Remembrances of food past

Have you ever craved food that nobody makes anymore?

I don’t mean in the “nobody makes gravy like grandma” sort of way, but rather in the “manufacturer discontinued it” sort of way, that sinking feeling you get when your favorite dish has been unceremoniously dumped from the menu, or when the spot where the item used to be on your grocer’s shelf has been filled by some imposter product.

Take the Arch Deluxe. With much fanfare, McDonald’s introduced it as an uptown version of the venerable hamburger, the sandwich equivalent of the girl you wouldn’t be ashamed to take home to mother.

Released during the height of my own McDonald’s mania – before I was concerned about what all the calories and grease were doing to my weight, not to mention my heart – the Arch Deluxe quickly wormed its way into my good graces. It became a destination sandwich, one I would forgo all other fast-food fixes to buy and savor. Honestly, I was eating two or three a week.

Then, one day, it was simply gone. Little did I know that the quarter-pound of 100 percent domestic beef, cradled lovingly between slices of a home-style bakery bun and a special “secret sauce,” was costing the company a fortune (some $300 million by one estimate), and that there weren’t enough of us patty connoisseurs to keep the curtain from ringing down on a marketing misfire. (But such a tasty misfire!)

One website purports to offer the Arch Deluxe recipe, including ingredients in the secret sauce, so that diehard devotees can experience it once again. I don’t believe it. It’s like kissing the photograph of an old flame 20 years after the fact and wondering why it doesn’t feel the same. I’ll let the Arch Deluxe be a happy memory from the days before calories really counted.

(As an aside, a visit to an urban slang website taught me that “arch deluxe” has far naughtier connotations than I can hint at in a family paper. The over-18 crowd may want to check it out.)

Another food that’s gone AWOL is Micro Magic French fries. Each red box with the yellow Micro Magic logo contained one serving of Idaho’s best. The user would peel back the lid, tuck it beneath the box and expose the shiny foil innards to the heat of the microwave oven. A minute or two later, a greasy mound of crinkled potatoes beckoned. Along with ramen noodles, they formed the staple of my bachelor’s diet.

Like all good things, Micro Magic went away with marriage. A few years later when a nostalgia craving struck, I was dismayed to learn they were still available – but only in Japan. Not having a passport or access to a nonstop flight to the Land of the Rising Sun, I reluctantly bid sayonara to the fries.

The unkindest cut of all, however, is Kellogg’s abandonment of grape-flavored Pop Tarts, which I ate for breakfast daily from childhood right up to the day when the purplish boxes disappeared from store shelves. Thus began my quixotic quest from store to store, including some in other states, with no success.

Amazon.com lists the item, along with a photo reminder of the glory of grape Pop Tarts past, but urges shoppers to “sign up to be notified when this item becomes available.” One frustrated grape nut, D. Bowman, wrote on the site in 2007, “I’ve been eating grape Pop Tarts (and only grape!) since I was a child. Now it’s the only Pop Tart my children will eat. Little by little they have faded from our stores. The last two boxes we’ve had I’ve gotten off of Amazon and paid way too much. But I guess it was worth it seeing as how we’ll no longer have the chance to eat them again. I hope Kellogg's will reconsider retiring this classic Pop Tart.”

Me too, D., me too.

During this season of thanks, I know I shouldn’t whine about foodstuffs past and should instead focus on those comfort foods still readily available – the Red Robin gourmet cheeseburger (sans cheese, of course), Keebler Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies (three cookies, 32 seconds in the microwave – never 30 seconds! – equals bliss), and Snyder’s of Hanover sourdough hard pretzels.

Eat ’em while you’ve got ’em, boys, for tomorrow they may have gone the way of the dodo bird – or the late, lamented Arch Deluxe.


This column originally ran in 2009. Based on the reference to "this season of thanks," it was probably in November. If I wrote this today, I probably wouldn't say that all good things end with marriage, because they don't. And I'd think twice about "the sandwich equivalent of the girl you wouldn’t be ashamed to take home to mother." I'd also note that Wild Berry Pop Tarts are a good substitute for my still-missing grape variety.