- Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle.
- it’s surprising how cars in the 80s didn’t actually have cup holders. I always thought that was just a joke until I bought an 80s car and learned I’d need to buy the cup holders aftermarket
I hadn't thought about mangoes but now that you mention it, it does feel like they showed up in the USA at some point since the 1990s.
> - sugar free sodas
I am not convinced this was actually a good thing. After all these decades of studies in ever more obese human populations, it should not be this hard to find any benefits at all, and there should not be so many warning signs. You certainly can't see it in any obesity rates or soda tax results (or my relatives...), the experimental weight loss results have always been oddly unimpressive, and there are lots of concerning results about the effects on microbiomes (https://gwern.net/doc/genetics/microbiome/2022-suez.pdf) or on cardiovascular health (https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2024-witkowski.pdfhttps://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10334259/), which is all very weird if they are 0 calories and don't affect insulin metabolism, as you would expect unambiguous, immediate, large benefits (contrast this with, say, GIP/G1P). So, maybe sugar-free will finally wind up being a wash or slightly beneficial, but it's not going into my list either way.
(Also, I eat mangoes and frozen vegetables and a little reluctantly eat nü brussel sprouts, but I don't drink soda, so it's against the spirit of my personal list to begin with.)
> Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle.
Not in the US, but _slightly_ sceptical of this one, because (a) I'm pretty sure that they were available in supermarkets _here_ (Ireland) in the 90s and (b) because there was a Seinfeld episode about them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mango - 1993, Kramer is banned from his favourite fruit store, is horrified at the suggestion that he buy supermarket mangoes).
> frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables
Again, we're talking the 90s, right? I'm pretty sure that had already happened; that'd be more 70s-80s.
In the 90s, American would've known that mangoes were a fruit and (probably) that they were orange. But they would not be in a standard grocery store. I suspect a big part of this was that for a long time the US banned mango imports from India, and that was lifted in 2007.
NYC is a bit different because it's much more multicultural and not really representative of the typical US experience. Plus, the fact that they had Kramer obsessing over mangoes was a bit of "he's a weird guy, of course he'd into a weird fruit". Living in the midwest, I think the first time I saw a mango for sale in a grocery store was probably ~2010.
re: frozen veg
they definitely existed in the 70s and 80s, but flash freezing technology has made them significantly higher quality in recent years and expanded the number/type of veg that you can find frozen. And on top of that, in the last decade has had the advent of 'steamer pouches' that make microwave cooking super-easy and they've really taken off in popularity.
- Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle.
- it’s surprising how cars in the 80s didn’t actually have cup holders. I always thought that was just a joke until I bought an 80s car and learned I’d need to buy the cup holders aftermarket
- frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables
- sugar free sodas