Coffee Time Blog 10 | Food of the 70s

Good morning! It’s 7:00 a.m. on Thursday, October 30th, 2025. It’s wet and slightly warm outside and it’s coffee time.

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It seems I’ve been quite nostalgic lately. This morning around 6:30 AM, when I was walking Sascha on her short trip for a pee, I noticed a school bus picking up children in my neighborhood. I thought, “What? That’s very early for picking children up!” 

It got me thinking about me getting up and going to school in the ’70s—which were the heart of my school years. My mom would get up, and for some odd reason, especially in high school and middle school, she would often make me a grilled cheese for breakfast. That was cool; I loved it and didn’t mind. It was quick and easy for her, and she could, I guess, go back to bed or get her day started.

But I thought about it in general as I walked Sascha—all the different ’70s foods I experienced, especially how they’ve even changed today. Here’s a good example: for breakfast back in the ’70s, TV commercials on Saturday mornings were big on Tang orange drink (with Vitamin C Of course) and cereals were pretty much like they are now. We had Sugar Crisp (they changed their name, I think in the ’80s or something, to Super Golden Crisp because people were starting to turn away from sugar and they thought, “Oh, we’re losing money!”). I digress…again!  We had Lucky Charms (they kept adding a charm), Cocoa Puffs (hasn’t changed, it seems), Frosted Flakes (hasn’t changed), and Captain Crunch (hasn’t changed). But as much as kids loved the flavor of Captain Crunch, I know I didn’t like it because it would always cut the roof of my mouth. Don’t forget Nestle’s Quik – which I think has changed somewhat.

Tang was really big because the astronauts supposedly took this powdered orange drink to the moon with them or something. And in the third grade, there was this thing in the morning where all the kids went and got orange juice at the cafeteria and then went back to class, which was kind of weird. Can you imagine that happening nowadays? Parents would freak out, riot! My mom was like, “Oh, that’s fine; just another thing I don’t have to buy.”

Then there was lunch. At least for me, in the summertime or when I wasn’t going to school, or on the weekends, or whenever, lunch was considered the second meal of the day. I remember things like Spaghetti-Os (they haven’t changed) and Chef Boyardee Ravioli (which hasn’t changed), but I didn’t have that much. If you had Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, you would have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with it. If you had Campbell’s Tomato Soup, you would usually have grilled cheese, amazingly. milk to drink, usually for breakfast, and chocolate milk—my dad never got it because it never lasted more than a day. There were a lot of things that my dad asked my mom not to buy.

A typical man-of-the-house for the time, my dad would be against anything that would be eaten instead of nutritious food every day. For example, my mom wouldn’t get a package of cookies or anything like that because, according to my dad, that’s all I would eat. Then there were the “luxury foods.” We rarely got things like the Chef Boyardee ravioli, and Spaghetti-Os…and this isn’t because of the ’70s; it’s because my parents were kids in the Great Depression, and they kind of carried that with them, as I said in a post before.

Dinner in my house was usually when my dad came home around 5:30 PM or something. He had the same job mostly throughout the ’70s. My mom would make typical Southern stuff. Some nights we would have fried chicken with rice and gravy and green peas—that was always a go-to. And then Mondays, a lot of times, we’d have leftover Sunday pot roast if it wasn’t used for sandwiches on Monday. My mom would also make things like SOS, which is, you may know, “shit on the shingles,” because it reminded my dad of being in the Army, and basically, it was flour, salt, and pepper, and Armor dried beef, which can still be found in the canned meat section of the grocery store. It’s rather expensive nowadays, but it wasn’t back then. Another thing she would make was her version of chop suey, which consisted of ground beef and soy sauce (often a little too much soy sauce, sorry mom!), canned bean sprouts, and ground beef which was all mixed together. So yeah, there was that one, and then, as time went by, it would change here and there when the seasons did.

So…

Now, if you want to know what the ’70s tasted like, I recommend the following products:

1. Find, if you can (it’s usually kind of hard to find it at Kroger), the Kraft spaghetti in a box. You know you’ve got the right thing when it’s got spaghetti in it, a little thing of Parmesan cheese that comes with it, and a little seasoning packet that comes with it. All you have to do is add tomato paste and, I think, one can of tomato paste’s worth of water (in other words, use that as a measurement).
2. Another oldie but goodie is Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, which hasn’t changed much at all.
3. Pretty much anything that’s a Banquet TV dinner or frozen pot pies—that is very ’70s and ’60s. 
4. The fourth thing that I would suggest is Moon Pies. They’re hard to find, especially since they’re a Southern thing, try to get some of those.
5. Drinking RC Cola or Fresca, or Tab if you can find it. Orange Crush was reformulated. Oh! And there was Sanka decaf instant coffee, my parents drank that. Why? I don’t know, I just don’t.
6.  But as a kid, one of my favorites has totally got to be the MoonPie and the Yoo-hoo.
7. Let’s see what else… peanut butter and saltine crackers, even though those may have changed because of the sodium stuff. But it seems everybody got more heart health-conscious between the ’80s and now, especially like with eggs and salt and stuff.

So that’ll get you started. A lot of the other products have changed. For example, anytime you see a product that was around in the ’70s, like let’s say, for example, Tide laundry soap, which has been “new and improved” so many times that there is no way to go back to the ’70s and tell you what the “old Tide” was like. It’s been approved so many times; it’s perfect now!

Challenge time! – Go look for this unhealthy stuff!. Make it an adventure and have a ’70s meal night with your family, which would really be cool. Get everybody a TV dinner with Kool- Aid and sit there and watch TV Land. Oh my goodness, I’m laughing right now.

So there you have it: ’70s food. Why did I think about that when I saw kids having to get on the school bus at 6:30 in the morning? Pop-Tarts, probably, the totally portable breakfast if one is late for the bus.

Anyway, that’s this morning’s Coffee Time. Be good to each other, accept each other as best as you can. I love you guys and have a great Thursday out there, or whatever day you might be reading this. Peace and love.

PS Folger’s Drip with a shot of Bustelo. Not Sanka, hell no not Sanka

Mark