. The company ultimately went bankrupt.

Another '80s-era, across-the-board healthy fast food chain got its start in Oregon in 1981. Macheezmo Mouse sold a Mexican-inspired menu featuring chicken grown without preservatives, non-hydrogenated cooking oils, and low-cal, low-fat, and high fiber options. The company operated about two dozen restaurants on the West Coast, before their popularity dwindled and the whole thing went bankrupt in 2003.

When millions of households started adding microwave ovens to their kitchens in the 1980s, it seemed like a scientific miracle or a piece of magic, capable of preparing meals in a fraction of the time it would take via a conventional oven or rangetop. The food didn't always taste that great, but that was beside the point, because microwaves needed only speed and convenience to dazzle. Among the many specially formulated for microwave products released in the 1980s was Micro Magic. Created by french fry mass producer J.R. Simplot, the reason why Idaho is America's famous potato capital, the frozen-sold items made fast food even faster – fries and burgers came right out of the freezer and into the microwave for a couple of minutes.

Micro Magic completed the beloved fast food trifecta with chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and orange milkshakes. Confusingly, these were microwavable milkshakes. While it doesn't make a lot of sense why one would heat up a milkshake, they would because Micro Magic's were frozen solid; a minute or two of scientific heat made it soft, smooth, and drinkable. And like the other microwaveable foods of the era, they just didn't taste good enough to last long in the crowded grocery marketplace.

In the very late 1970s, major meat packer Esmark Inc. introduced convenience breakfast meats that led to major profits. Along with pre-cooked, heat-and-eat, Brown 'n Serve sausage, the company unveiled Sizzlean, which became a phenomenon throughout the health conscious 1980s. The overall health directives of the era had Americans trying to eat less meat and processed foods to ward off cancer and heart disease. Sizzlean Pork Breakfast Strips were purportedly the answer: It was a new kind of processed pork that packed fewer calories and less fat than bacon, a key player in the classic American breakfast.

Sizzlean succeeded due to some very tricky marketing and telling the public what it wanted to hear. Packages of the meat claimed that it was "50% leaner" than pork belly bacon, even though the bacon alternative was still 37% fat by weight. But by putting "lean" in the name of the product itself, its makers suggested that it was a largely fat-absent health food. To make up for less fat, Sizzlean contained more meaty pork, resulting in a tougher product more akin to jerky. Sales of Sizzlean tapered off in the 1990s, before it was taken out of production entirely by 2005.

The major soda manufacturers were very concerned with removing things from their product in the early 1980s: Diet Coke cut out the sugar entirely, 7-Up marketed a reduced-caffeine cola called Like, and Coca-Cola replaced the sugar with high fructose corn syrup. Retired Canada Dry bottler Joseph Rapp and his son, C.J., wanted to go back to the days of fully-loaded, pep-providing soft drinks, and in April 1986 they launched Jolt Cola in the Rochester, New York, area. Not only did one serving contain 42 grams of sugar, but it also packed in 5.9 milligrams of caffeine per ounce — just under the FDA's legal limit of six milligrams.

Within three months, Jolt was available in 20 states, and eventually nearly nationwide, and it sold very well. There was something very enticing and a little bit dangerous about a soda that had so much real sugar and an almost unlawful amount of caffeine. The Rapps' company sold $1 million worth of Jolt Cola in 1986, but due in part to consumer and parent groups' outcry about the adverse effects of such a drink on the nation's youth, sales fell by about half in 1987. Jolt would survive as a niche product, popular with college students and hardworking software engineers, taking up about 0.1% of the soda market. It was discontinued entirely in the late 2000s, but came back a few years later with stated warnings urging kids to stay away.

As wonderful as a fully-dressed cheeseburger can be, there's always the matter of maintaining the proper temperature and texture of its components. One would prefer that the beef patty and melted cheese stay warm, while the tomato slices and lettuce remain cool and crisp. McDonald's had all that in mind in the mid-1980s when it introduced the McD.L.T. The "L" and "T" stood for "lettuce" and "tomato," which sat atop half of a bun concealed in one half of a two-sided styrofoam container. In the other, adjacent compartment: the warm parts of the burger, the meat, bread, and second bun half. As the energetic TV commercials starring future "Seinfeld" star Jason Alexander pointed out, the hot side stayed hot, and the cool side stayed cool; it was up to the McDonald's customer to assemble the sandwich themselves just before eating.

Designed to compete with the nearly identical Whopper from Burger King, the McD.L.T. was a top-selling addition to the McDonald's menu, but the mega-chain still discontinued it in the early 1990s. The rise of the McD.L.T. coincided with the public turning against the widespread use of styrofoam, a material that took ages to degrade and leaked chemicals into the environment as it did. McDonald's phased out the use of styrofoam completely, thus killing the entire gimmick of the McD.L.T., sending it into the realm of discontinued McDonald's menu items that deserve a comeback.

While Lunch Bucket hit stores in 1987 with a vaguely unappetizing name borrowed from the old-fashioned metal lunch containers used by laborers, the product itself was cutting-edge, embracing the still new and novel microwave oven technology. Like a frozen dinner, the 15 initial varieties of Lunch Bucket — beef stew, lasagna, soups, and pastas — all arrived in an easily transportable, shelf-stable sealed cup that required no refrigeration. One simply heated up the contents of the Lunch Bucket inside that very vehicle in the work microwave. It might be ready in about a minute, thanks to the specially formulated and lined container laced with a heat conductive metal ring.

Lunch Bucket, marketed by a division of the soap company Dial, briefly became all the rage in brown-bagging it thanks in part to a memorable ad campaign that featured a crisp, curt, and droll British butler figure. It also inspired competitors in the pasta and soup businesses, like Chef Boyardee and Campbell's, to come up with their own version of Lunch Bucket utilizing the same microwaveable tech. That definitely didn't help business, and Lunch Bucket was discontinued after about five years.

In the 1980s, the media landscape was such that a widely syndicated newspaper columnist could single-handedly create a sensation. Since 1972, the A.J. Canfield Company of Chicago had made a sugar-free chocolate fudge-flavored soda. It sold moderately well in the Midwest, but then in 1985, Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene discovered that the two-calorie soda effectively killed his sweet tooth while he was dieting, and he wrote a piece about it. Greene compared the taste of Canfield's Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda to an ice cream sundae — a feeling enhanced by a recommendation to look at chocolate cake while sipping — and the cities where the column ran fell into a period that the Canfield company called "fudge fever" (via Mental Floss). Over the course of 1985, 200 million cans of Canfield's Diet Chocolate Fudge Soda were purchased and drank, primarily by those looking to cut calories and lose weight, persuaded by that other '80s sensation of fitness and getting in shape.

Canfield struggled to meet demand for its specialty product, and even keeping the factory open 20 hours a day, everyday, didn't produce enough soda, allowing other companies like Royal Crown, Famous Amos, and Yoo-Hoo to fill the void with their own carbonated chocolate sodas. Then came the backlash: People realized that the chocolate fudge soda, artificially sweetened and flavored, didn't really taste like chocolate, and they returned to the many other diet sodas available. 

Considering the flashy rollout and immediate failure of Coca-Cola's New Coke, the biggest mistake in soda history, and the brief fascination with diet chocolate pop, soda got a lot of people fired up in the 1980s. Celebrating and consuming sweetened and carbonated beverages extended into the candy aisle, too, when numerous famous name brand sodas presented themselves in a semi-solid form. While the really big brands like Coke and Pepsi battled it out for cola dominance, the second-tier brands tried to win over customers with brand extensions into the realm of chewing gum.

Royal Crown Cola, Dr Pepper, 7Up, and Cherry 7Up became the flavors and inspiration for gums. Not only did the main chewable part of each soft morsel that came five to a pack taste at least vaguely like one of those well-known sodas, but it also approximated the name on the label with a liquid center. Working one's way through the gum unleashed a wet, gloopy surprise of noncarbonated juice that tasted like concentrated soda syrup. The gum-meets-candy treats were polarizing, and that's not enough to sustain a fad for long.

Closely and forever associated with the 1980s: the rising social and economic class known at the time as young urban professionals, or "yuppies." Presented as proudly superficial, trend-chasing, free-spending city dwellers, yuppies were blamed for a lot of the glitz, class warfare, and passing nonsense associated with the Reagan era. Yuppies even influenced the food culture of the 1980s. Stylish, slim, and immediately interested in whatever happened to be coming out of Europe, yuppies embraced nouvelle cuisine: revamped versions of classic French food presented in ridiculously small portions by exclusive and very expensive restaurants in places like New York and Los Angeles.

Nouvelle cuisine became synonymous with '80s cuisine because it was so often featured in media of the era, and not in a flattering light. Those tiny portions weren't filling, and were much ado about nothing, proclaimed TV commercials for heartier food and in movies that satirized yuppie culture. By the time the '90s came around, those fad-obsessed yuppies and the ever-striving community of chefs had all moved on.

The market for sugar-laden and/or sugar-coated cereals has always been children. In the 1980s, cereal companies realized that they could make a fortune if they licensed the images of popular cartoon, movie, and toy characters for use as cereal inspiration and mascots. Thus, the decade became the heyday of IP-branded cereals, usually unexceptional endeavors made of sweetened corn meal (and tasting much like variations of Cap'n Crunch or Kix) used as part of the advertising and merchandise campaigns of whatever show, movie, or toy that someone was trying to get kids to check out.

In 1982, the card series, doll line, and cartoon "Strawberry Shortcake," in which the characters corresponded to different desserts, became a General Mills cereal, with Strawberry Shortcake, Orange Blossom, and Blueberry Muffin flavors. The biggest movie of 1982, "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," starred an alien who loved Reese's Pieces, and the chocolate-peanut profile inspired the flavor of General Mills' E.T. Cereal, which came in "E" and "T" shapes. Kid stuff is necessarily faddish, and those cereals came and went as consumers got tired of the pop culture phenomenon and the cereals. Other vintage, long-disappeared and discontinued cereals we'll likely never eat again: the "Star Wars"-adjacent C-3PO's and Smurfberry Crunch.

In the wake of multiple studies vaguely linking certain dietary components to heart disease, the USDA told Americans in 1980 to eschew fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. Rather than follow the simpler dietary guidance of early and later generations — to base one's diet around fresh produce and whole foods — American food packagers and consumers responded by buying up and eating most any well-marketed product that was created through modern technology that simulated other foods but that had the fat removed. Those products tended to be loaded with chemical compounds and added sugars, but they were perceived as healthy because they lacked fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

That conventional wisdom and customer demand led to a fundamental '80s-laden shift into how a lot of Americans bought, ate, and thought about food. In the 1980s and early 1990s, stores were beset by fat-free or reduced fat versions of stuff that didn't have a lot of fat, saturated fat, or cholesterol to begin with, like soup, deli meat, yogurt, and salad dressings. Perhaps most indicative of the trend was Lean Cuisine, the Nestlé-produced line of frozen meals that reduced fat, calories, and portions.

Popcorn was a commonplace treat consumed at movies, sporting events, and in the home for decades prior to the dawn of the 1980s, and it remains so more than 35 years after that decade ended. But in the '80s, it was briefly very cool to eat popcorn treated with an array of sauces and toppings and dyed various eye-catching colors that had been purchased from a kiosk or small store at that quintessentially '80s hangout spot, the shopping center, where it generated some favorite mall food memories.

Karmelkorn became a regular denizen of malls in the 1960s, situated in 270 shopping centers in 43 states by the 1980s, with popular flavors including cheese-dusted and caramel-coated. One of Karmelkorn's biggest rivals in the mall-space: Jack's Corn Crib. Co-owned by "The Odd Couple" star Jack Klugman, who consumed mass quantities of popcorn because it was a naturally low-fat and filling snack, dozens of malls featured one of the actor's emporiums that sold more than 20 flavors at a time, from the regular and familiar varieties to more adventurous stuff like watermelon. Lawsuits and bad deals led to the demise of Jack's Corn Crib in 1985 after three years in business. After closing its final retail shops, Karmelcorn became a mail-order popcorn business.