Everyone knows that the cottage is where you eat junk food. Or, well, more junk food. That was one of the best parts about growing up while spending chunks of the summer at my family’s rustic, off-grid cabin in Algonquin Provincial Park. Having to pee in an outhouse, or a chamber pot if it was the middle of the night, was a fair tax for sugary cereal at breakfast and puffy Cheezies at night while playing cards with my family—sometimes my whole family, grandparents and uncle included. I ate spider dogs roasted over the fire, and Smarties from my Oma when I did a little job for her. (“It’s energy food,” she’d say.)
But the food I loved most was Tang. Forget you, orange juice from concentrate: our small, box-like propane fridge had no freezer, and my mom was okay with Tang because it had some relation to actual oranges. But c’mon now, Tang. You’re really the same as Kool-Aid, except your spokesperson is NASA instead of a cartoon juice pitcher that busts through walls. Oh, yeah!
Tang became famous after it was used in the space program in the ‘60s, but to be clear, NASA did not invent it. The folks at General Foods did. Looking back, it’s ridiculous that, even as an eight year old, I believed the NASA myth. If NASA was going to invent a drink, they’d invent something better than Tang. And they’d give it a better name.
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My sister, Lesley, and I drank Tang for breakfast and lunch and during the late-night card games. (We still had to drink milk at dinner. Unfortunately.) It was satisfying to tear open a paper package of the stuff, mix up the orange liquid in our plastic orange pitcher, and drink it out of short, orange flower-patterned glasses. A glass of Tang tasted like powder mixed with tepid water. Because that’s what it was.
The Tang years came to an end when we replaced the miniscule box fridge with an almost normal-sized propane fridge-freezer combo. We replaced all the flower-patterned glasses too. I think the pitcher is also gone. Eventually, so were the card games, mostly because family time at the cottage changed. Nights became reading by the light of the kerosene lamps with glasses of wine. Breakfast became litres of coffee and yogurt mixed with muesli. (“It tastes like ice cream,” Mom would say. Which…it does not. I’m concerned that she still doesn’t know what actual ice cream tastes like.)
Tang changed too—now you can buy it as concentrated liquid drops, or in grape flavour, or in massive canisters, in case you need to make 18 litres. Maybe I’ll get some and mix up a pitcher. Maybe drink it with sugar cereal, Cheezies, and a spider dog. It would be the most disgusting meal ever. But I wouldn’t be mad at the memories.
This article was originally published in the Early Summer 2026 issue of Cottage Life.
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