The Most Peculiar Food Trends From The Decade You Were Born

Trends, by definition, come and go, and they affect every aspect of our lives, from our hairstyles to the way we decorate our living rooms. But just like perms and mullets, there are certain trends from the food world that we'd rather forget about completely.

The Most Peculiar Food Trends From the Decade You Were Born Gallery

You could argue that we're currently living in a golden age of food trends. Thanks to the internet, a bagel shop in Brooklyn can start selling a rainbow-colored bagel one day, and two weeks later imitators will have popped up across the country; a month later, rainbow-colored everything will be trendy. And don't even get us started on pumpkin spice.

Food trends in decades past might have been a little more subtle, and they might have taken a while to fully catch on, but they were definitely there, and definitely prominent. Some of them were also patently absurd. For all the ones that were actually good ideas that have stood the test of time, like brunch in the 1970s, there was also no shortage of absolute clunkers, like Jell-O molds, whose popularity defies explanation.

The food trends of the past 10 decades are actually really good reflections of the culture at large and the headspace we all were in as Americans. When times were good, excess and invention ruled the day; when times were rough, everyone had to tighten their belts. And when the times included hordes of hippies, everyone started eating granola. Read on to learn about the strangest food trends in every decade from the 1910s onward.