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?

Cottage pie
Shepherds pie
Stew
Fish and chips
Sunday roast every week
Always had a home made pudding, stewed rhubarb and custard that type of thing
Rice pudding

Mum always made her own bread and cakes

My mother never cooked curry or anything remotely adventurous. Weekend dinners were very nice indeed, but during the week she really couldn't be bothered. Far too many carbs, not enough veg, not enough fresh fruit, some ultraprocessed foods like shop bought fishcakes etc regularly.

My DS eats a lot better, a lot of variety, lots of fresh fruit, Greek yoghurt, healthy cereal/porridge. DH and I cook meat and various pasta dishes that are much nicer than my DM's weekly cooking for sure. Also more flavour/cuisine variety. I took bad eating habits out of home and determined for my DS to have a good start.

Quite a lot of mince cooked with carrots and onions. This would be accompanied by potatoes or dumplings or homemade chips and green veg like peas sprouts or cabbage.
Beef and ale or chicken and mushroom stew with similar accompaniments.
Roast chicken Sunday dinner type things with gravy and loads of veg.
In the summer, we had things like egg and ham flans with lettuce tomatoes and cucumber and pickled beetroot.
Jacket potatoes with beans, cheese etc
Pasta with tuna, sweetcorn and a tin of Campbell's condensed mushroom soup was probably the weirdest one.
In the 90s we moved to a lot of Bolognese type things with loads of veg in and sometimes garlic bread - my favourite. Plus heavily adorned frozen pizzas (my dad's speciality)
My Mam was a really good cook and did good versions of all of these. We ate really well I think.

I forgot soup!
Leftover Sunday dinner soup
Bacon bones soup
Scotch broth
All really good.

Breakfast was always cornflakes or toast and honey

I was born at the beginning of the 90s so my memories of my childhood diet spill over into the noughties too

I recall having Bernard matthews turkey drumsticks, super noodles, pasta with jars of tomato based sauce, baked potato, cottage pie, sausages, carbonara, spag bol, chilli Con Carne, lasagna, stir fry

We never really ate fish except for tuna in sandwiches or from a fish and chip shop

We didn't eat beans or lentils or chickpeas, except baked beans

In the noughties my mum met her husband and I distinctly remember having a lot of new dinners

Fajitas, steak, risotto, Thai curry

We also started eating out more because their combined income met we had more money

I've actually talked to my mum a lot about what she ate when she was a kid in the 60s/70s and compared to her diet mine was very varied. They never had pasta or rice, always they had potatoes which just blows my mind!

Makes me think I have definitely worried too much about DD diet when weaning her

I recognise most of what OP lists, but not for main meals. I recognise what most other posters have said re main meals. My mum was/is a great cook. I remember having pizza infront of the tv, once, with 2 older brothers watching James Bond, thinking we'd died and gone to heaven.

Cottage pie
Bangers and mash
Macaroni cheese
Roast dinner
Stew and dumplings
Curry

I didn't have pasta in any other form than macaroni cheese until after the millennium. Also didn't try an avocado until about 2001 either. The only fish we had was in batter or breadcrumbs, or in a boil in the bag thing with parsley sauce.
Fruit was mostly apples and oranges, or out of a tin.
Salad was tomato, cucumber, lettuce, maybe some pickled onions or onion with it.
That is partly because my parents were fussy eaters and we were quite poor though.

I want to print off this thread and try all the older stuff again however once I mentioned liver or cabbage to the kids the warned me they would rather starve themselves to death. I have not heard of anyone cooking liver in years - thankfully.

I bought and produced findus pancakes here a few months ago and the kids nearly rang childline. They really are not what I remember. I got the mince and onion ones which were my personal fave as a kid. Homemade chips though with loads of salt and vinegar were divine.

My children, born in the early 80s, ate a fairly wide range of food including home made soup, curries, international dishes of various origins (chilli chocolate chicken being a favourite) as well as cottage and shepherd’s pie, sausages and mash roasts and other traditional food, including plenty of vegetables. They had cereal or toast for breakfast - sometimes eggs - and fruit daily, though there wasn’t the range there is today. Blueberries, for example, were a rarity in shops, and the selection was far more seasonal.
What they didn’t have were endless snacks or fizzy drinks, which I couldn’t afford and didn’t approve of.
I was a single parent working full time.

I don't know if my (lower middle class) parents thought about nutrition in a detailed way.

Mum isn't a particularly good cook, so things like spag bol. Her attempts at kentucky fried chicken eventually food poisoned me as it was frozen inside.

There were the small Sainsbury's basic pizzas.

Frozen jam doughnuts (not the best.) Anyone else remember these?

I ate a lot of Marmite sandwiches or peanut butter ones maybe.

Food shopping day (weekly?) always meant there'd be a treat like a Belgian bun maybe.

We didn't have takeaway except fish and chips, and no delivery.

I turned vegetarian/vegan in my mid/late teens but that was just to cut calories and restrict for my EDNOS. It mainly involved having nothing all day and then just getting myself chips from the chippy in the evening. The chips were probably not technically vegan anyway.

Maybe my parents had given up entirely by then. 😁

The mice reminded me, I had to do three years home economics, the third year seemed to mostly consist of mince and onions.

Cottage pie, a meat pie made with mince and onion filling, a strange thing that had a disk of pastry, potato piped around the edges and mince and onion in the middle.

A thing like a jam roly poly but with mince and onion instead of jam.

Mince and onions with dumplings.

We did make a Christmas cake but then it was back to mince. Mince with a flaky pastry top.

This was the 1980s so they may have been concerned with costs but surely they could do something else occasionally?

Everything and I mean everything came out of a packet. The freezer was out god and all good came from it, all cooked on a half working oven that only half did stuff so most food was utterly soggy.
So glad I didn't take after my mum!!

Born 1982:

Sundays, we always had a roast - a rotation of chicken, beef, pork & lamb. The only exceptions were Wimbledon finals days and the Sunday before Christmas.

Sunday evening we always had 'tea' - the only time the teapot came out and we all drank it, even though nobody liked it! Was served with sandwiches and homemade cakes.

other meals included:
cold meat leftovers with jacket potatoes & pickle
chops
shepherds pie
'chilli' with rice (Colemans sauce; no beans)
Liver, baked in gravy
Birds Eye fish with home cut chips
Bacon, potato and onion pie

nearly everything was served with mashed potatoes; piles of the stuff!

There were always at least two types of homemade cake in the cake tin

We had food cooked from scratch nearly day. All I ever wanted was a findus crispy pancake or a pot noodle but we never had them in the house!
We would have spaghetti boll with loads of carrots in it !
Salad in the summer was lettuce and sliced tomatoes with new potatoes and sliced ham bit of a crusty cob on the side!
Homemade chips done in the chip pan!

Ooh blancmange! Love that!

Most weeks would include:
Gammon steak
Chicken kiev
Ready meal, often chicken tikka
Cauliflower cheese
Omelettes
Garlic baguette with some meals
Spaghetti hoops or beans on toast when schoolfriends came.

First had pizza aged about 10, but didn't really like cheese. Agree that deviating from mince bolognaise as the companion to pasta was something very rare for several years.

We had quite a range, born mid 70’s.

spaghetti bolognaise
chilli
shepherds pie
meatloaf
stuffed marrow and pepper
quiche and jacket potato
boiled salmon and new potato
stir fry with noodles
lots of casseroles including chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce
beef goulash with flat noodles
paprika chicken
lots of roast chicken roast potato with brocolli and carrots
smoked salmon on bridge rolls every Sunday for tea time
beef olives and mashed potato
there was a kedgeree phase but all of us refused to eat it so that ended
fish fingers / frankfurters with oven chips and beans
homemade chicken and veal shnitzels which were sometimes made with liver instead
veg were pretty wide ranging. Peas corn broccoli cauliflower cabbage, red cabbage, courgettes, peppers, aubergine, mushrooms green beans mange tout

fruit involved apples pears oranges and grapefruit. We had strawberries raspberries peaches apricots and cherries in season. Rarely banana as none of us liked them

A lot of chips with fried eggs and peas
Spam
A meat and potato pie that was boiled potatoes, corned beef and short crust pastry. My mum made a vegetarian version which was the same thing but without the corned beef.
Stew and dumplings

OMG yeah chicken nibbles were my favourite too but they seemed to take so long to cook really they didn't! The closest they do at iceland now is southern fried chicken wings but they are definitely not the same i wish they still sold them 😊

Don’t think OP’s diet was vastly different to many 80s/90s kids. However, we’d also have onions, celery, occasionally radish, grated carrot and white cabbage in salads. Baxter’s beetroot was another staple of our salads.

Mum used to make homemade curry and I always had a curry from the Chinese takeaway on Saturdays. Omelettes; quiche; pasties; egg, chips and beans; vegetable stew; cauliflower cheese were also regular meals. We regularly had spaghetti bol but it wasn’t until I was about 13 that I regularly started to eat other pasta.

IDK if I posted on this thread about these yet, but does anyone remember frozen jam doughnuts? Or are they a nightmare I had lol.

They would've been from Sainsbury's, and quite cheap.

Artic roll essentially ice cream rolly poly jam dessert
Cherry black forest

Late 80's born. Everything ultra processed. Instant mash, tinned beans/spaghetti. Wallbangers (frozen battered sausages), chicken nuggets, fish fingers, peeled boiled potatoes, mini chicken Kiev's, some gross mini Kiev's with ketchup in the middle? Eggy bread, smash and tuna 'fishcakes' egg and chips, bacon grill and chips, sausage and chips. Cook from frozen party sausage rolls. Only vegetables were peas and carrots from a jar and frozen broccoli and cauliflower on a Sunday dinner. Didn't have pasta until I was 10, and then it was served with just butter on. Breakfast was pop tarts, sugary cereal or readybrek. Lunch was tinned ravioli, tinned tomato soup, tinned meatballs, dairylea or corned beef sandwiches, tuna or peanut butter on crackers. Salad wasn't often but it was just iceberg, tomato and cucumber with mayonnaise. Pudding after every meal was a chocolate biscuit like a Penguin or Blue Ribbon. Rarely any fruit.