Introduced by General Foods in 1959 as a breakfast beverage made by mixing water with a spoonful of what the manufacturer called “aromatic, orangy-tasting powder,” Tang was touted as convenient, nutritious (loaded with vitamins A and C, as well as tricalcium phosphate), pleasant-smelling (“like oranges, but with a flavor all its own”), long-lasting in its jar on the shelf, and most wonderful of all, modern. To serve Tang for breakfast instead of orange juice was to say you were riding high on the wave of progress; history would not leave you behind with all the fuddy duddies who still struggled to squeeze juice from oranges the way generations of unlucky homemakers had done before them.
Tang is convenient, nutritious, and pleasant-smelling.
At the time, General Foods was predicting a dazzling future menu of scientifically reconstituted foodstuffs. “Picture an instant, king-sized steak— made of beef-flavored corn cereal—sizzling in the breakfast skillet,” General Foods’ Monsanto Magazine rhapsodized, going on to describe Tang as the logical next step after instant coffee in the march of progress from the laborious past to the effortless future.
Tang made the leap from convenience food to pop culture in 1965, when it was conspicuously drunk by astronauts on board Gemini flights. But in the 1970s, as the terms fresh and natural displaced modern and convenient as foods’ highest benediction, Tang quickly lost its cachet, going from an emblem of the future to a quaint, even silly, reminder of what we used to think was groovy. The nerdy Loopner family of television’s Saturday Night Live drank Tang by the pitcherful.