Shopping Saturday - Vintage Food Ads

Mankind keeps trying to come up with a way to make money. They desperately want a piece of the market and get your dollars into their back account. I have memories of the "fake" food that was popular when I was a little girl. Some of these things were developed during WWII. Necessity breeds invention. It was most important that our men fighting overseas had the first and best of everything. So civilians back home were rationed and had to learn to make do with what they could get. Also transporting food to our men made it necessary to come up with new ways to package or prepare food that would last and could be transported easily to our armed forces. Then there was the space age and our astronauts needed ways to transport food but it had to be light weight, easy to fix, and they didn't have a stove to heat it up on. Then there were those entrepreneurs who just plain were looking for ways into the food market. I remember the women in my family thought this "new" food was healthy. Like margarine instead of butter, Jello salads for your hair and nails and for healthy dieting! They also thought they were getting nutrition cheap and easy! They believed those ads! They went through a period of using instant coffee. My Aunt Ruth drank a lot of instant Sanka. She kept her aluminum coffee pot full of water simmering on the stove. She would ask me to take her white Fireking coffee cup and make her a fresh cup of coffee using her Sanka. She would be busy sewing or ironing, etc and I would bring her fresh coffee. I never liked the original instant coffee. I did like the fancier instant coffees when they came out in the 1980's. I still use instant tea. Walmart's Great Value instant teas are great! I also drank many a glass of chocolate milk made from chocolate powder, as well as, Koolaid and Tang. Dried powdered creamer is still used in my coffee. I like the different flavors they have now. We tried a few frozen dinners but they were terrible so we didn't get into that in our family. I have a mental picture of my Granddaddy eating his Kelloggs Cornflakes in the mornings for breakfast. That was his favorite cereal. I also remember the TV ad of a bowl of oatmeal or cream of wheat following behind a child on their way to school through the cold. Some of the old ads are so sexist or racist that they would never be used today. It was part of our culture and seemed acceptable in those days but we've come a long way.

I did a Google image search looking for vintage food ads and came up with these. I figured they would trigger some memories in you too!