Tang

Tang, made by General Foods, is a sweetened drink powder artificially colored and flavored orange. It is one of America’s most celebrated chemically created foods. Tang is almost synonymous with space travel. Tang went to space on the Gemini and Apollo missions. The mix was delivered to the astronauts in silver pouches. When water was added, the pouches yielded a sweet, slightly tangy, orange-flavored drink that provided an entire day’s worth of vitamin C. By the first Gemini flight in 1965, Tang had been languishing on supermarket shelves for six years. Then General Foods dubbed it “the drink of the astronauts,” and the new Tang, with a prominent picture of a launch pad on the outside of the canister, soon was rocketing upward in sales and consumption. General Foods also marketed the newly popular Tang as an instant, nutritious, and drinkable breakfast. Children influenced by television demanded the sugary drink, and parents, believing it was healthful, bought it. At the peak of popularity of Tang in the 1960s and 1970s, American households consumed the “instant breakfast” on a regular basis. Sales of Tang declined after the novelty of human travel in space subsided. In 1998 Tang received a much-needed boost in popularity when John Glenn, the first person to orbit the earth and the first human to eat in space, insisted on taking the powder with him on his return to space on the shuttle Discovery.