There have been a lot of different ideas for food or menu items over the years. Some of them look a little… weird. So let’s talk about generations of weirdly coloured food!
BOOMERS
One food that stuck around for a long time was red pistachios. These died tree nuts stuck around from the 30s through the 70s,
Roast pork, or meat in general in aspic. Every photo I see is this weird orange colour.
GEN X
Watergate salad. Bright. Green. It had pineapple, pistachio pudding and whipped cream. I know salad is supposed to be green but THAT green?
Meatballs and Grape Jelly. Maybe my family put a bit too much jelly on this.
MILLENIALS
Ghost buster themed food. All ecto plasm green or, I think, sometimes orange?
Maybe it was just me weirded out by this one, but the Tri-Coloured noodle salad. I always expected the green or red noodles to taste different and was always mildly disappointed when they didn’t.
GENERATION Z.
The purple ketchup. Heinz also released green and blue ketchup. I think the green one was a Shrek-related food which was EVERYWHERE in the early 2000s, kinda like how Ghostbusters was in the 80s and 90s.
For a while everyone was putting black charcoal powder in their drinks around Halloween. It looked so cool, but could definitely mess with you if you were on any kind of medication.
GENERAL
Trix Yogurt was released back in 1992 and had some pretty neon colours. Blue, pink, yellow, even green! It was discontinued in the early 2000s, but I have heard that it came back? Maybe I’ll actually have the chance to try this wild-looking treat?!?
One I’ve seen some folks have fun with on social media is rainbow bread. Use a combo of food colouring and different ingredients like tumeric for yellow, matcha for green, and cocoa powder for a dark brown-black colour. Could literally get a whole rainbow.
Red velvet cake originally was made in the early 1900s, and I’d argue it’s one of the older “weird coloured food.” Apparently in early recipes it was cocoa and buttermilk that gave off the red colour, when later on people would add things like beetroot to give this chocolate cake its signature red hue.
What weird-coloured food do you remember eating when growing up?
- Tie-Dye Tam
