What did you eat as an 80s and 90s child?

[Foodfan]

If you were a child in the 80s and 90s, what was your diet like?

im wondering if mine was typical for children in the 80s and 90s or my parents were just not very adventurous!

salad wise we tended to only have lettuce, tomato and cucumber. That was always what salad was.
I think the other vegetables I was given were peas and carrots (plus sprouts at Christmas!)

Meals wise I remember having sandwiches, toast, porridge, toasties, shepherds pie, sausages, chicken nuggets and chips, pizza etc.

I remember that my mum was always slim but always on a diet and seemed to live in grapefruit and ryvitas!

We also had things like baked beans, spaghetti hoops etc too but I didn’t even know there were foods in the world such as salmon or curry etc until my teens!

Was this a typical 1990s diet? If not, what sorts of things did you eat and were the norm in your house growing up?

What have you done differently to your parents with your own children?

My mum (who did/does all the cooking) really very adventurous and cooked foods from all over the world. I was pretty lucky. Ready meals didn't really exist then but we had have frozen pizza and fish fingers etc so she didn't a big variety.

I hated vegetables as I child and was fairly fussy but my mum would get me to trh again and again and I love all vegetables now and eat anything.

I think that was an important lesson Ive kept with food - taste changes through life.

Having said this, my mum worked and would leave salads for lunch for us during school holidays which were often a slice of ham, yellow lettuce, chunk of cucumber, quarter tomato and cold boiled potatoes! With salad cream until my sister made us change to mayonnaise

Oh and born in 1968

"etc so she didn't a big variety." typo - should say "she did give us a big variety of things "

Roast dinner
Meat pie
Lamb chops
Pork chops
Shepherds pie
Stewed meat
Grilled chicken

Very much meat, potato , veg. Potato's were mash, roast or chip. Veg was usually carrot or peas.

I

Ooh, I used to love the hamwich things...with baked beans and deep fried chips. I wonder if they still make them? I've got a craving now....

Bugger all - apart from dinner which would depend on when my dad came back from work. For some reason, mother would wait for him to decide what to cook. They'd then have a couple of drinks (accompanied with nuts / cheese), played cards so we wouldn't eat until after 9pm news - at the earliest. I never had breakfast or even a hot drink before leaving for school because she'd scream at me if I did and didn't make her one - sounds easy enough but her drink was time consuming process involving boiled milk (yuk). Didn't have school lunch and never had any money to buy anything - no wonder I looked like a pencil! However, we usually had weekend brunch - eg American style pancakes with maple syrup which were unusual at the time.
I do remember those weird 'Minute' steaks that were cooked to shoe leather status and various processed meat shaped into something resembling the original cut of meat. Angel Delight was a treat plus tinned fruit cocktail (brothers would battle for the glacé cherry) with Nestle tinned cream!
There was food available so I started 'cooking' when very, very young, various weird stuff for my brothers and I - eg mini frozen Margarita pizzas topped with combinations of thinly sliced onion, Chillies, deli meat, tinned anchovies and a lot of pasta bakes!
I quite fancy a Findus crispy pancake now are they still around?

Much like you say. We did have lasagna, spaghetti bolognese etc and also Indian and Chinese takeaways (not often!).

When DM got a huge chest fridge freezer in early 1980s she used to batch cook.

Far more meat, beef, lamb, pork.

My mum wasn’t over keen on convenience food but we did have the Findus crispy pancakes and the pizza slices (frozen). Sara Lee cakes, cinnamon strudel.

Lunch at home was Mighty White bread sandwiches with either cheese and salad or cheese tomato etc. baguettes with liver pate sometimes. Lots of crisps and snack bars, wagon wheels etc.

Home cooked meals were shepherds pie, liver and bacon, tuna fish pie, homemade apple pie for dessert. My mum also made her own bread but think stopped in early 80s. Friends still recall helping with bread making and the smell of freshly baked bread. Far easier to make a Victoria sponge but we did get cakes from patisserie/baker and sainsburys bar cakes (coffee and walnuf).

@Saltisford - my DM’s dad was German (grandad) so he loved sauerkraut, rollmop herrings, pumpernickel etc.

There was a great I think Austrian patisserie/bakery on the way to where he lived so we’d pick up bakery treats there, not sure what, Black Forest gateau was one.

DM was brought up by him and her grandmother and recalls making potato salad without mayonnaise and every year they’d get a huge salami sent from Germany plus lighted candles on the Christmas tree! Oh and spiced biscuits with icing for on tree and stollen.

Born 1971. My nana still had a larder and pantry too and I recall her going there to pick out food. Her specialities were roasts, fry ups and Sherry trifle.

For a year aged about 14 I only ate potatoes... mashed, roasted, boiled....

We had a lot of the usual simple stuff.
Bangers & mash, Meat & two veg etc. Parents are Irish so we also had Irish stew and Bacon & cabbage <urgh>.

My Mum did cook from scratch a lot and we also had some quite adventurous food for 80s kids. She had Madhur Jaffrey cookbooks, so we had a lot of nice curries. She also made a lovely Persian chicken dish, lamb kofte, Hungarian Goulash, really nice varied pasta sauces etc.

It was perfectly acceptable to have tinned soup and bread or spaghetti hoops on toast for a quick dinner, though.

Only ever had pudding on Sundays (tinned fruit & ice cream, Viennetta if we had guests!). Or maybe a Ski fruit yoghurt on a weekday.

Only had salad (lettuce, cucumber, tomato, salad cream) with ham and boiled eggs in the summer.

In the 90s, she started stocking the fridge with frozen pizzas & Findus crispy pancakes for us hungry teens 😆

This is really helping my understand how my partner can apparently live quite happily on sandwiches, plain salad and a bit of ham. We’re a similar age but my parents were a bit alternative and we ate things like this at home.

hummus homemade in a vast bowl, spicy polish sausage stew, Mediterranean vegetable thing my mum called “ratatouille” (basically my mum shoved some tinned tomatoes and onions and aubergines maybe a courgette in a pan and cooked it until she got bored, was always barely softened veg and absolutely foul), lots of brown rice, lots of tinned kidney beans and chickpea things, lots of French bread and homemade soup.
All leftovers were used up in some kind of “stir fry” so you’d quite frequently find leftover chicken in a pan with some old soup, half a tomato, leftover mash, and ye olde veg. Tuna on brown toast. Always granary bread which was for some reason full of holes.

I really didn’t appreciate at the time that we were being fed a lot of wholesome stuff! Was always relieved when we had blander things like butterfly pasta and cheese sauce with bacon, toad in the hole, “vegebangers” which were a veggie sausage mix from a packet and completely delicious. It was at my granny’s that we’d have what the rest of you were eating - the stews, pies etc. I loved them!!!

We always had shop biscuits in and fruit juice when we could afford it but no other treats until I was probably at secondary school. Was AMAZED at friends houses where they had multipacks of crisps and wagon wheels just lying around!

Oh and yes boiled potatoes were definitely a thing! Does anyone make these now? The one plus was that mum is butter mad so we always had that on them. A regular lazy tea was jacket potato with butter or (whole meal obvs) pasta with butter - nothing else. Delicious tbh.

Where did all the liver go? Sounds like everyone (without hippy parents) was eating it.

I was born late 70s. We had a healthy diet. Growing up I mostly remember eating things like lamb/pork chops, cauliflower cheese, lots of fish (parsley sauce being a favourite accompaniment), chips made in a deep fat fryer as an occasional treat, vegetable crumble (which I hated), rissoles and Sunday roasts. We never ate junk food (occasionally fish fingers) and the only pasta we ever ate was in spaghetti bolognaise. The first time I ever had a curry was when I was 14! We did used to have a foreign holiday every year and eat out in restaurants but DM clearly didn't feel the need to replicate any of it at home!

I don't remember what was in salads but I do remember loving a "cheese salad", when I was little, which was basically lettuce, cucumber and tomato with grated cheese on top and smothered in salad cream.

And lots of homemade soups, in winter!

I was born early 80s.
We grew up in a very white, very working class town with a high poverty rate.

My mum would cook us all sorts!

Healthy chinese stir fries, salads with fruits in them, curries, veggie and meat kebab sticks, granola and yoghurt, homemade lasagne, hungarian goulash, chili, etc etc basically foods that were NOT the norm for our neighbourhood whatsoever. Her motivation was growing up in a house were every day they'd eat the same bland meals on the same days of the weeks forever. She definitely went the opposite way with us!

It definitely wasn't the norm as friends and school staff were always shocked if we mentioned what we'd had to eat.

I quite fancy a Findus crispy pancake now are they still around?

Yes, I bought a pack of ham and mozzarella for nostalgia's sake a while ago and they are disappointing as an adult. They sell them in Asda.

I was born in 75.

There was always a roast (beef, pork, lamb) on Sunday. Monday was my favourite dinner because it would be things like stovies or sweet and sour pork made from the leftovers.

Thursday was something from the fish van, my favourite was an Arbroath smokie which used to be a peasant food but is now really expensive but I also liked mackerel, fish cakes and breaded white fish.

The rest of the time it was mostly meat and potatoes with the occasional salad in summer, yellow curry with raisins in it or spag bolognese. A huge favourite of mine was homemade Scottish lentil and bacon soup and Scotch broth made with lamb.

I went vegetarian at 11 because I hated eating meat, I went back to meat eating around 20 and now eat meat, just not big chunks of it like roast dinners or chops.

Faggots
Liver and onions
Kidneys
Things dad had shot
Very overcooked lamb or pork chops
Cabbage
Very overcooked carrots, swedes or parsnips
Fish
Any of the above would always be served with quartered, boiled potatoes
No sauce with any of the above and much tutting if you asked for ketchup

Lunch was always sandwiches
Corned beef
Cheese (just cheese
Ham (just ham)
Peanut butter and jam
An apple

Breakfast
Muesli
Porridge made only with water

That's it!

I didn't have pasta, rice, cous cous etc until I left home.

Things dad had shot

My dad had a gun too but this made me laugh for some reason!

Breakfast was either cereal/porridge or custard with banana and rich tea biscuits.

Lunches were sandwiches of either cheese or leftover roast chicken or crackers with cheese, peanut butter or chocolate spread with a packet of own brand crisps and a fun sized bar of something like mars. (this was school time as packed lunch)

Dinners depended who cooked. My mam cooked a roast chicken most sundays and shepards pie, stew, anything from frozen or mince burgers and chips during the week. My dad would have made ribs, curries, spag bols etc. We ate well but we ate a LOT of spuds. Being Irish of course this is a birthright but I barely cook potatoes myself now.

Oh bacon and cabbage…. Once every couple of weeks was enough for me. My kids only get it on st paddy’s day and they love it 🙄

I was born in 1991 and my mum was a very good, adventurous cook. Mediterranean chicken and veg, Indian and Thai curries, stir fries, various pasta dishes, fish dishes, lasagne, etc., alongside your traditional roasts, hotpots, shepherd's pie etc.

i remember pasta went with Bolognese and the amazing new recipe my mum made from a Tesco card with farfalle, crème fraiche, ham and mushrooms and peas.

Omg I remember this Tesco one! My mum made it loads, it was with Parma ham if I recall? How boujee 😂 it was delish though!

I didn't have Yorkshires till I was in my teens and my aunt married an Englishman. I'm not British and we didn't have much of the classic British food. I think I was 10 when I had shepherds pie at a friends house. Never tried a findus crispy pancake in my life 😞

Vesta beef curry

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