Today was National Popcorn Day. This morning when I first found this out my mind starting wandering. I have many popcorn memories so will share a few.

One of the first was memories of visiting my grandparents who lived near Hamburg, Iowa. They almost always had a large bag of popcorn for us to munch on when we visited. Hamburg is home to a popcorn processing plant and they would always get bags of popcorn that had been popped in the testing process.

Each year Hamburg has a Popcorn Days celebration. The picture above comes from an early Popcorn Festival. See: Popcorn Festival Floats

Another memory I had was of microwave popcorn. I remember that we would nuke popcorn almost every day when I worked in a pharmacy during college.

We did not have fancy types of microwave popcorn like these Chile Lime and Bacon varieties. I will say that I was not impressed with these when I tried them 🙂

I have memories of one of the pharmacists always coming back from the break room with her bag of popcorn and having me open it for her as she always had trouble. I think that today they are much easier to open than back then.

I of course wondered when microwave popcorn first became available. Popcorn has been microwaved since at least 1947 when a patent was filed for a method of microwaving a complete ear of popcorn in a bag.

However, it was not until 1984 when ACT II popcorn was introduced as the first shelf stable buttered microwave popcorn. I do remember that it was ACT II popcorn that we popped when I worked in the pharmacy in 1987.

Of course, I have many other popcorn memories like different methods of popping corn used over the years, kettle corn, movie popcorn, etc.. However, these memories will be saved for another time.

Tonight I simply enjoyed a bag of microwave popcorn to celebrate the day.

Steven