A Record of the Foodstuffs I'll Never Eat Again

They're making Surge again, and... I hate to say it. Surge deserved to die.

Google "Crystal Pepsi" or "Nerds Cereal" and you will find plenty of nostalgia concerning all sorts of discontinued products. The thing is, most of those trendy foodstuffs of yore tasted bad or looked weird and earned their fates. Survival of fittest. Don't feel bad, it's nature's way.

But there are several products that I will never consume again, and it makes me sad not because they were some novelty, but because they tasted great. They were unique and now they're gone forever, and this is my gallery of foods I will miss, recorded for posterity and my aging memory.

Ore-Ida Cheddar Browns

My entire childhood, my family, my parents cooking brunch on a Sunday while my brother and I played Nintendo after church, cold winter mornings before school when my mom made us warm breakfasts because she cared about our health and our school performance and wanted to make us happy, all of that would rush back to me in a deluge of memory and feeling if I could just eat one more bite of an Ore-Ida Cheddar Brown. Those things were so good, salty and cheesy, and they took forever to cook, but it you left them in the pan they got so brown and delicious. One more box of Cheddar Browns, what I wouldn't give. I like to imagine someone out there has a box in the back of his or her freezer, but they would be so freezer burnt by now. Hope dies with ice crystals and freezer odor.


Jolly Good Fruit Punch

Jolly Good was a Wisconsin brand of soda, purchased by the can, which was delightful. Mixing and matching pop cans on a little cardboard pallet, that's how I learned to plan and organize. Sour Pow'r registers on many people's nostalgia scale, but Fruit Punch was so sweet and fruity and amazing that I can still taste it, unlike many of these other products. A bit of good news - Jolly Good has a Facebook page and is once again producing soda, for sale at Cedar Valley Cheese Store in Random Lake, Wisconsin. Supposedly more flavors are on the way, and maybe broader distribution. I will attempt to corral my optimism, as that news makes me quite excited.



Campbell's Select Italian Wedding Soup

My favorite canned soup of all time perished in the Great Campbell's Salt Purge of 2009. From what I can tell, they moved Italian Wedding to their "Healthy Selects" line, took out the sodium and the flavor, and when I ate that last can of the good stuff, I didn't even know. I would have appreciated it more. I would have spent more time. I would have licked out the inside of the bowl. Now they sell an Italian Wedding soup as part of the Campbell's Cunky Line, but it's not as good. It's got a weird, gross carrot aftertaste. I could try to make my own, but it would never compare.






Coffee Mate Blueberry Cobbler Creamer

Please hold on. I understand blueberry coffee sounds atrocious, but it wasn't. It so, so was not. This sweet nectar was never intended to last; it was a special holiday flavor, but I first tried it at my in-laws on a blustery winter day, Christmas or thereabouts, and it transported me, it flew me to a land of flavor where everything good about coffee and breakfast and fruit and baked goods and the holiday season blended together in a vortex of steamy warmth and sweetness. Cuddling has a flavor, and it's coffee with a generous pour of blueberry cobbler creamer.







Oompas

Apparently Oompas existed in the 1980's as Willy Wonka's version of Reese's Pieces, and there is plenty of candy nostalgia for that peanut butter version. But in the early 2000's, Wonka released a new Oompa, which copied Skittles, except bigger, chewier, and significantly tastier. Every time my new wife and I drove to visit my parents' northwoods cabin, we stopped at the Kwik Trip in Medford and I enjoyed a bag of Oompas while we held hands across the big bench seat of my 1985 Buick Regal. The scene was almost as sweet as the candy, sweet enough to make most people nauseous. Oompas were young love in a plastic pouch, and now they're gone. Thankfully my marriage survives.

The Odd Phenomenon of the Wisconsin Corn Maze

Get in the car and drive at least 20 minutes. You’ll want to find a corn maze farm far enough away that you feel like you’ve left the city and reverted to something simpler, something agrarian, something like the way things used to be, with tractors. But you needn’t go farther than that. You’ll want to make it back by dinner.

Pack a sweatshirt, ‘cause there’s equal chances it’ll be warmer or colder than it looks. October sun is wily like that. If your spouse asks about bringing a coat, say yes.

Pay the people. Farming is hard for the farming family, especially when they spend a whole big chunk of land on parking and bouncy houses. Divide the total cost by the number of people you brought and the hours you manage to spend there. Cheaper than a movie.

Feed the animals. Goats, sheep, miniature horses, llamas, pigs, whatever they have. The creatures can’t possibly be hungry, they eat corn out of people’s hands all day, but they’re a hair closer to real wildlife than your cat or your dog, and we’re all supposed to share the planet, and the corn’s only a quarter.

When you’re in the actual maze, pretend you can’t hear the highway or see the snack trailer. Pretend you couldn’t just walk through the corn and out the side whenever you wanted. Imagine the sun sets, and something menacing lurks somewhere in the field with you, two rows away, ten rows away. If the way out obviously requires taking a left, take a right. You’ll get there eventually.

Appreciate the ingenuity. Corn mazes attract customers through tremendous lists of attractions. The pumpkin launcher took some serious engineering, but the hay pit is just a pile of old mattresses covered in hay, surrounded by hay bales. Vinyl gutters can be transformed into all sorts of impressive apparatuses, tennis ball tracks, rubber duck race courses, mini-golf holes. Kids will throw beanbags at just about anything, and if they’re filled with dry corn, even better.

Buy some gourds. You don’t eat them, and they look pretty strange, but a stack of them on your dining room table makes it feel like fall more than anything else you can do. And if they have pumpkins or apples, you might as well grab those, too. The Honeycrisps taste pretty good, and you’ll want to make a jack-o-lantern, you know you will, even if this year you’re pretty sure you won’t get around to it.

Take a big breath of the cool fall air. Consider the seasons and the passage time, if that’s the sort of thing you like. If not, buy a cup of cider. It's fall in Wisconsin, either way.

How to Be a Football Fan in Packer- and Badger- Land

Everything that can be said about football and its meaning and significance has already been said, except maybe for this: I don’t like football.

Wisconsin Badgers 58, Miami (OH) Redhawks 0

Even that’s not an original sentiment. Some football anti-fan maintains an “I Hate Football” Facebook page, and stacks of articles highlight the damage the sport inflicts on our kids’ developing brains and the decimation it imparts on the minds and bodies of NFL alumni. The sport is sexist, and crude. It used to tempt husbands away from their wives, until women started watching, and now it tempts all of us away from Sunday chores and family time, from autumn corn mazes and apple orchards and productive time at work. If the hours sacrificed by the fans and the IQ points sacrificed by the players produced something tangible, maybe they would be resources well spent. But the season does not end with any legislation or cures for any diseases. The lessons taught to our young men about teamwork and hard work are important, but they are weakened when packaged with all the aggression and concussions.

My distaste for the sport has certainly not prevented me from watching a phenomenal amount of football, this season more than ever. Living in Wisconsin and ignoring the Packers is almost as foolish as living here and never purchasing a winter coat, so watching Aaron Rodgers and company barrel up and down the field is essentially required. A good friend invited me to a Badger game at Camp Randall. I took my son to the Homecoming game of the high school where I teach, and I’ve attended all of his flag football games. On the website for my fantasy team, all the columns of statistics are starting to make sense. When I was a pudgy kid, the television coming on after Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday brunch was my cue to retreat into the kitchen or into my Gameboy. Now I set aside time to watch the NFL draft each spring.

Memorial Old Abes 29, Hudson Raiders 17

I don’t like football. But I like everything that surrounds football. My state of 5.758 million people has built an identity around a sports team, the Green Bay Packers, and however artificial and meaningless the successes and failures of those 53 players and a dozen or so coaches are, they have given me a bond with millions of people. That’s insane, but it’s true--I can go anywhere in this state and meet anyone and feel like a little less of a stranger because we both have opinions on the effects of the loss of Jordy Nelson.

That Badger game, that was a bucket-list level experience. Wisconsin’s 58-0 victory helped, but when the students filed into the stadium in the middle of the first quarter, and the band filled the field at halftime, and the alumni stood up to sing and the rest of us stood up to dance in the second half, and the school inducted a handful of athletes into its hall of fame, and I had some memorable nachos, those moments were not about aggression and violence, those moments were about community and tradition and the breathtaking things we can do when we come together. I sat next to a friend who spent time at the University of Alabama and attended games there, and he made it sound like the experience there might be even more impressive, and in that moment I understood the entirety of college athletics.

At my school, the football team is not great, and has not been great since I started teaching there. Budgets are tight, instructional minutes are precious, and maybe we need to have a serious discussion about whether football and other sports are worth everything we invest in them. But the guys wear their jerseys on game days and standardized test scores and academic programs could never, never replace the pride they inspire. My neighbor in the English hallways coaches the Spirit Line/Cheerleading team, and she pointed out wins and losses have little to do with the success of a school sport. Helping a kid feel involved is a precious thing.

Packers 14, Vikings 6

My son loves playing football, and so far it’s easy for me to love it, too. He plays the flag version on an indoor soccer field, and while turf burns are brutal, the chances of more serious injuries are slim. The 6- and 7- year olds rotate positions, and for all the praise I offer my son for his math scores and reading abilities, his piano and artistic skills, his kindness and compassion, he is fa
r more proud of his two completed passes in his second game as an EC Indoor Sports Center Viking.

I don’t like football. Watching others inflict pain brings me no joy, watching others sacrifice their bodies and their minds feels a little too Greek coliseum for me. But for someone who doesn’t like football, I sure am becoming quite the fan.