Your experience with food is probably shaped by many factors: your genetics, heritage, geography, upbringing—it’s really a complex concept when you start breaking it down. “The top thing that influences taste is your cultural background,” said Dan Schmitz, then-director of Global Product Development at Abbott, in 2018. “And specifically, what cooking you grew up with.” But according to some people, there’s also a kind of randomness to the foods we consume—and the ones that seem to disappear.
Have you ever felt like a meal has shrunk in popularity, seemingly banished from everyday society? If you consult online forums, a lot of people appear to be having that experience. Perhaps they’re just nostalgic for the foods of their youth. Maybe they’ve just moved to an area of their country—or even another country—where the meal in question isn’t as popular. But many Gen Xers and Boomers seem convinced that certain dishes have gone extinct.
Foods people don’t seem to make anymore
Just consult the /AskOldPeople Subreddit, specifically the thread “What’s a food people don’t make anymore?” The OP, a 57-year-old, wrote, “The other day I was thinking, [‘W]hen was the last time I had Salisbury steak? [H]as to be the early ’80s.” Right away, a handful of people pushed back on that idea, with one saying they make it “a lot” and another calling it a “rotation dinner” in their house.
The cultural aspect also quickly came into play. One “60-something” Redditor answered with “goulash,” earning a pile of upvotes. But the first responder asked for clarification: “American or Hungarian? Two very different dishes.” (People on this thread have a lot of strong opinions about goulash, including the variants, it turns out.)
The Ultimate: Jell-O salad
Several foods received a ton of votes: ambrosia, aspic, chicken à la king, “tuna noodle casserole with canned soup.” But the thread’s top response is, by far, “Jell-o salads of every kind.” “My grandmother used to make a jello salad with cherries(?),” one user wrote. “On a bed of lettuce and topped with a dollop of mayo. Peak 70’s, and I remember it being a part of the Christmas spread well into the early 90’s.”
In 2023, Sarah Grey wrote vividly about the rise and fall of Jell-O salad for the food site Serious Eats. “While Jell-O products are still very popular as snacks and desserts, the Jell-O salad—particularly in its savory forms—had fallen from culinary favor by the early 1980s,” Grey noted. “Though you’ll still find it in church basements across America, today you’re just as likely to see Jell-O salads on blogs like the Gallery of Regrettable Food. What makes the Jell-O salad such an icon of its time? Shaped by the rise of home economics, the industrialization of the food system, World War II, and changing expectations about women’s labor, few foods can tell us more about life in 20th-century America than the wobbling jewel of domestic achievement: the Jell-O salad.”
While some may not not be familiar with the dish, it seems to have a divisive reputation among those who are. In a 2025 essay for Delish, Taylor Ann Spencer defended the Jell-O salad as a staple of the Midwestern U.S. “[I]n communities where bringing a dish to a potluck or community event at least once a month is the norm, Jell-O salad is an absolute lifesaver,” they wrote. “Made with relatively few ingredients (many of which are store-bought), it can be mixed and chilled in the same bowl it’s served in. Few dishes? Check. Easy to make and transport? Check. It’s no wonder there are at least two or three bowls of the stuff at every potluck.”
It’s difficult to fully understand broad cultural shifts in food taste, but it’s interesting to consult the data we do have. In February 2025, when research data group YouGov compared the most popular breakfast foods among Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z, a few trends popped out. Asked which foods respondents normally eat for their first meal, both hot/cooked cereal and cold cereal gradually waned from one generation to the next—with the former moving from 28% (Gen X) to 26% (Millennial) to 19% (Gen Z) and the latter shifting from 36% (Gen X) to 34% (Millennial) to 26% (Gen Z).
