Remember These? Retro Foods We Grew Up With | Candy, TV Dinners & More

Remember when a TV dinner actually meant eating dinner in front of the TV?

Or when a trip to the candy counter meant wax bottles, candy dots, Tootsie Rolls, fireballs, malted milk balls and maybe even candy cigarettes?

In this fun and nostalgic episode of LIFEcast: Living in Full Expression, Randy and Grace take a delicious trip down memory lane to talk about the foods, snacks, drinks and candies they grew up with — including a few that one of them remembers fondly and the other insists were absolutely terrible. 😂

They start with some of the simple foods that showed up on kitchen tables decades ago: bologna sandwiches, tomato sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and banana, snack cakes, Oreo cookies and ice cream.

Then come the drinks — Kool-Aid, Coca-Cola in glass bottles, Tang, chocolate milk and milk with cookies after school.

And, of course, no childhood food conversation would be complete without the candy.

Grace and Randy remember everything from wax candy bottles and wax lips to Red Hots, Good & Plenty, Almond Joy, Baby Ruth, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Milky Way, Turkish taffy, Bazooka bubble gum, candy dots and the always dependable Tootsie Roll.

Then they head back to the dinner table with:

TV dinners on little folding trays

Chicken and beef pot pies

Jell-O — plain or dressed up with fruit and whipped cream

Chef Boyardee

Spam

Fried chicken

Deviled eggs

Macaroni and cheese

Pound cake

Banana pudding

The conversation also becomes a hilarious comparison between Randy’s Southern childhood and Grace’s Italian-American upbringing, proving that what counted as perfectly normal food in one household could sound completely foreign in another.

And beneath all the laughs is something we can probably all relate to:

Food carries memories.

A candy bar, a sandwich, a Sunday dinner or even the sound of opening an old glass soda bottle can instantly take us back to our childhood, our parents, our grandparents and a completely different time in our lives.

So grab a snack and join Grace and Randy for a little trip back in time.

What food or candy from YOUR childhood instantly brings back memories?

Tell us in the comments — especially if Randy and Grace forgot one!