Open a typical American refrigerator in the 1970s and you’d probably find a very different lineup from what’s chilling in your kitchen today. 1970s refrigerator foods included plenty of staples that might look a little different today: There were no oat milk cartons or bags of prewashed arugula, but there was a good chance you’d spot bologna, processed cheese, iceberg lettuce, and at least one mysterious plastic tub containing something other than what the label promised.
The decade was firmly embracing convenience foods, from refrigerated biscuit dough to bottled salad dressing, while old-school staples like Jell-O salads and cottage cheese were still going strong. And leftovers? Those were likely hiding beneath aluminum foil or tucked inside colorful Tupperware.
Not every household had every food on this list, of course, but these 15 refrigerator staples offer a pretty recognizable snapshot of what American families were eating — and saving for later — during the 1970s.
A Pitcher of Kool-Aid or Tang
If there were kids in the house, there was a decent chance a brightly colored plastic pitcher was taking up valuable refrigerator space. Kool-Aid was inexpensive, sugary, and easy to make by the batch, while Tang still carried some of its space-age appeal. Whether the drink inside was neon orange or suspiciously red, it was ready to pour alongside lunch or an after-school snack.
A Gallon of Whole Milk
Milk was a breakfast-table essential, a dinner drink, and the necessary companion to the enormous amount of cereal kids were eating. Whole milk remained a familiar choice throughout the decade, and depending on the household and year, it might have arrived in a glass bottle, cardboard carton, or plastic jug. In some communities, milk delivery hadn’t completely disappeared yet, either.
Velveeta or American Cheese Slices
Before refrigerators were packed with wedges of artisanal cheese, plenty of families relied on the processed stuff. American cheese slices made grilled cheese sandwiches and cheeseburgers ridiculously easy, while Velveeta could find its way into everything from dips to casseroles. Those uniformly orange squares were basically engineered for the convenience-focused decade.
Bologna
Few foods say old-school lunchbox quite like a bologna sandwich on white bread. Sliced bologna was inexpensive, convenient, and could feed a household full of kids without much preparation. Add yellow mustard or mayo and lunch was done. And if eating it cold got boring, there was always the fried bologna sandwich.
Miracle Whip or Mayonnaise
Some households were firmly Team Mayo. Others wouldn’t dream of making a sandwich without Miracle Whip. Either way, a big jar of something creamy was probably taking up space in the refrigerator. Beyond sandwiches, mayo and its tangier competitor showed up in potato salad, tuna salad, deviled eggs, and the seemingly endless parade of creamy dishes served at family gatherings.
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Bottled French Dressing
Salad dressing wasn’t necessarily subtle in the 1970s. Bright orange French dressing was a supermarket staple, and Catalina-style dressings brought even more sweet-and-tangy flavor to the dinner table. Pour it over a bowl of iceberg lettuce and a few sliced tomatoes, and you had the kind of simple side salad that appeared alongside countless family dinners.
Iceberg Lettuce
Long before spring mix occupied an entire supermarket section, iceberg lettuce was the default green in plenty of American kitchens. It was inexpensive, mild, crunchy, and sturdy enough to hang around in the crisper drawer. Whether chopped into a basic dinner salad or sliced into a wedge and covered with dressing, that pale-green head was refrigerator royalty.
Jell-O Salad
The word “salad” was doing a lot of work in the 1970s. Gelatin creations remained popular at family dinners, potlucks, and holidays, and recipes could include everything from fruit cocktail and marshmallows to cottage cheese and vegetables. A lime-green Jell-O mold covered in plastic wrap might look strange to younger generations, but it wouldn’t have been particularly surprising to find one chilling in a ’70s refrigerator.
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Cottage Cheese
Cottage cheese had a much bigger cultural moment in the 1970s than it does today. The high-protein dairy staple was closely associated with dieting and lighter meals, and it was often paired with canned peaches, pineapple, tomatoes, or a few leaves of lettuce. A scoop of cottage cheese alongside fruit could practically pass for lunch.
Canned Biscuits in a Cardboard Tube
Few kitchen experiences combined convenience and mild anxiety quite like opening a tube of refrigerated biscuits. Families could keep canned biscuits, rolls, and crescent dough in the refrigerator until they needed a quick addition to dinner. Then came the memorable part: peeling back the wrapper and waiting for the cardboard tube to suddenly pop open.
Leftover Casserole
Casseroles earned their place on 1970s dinner tables by being inexpensive, filling, and easy to stretch across a family. Tuna noodle casserole, chicken-and-rice dishes, and ground-beef creations made with canned soup could all leave enough behind for another meal. The result was often a bulky baking dish covered with aluminum foil and occupying far more refrigerator shelf space than anyone wanted to give it.
Margarine
Butter certainly hadn’t disappeared, but margarine was an everyday refrigerator staple in many households. It could be spread on toast, melted over vegetables and potatoes, or used for cooking and baking. The plastic tub was useful, too — so useful, in fact, that families often washed it out and reused it for leftovers, creating one of the refrigerator’s great disappointments: opening the margarine container and finding cold green beans.
Pickles
A big jar of pickles could stick around in the refrigerator door for ages. Dill spears made an easy side for sandwiches and burgers, while bread-and-butter pickles offered a sweeter option. Somewhere nearby, there might also be a jar of relish waiting for the next round of hot dogs.
Eggs in a Plastic Refrigerator Tray
Modern advice might tell you to keep eggs in their original carton, but many refrigerators once practically begged you not to. Built-in molded egg trays made it possible to transfer each egg into its own little compartment, often right in the refrigerator door. A neat row of exposed eggs is one of those tiny details that can instantly make an old refrigerator look like it belongs in another era.
Leftovers in Tupperware or an Old Margarine Tub
Nothing in the 1970s refrigerator was necessarily what it seemed. Colorful Tupperware containers in avocado green, harvest gold, orange, and other era-friendly shades were perfect for storing leftovers, but families weren’t about to throw away perfectly good margarine, cottage cheese, or whipped-topping tubs, either.
That meant opening the refrigerator could involve a small guessing game. The margarine tub might contain spaghetti. The cottage cheese container might be hiding mashed potatoes. And somewhere behind the Kool-Aid pitcher was probably a foil-covered plate nobody remembered putting there. In a decade increasingly defined by convenience foods, the reused plastic container might be one of the most nostalgic refrigerator staples of all.
