The party was officially over when the aluminum trays went south IMO :sob
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When I was a tot, I was all about the little dessert that baked in the TV dinner tray. The very idea that I could have my very own, individual meal wowed me.
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The vessel change (away from aluminum foil) with the advent of microwave ovens. With that significant some engineering re-configuration of the recipes had to be considered with the new method of cooking and no doubt changed the taste.
I do agree with much that which has been mentioned above…and yes my “tastes” have changed…with respect to everything…but going back and really giving thought to all that has been said makes me feel not so old, crazy and feeble anymore Everything changes; we change!
MY POINT: Dr. Brown’s Cream soda…It is not the same…I guess he has become a specialist and thus raised his prices!
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Loved the turkey and the fried chicken. Did no eat veges as a kid though!
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Based on the decline in the ones I used to actually like, I’ve been too afraid to even try the ones I used to put in the “acceptable for certain uses” category…
I still “actually like” some canned soups, despite their uniformly excessive saltiness (like Progresso Beef Barley and their regular Lentil) and find quite a few others acceptable (at least at sale prices), but I gave up on the condensed Campbell’s entirely quite a while ago…
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Is Tab still available? I hope not.
God, was that stuff awful… I remember being horrified to discover that it still existed (theretofore unbeknownst to me) even in the early 80s… but at this point I think I’d instantly repress the memory even if I did see it.
Not that any diet “cola” is much better, but the couple of times I tasted Tab, it had the nastiest chemical tang I’d ever experienced (and not much other flavor at all), and that’s saying something, considering that as a little kid I used to like sucking on saccharine tablets straight up… (I can still remember a “conversation” I had with my (concerned) father about when I was about 5 1/2, and explaining that I understood that it wasn’t a good idea to to do it too often even though it didn’t “rot your teeth”, and that I didn’t “like” the flavor the way I liked candy or other “treats”, but that I thought it was “interesting” in a strange/curious sort of way… LOL)
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So in one of The Best Movies of All Time, (Adventures in Babysitting) there’s a conversation where they are brainstorming what to do about one horrendous women and the suggestion was “let’s spike her Tab with Draino!”, in retrospect i think that’s because she wouldn’t even notice it!
I tried the stuff once or twice, but my mom was/is a classic coke person when she does drink soda and my dad doesn’t like soda so we never had it around yet i remember seeing it in soda vending machines and stores…
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Mine never seemed to be cooked properly, I remember the desserts always being on the cold to lukewarm … I’m wondering if A I tore into them before everything was ready, or B maybe an issue when they started with that plastic nonsense!
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Featuring small parts by Vincent D’onofrio & Albert King. Great flic.
LIke all diet sodas it tasted much better when it had cyclamate. I’m not a diet soda person so I don’t care, but you must know that there’s a cult around Tab. The Sarah Silverman show did a whole (very funny) episode about it:
http://ilovetab.com/the-sarah-silverman-program-an-episode-devoted-to-tab/
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Like all diet sodas it tasted much better when it had cyclamate.
Interesting. I knew cyclamate existed, but for the most part, no one in my family consumed much in the way of artificial sweeteners and personally, I’ve shunned them like The Plague they are ever since I started feeding myself (one way and another). If I ever tasted it at all (in early childhood), I have no memory of it…
I’m not a diet soda person so I don’t care, but you must know that there’s a cult around Tab. The Sarah Silverman show did a whole (very funny) episode about it
Actually, no. I missed that (that there was a Cult of Tab, though these days there seem to be cults to every pop “culture” phenomenon ever created, somewhere…), and I may have seen it, but I don’t remember the Sarah Silverman episode either, I’ll have to check Youtube for a clip…
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Do Flinestone chewable vitamins count? 
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I linked to it in my post, also to a website devoted to the Cult of Tab.
Apparently, sucking on my thumb doesn’t taste the same as when I was a baby. It was the greatest appetizer and dessert (at the same time), but now… they just don’t make thumbs as good as they used to be. The quality went down a lot. Now, it is probably most boring and disgusting food.
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Low in calories and easy to take when you are on the go!
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How about fig newtons? They seemed much better when I was a kid and they were moister I believe.
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Yes…Phreddy Flinstone was one of my favorite guys!
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D’uh…<rme, sigh> I saw (and looked at) the page linked above the pic in your post, but managed not to hover over it (to see the play button) and thought it was just a still…
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Every once in a great while my brother and I could get my mother to “let us” get TV Dinners™. But even then, we thought they were horrible… The real draw was that she’d also let us eat watch TV while we ate them…
(That and avoiding post-dinner dishwashing and -drying, which was generally our chore… )
And for all that so many packaged and convenience foods have gone way down hill (or fallen off the cliff completely), I will say that frozen prepared food has come a long way since the 70s and even 80s… Some of it is probably the host of curiously-modified starches and gums that freeze better than their “natural” counterparts, but I suspect a lot of it has to do with improvements in packaging and distribution, and I also think reheating them (or most of them) is one of the few things microwaves actually better than conventional heat sources…
