Here's my latest column for the newspaper:

Chocolate milk is one of those nostalgic treats of my childhood, along with SpaghettiOs, Pop-Tarts and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

Growing up in the ‘90s with two parents working full-time jobs, I was more often than not making oodles & noodles and bologna sandwiches for dinner. So when we could splurge on some name-brand snacks, it felt special.

Occasionally, my dad would have to work late at the tire shop, and I would tag along with the promise of receiving the ultimate treat, the king of chocolate milk: Yoo-hoo!

Except, it’s not actually chocolate milk. Don’t tell 8-year-old me that.

The chocolate drink — made with water, high-fructose corn syrup and whey — was created by Natale Olivieri in Garfield, New Jersey, in 1928. Olivieri was already in the beverage business, bottling fruit drinks, when he began experimenting with a chocolate drink that could be packaged and sold without spoiling.

The trick was heat processing. According to the familiar Yoo-hoo origin story, Olivieri got the idea after watching his wife can tomatoes and other foods at home. He adapted the concept to his chocolate drink, developing a process that allowed it to remain shelf-stable before opening. Being shelf-stable was key.

A chocolate drink that didn’t require refrigeration could travel, sit on a store shelf and be sold through the kinds of small retailers that served communities across the country.

Before convenience stores became standardized chains with enormous refrigerated drink cases, many Appalachian communities depended on small groceries, country stores, general stores, drugstores and roadside markets.

Yoo-hoo was a perfect fit.

Yoo-hoo could be tossed into a lunchbox, packed for a fishing trip or picked up at a country store along the way. It didn’t have to compete for precious refrigerator space at the store, and it could be sold in places where the selection of refrigerated beverages was limited.

It isn’t from Appalachia, but it became part of the everyday landscape of convenience stores, grocery stores, vending machines, school lunches and roadside stops — the places where generations of Appalachian kids encountered packaged food and drinks.

Like me. And SpaghettiOs, Pop-Tarts and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The generation before mine had their own version of a chocolate drink: Chocolate Solider.

Chocolate Soldier was a carbonated chocolate-flavored soft drink produced by Monarch Beverage Company of Atlanta. It was sold in glass bottles from 1966 until 1994 and was bottled in various locations around the country.

The drink’s label featured a smiling tin soldier, and the name itself had a much older literary connection. “Chocolate Soldier” was already a phrase associated with George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play Arms and the Man, later inspiring Oscar Straus’ 1908 operetta The Chocolate Soldier.

For people who remember it, however, the literary history probably mattered considerably less than the taste.

Neither Yoo-hoo nor Chocolate Soldier needs to have been invented in West Virginia to tell us something about West Virginia food culture. Appalachian foodways have always included foods that came from somewhere else but became embedded in local life through availability, affordability and repetition.

A bottle of Yoo-hoo could be a childhood treat after school. It could ride along in the car on a family trip. It could come from a vending machine at a park or recreation area – or at your dad’s workplace.

Those memories are food history, too.

We sometimes think of Appalachian food as a list of dishes with clear geographic origins — pepperoni rolls, soup beans, ramps, buckwheat cakes. But food culture is also built from the things people bought, packed, drank and shared, even when those products originated hundreds of miles away.

Yoo-hoo is a good example. It traveled into the broader American food system and became familiar in places like Appalachia, where generations of people developed their own memories around it.