The Taste of Home website has produced a list of food products released the year you were born. I hate to check, because I’m getting to the age where the answer would be “cultivation of grain.”
But I’m also indifferent to the answer, just as I’m indifferent to birthday cards that detail all the things that happened the year you were born. None of that is familiar. Oh, Elvis stubbed his toe in Vegas when I was three hours old? I remember that! It was quite the formative event!
No. Your memories start later.
You remember a new snack cracker from age 10, at the earliest. Nowadays, with over 35,000 products on the shelf of an average supermarket, we see new products every time we go to the store. Back in the prior era, though, the announcement of a new snack food was like a revelation of a new planet.
For example: Bugles, released to a grateful public in 1966. Invented by a Minnesotan — Verne E. Weiss, from Plymouth — and made by General Mills, they were an immediate hit, because you could put them on your fingertips and pretend you had claws. Their bags call them “America’s #1 Finger Hat,” which really makes you want to know who’s in second place. Is this a fact? Do we have J.D. Powers and Associates data on this? Hmm?
Bugles were part of a massive ‘66 snack launch by General Mills: Buttons, which were suffused with cheddar cheese; popcorn-flavored Bows; Whistles, also dusted with cheddar-adjacent flavors; Pizza Spins, which tasted like licking the lid of a can of Chef Boyardee, and Burlap Rhomboids, which tasted like vinegar, woe and regret.
OK, I made up that last one. But you get the sense that they were full of enthusiasm for new ideas, and why not? We were going to the moon! Anything was possible! Fire up the IBM mainframes and let the electronic brains come up with new combinations!
They all failed, except for Bugles. They still can be found. The recipe has changed, and so there are, of course, Bugle Purists complaining online that New Bugles taste too salty, and Bugle Truthers who insist they’re full of seed oils and microplastics, and the conical shape is used to transmit 5G signals.