To ask what you ate in the 90s?

[Caligal]

What was your daily diet then like compared to now? Whether you were a kid, a teen or an adult. I’m curious how different it was to today....

Oh yeah, and usually crisps and a Slushie from the bus station shop on the way home. In six form college, I worked in MacDonald's, so ate dinner there at least 3 times a week, and coming home from clubbing would get a chicken burger and chips with garlic sauce at least twice a week.

Again, how was I so thin??? I have to low carb, work out and intermittent fast just to stay a healthy weight these days!

I was secondary school age for the first half on the 90s.. For breakfast i had marmite on granary toast most days, lunch was a small pizza, donut and chips on school days and a sandwich with crisps at weekends.
I remember eating a lot of pasta in creme fraice with bacon but it being exciting and new to our family in around 92. Otherwise it was jacket potatoes and cheese, cheese on toast, cottage pie, roasts, bangers and mash, ham in parsley sauce and potatoes, omlettes, stew etc.
I had my first curry in 1996 as even though there was two indian restaurant in town my parents never took me and they didnt cook with garlic or spices. But they do now.

I was a vegetarian and at Uni so packet Pasta 'n' Sauce, Supernoodles, beans or spaghetti on toast (most stuff on toast really) mixed beans in chilli sauce with onions peppers and rice or pasta (my housemate called it bean casserole). Lager, vodka and tea. Chip salad kebab or vegi burger on the way home, vegetable balti if we ate out. Was a size 16 in my first year then dieted back down to a 10.

I lived alone and had a lot of pasta and Dolmio stir-ins.

@LunaNorth

I seem to remember Chicken Tonight sauces featuring heavily. I liked the Spanish tomato one best.

When I was a student, I ate a lot of toast, homemade veg soup (I was born 40), pasta, individually wrapped frozen Kievs with different flavoured fillings from Sainsburys, and jacket spuds.

I got married in 1997, and I remember getting the Delia How To Cook series of cookery books. There was a recipe for potato wedges which I thought was revolutionary; ingredients were potatoes, olive oil, salt. I can’t imagine following a recipe for those now!

Why did sainsburys have to get rid of the individual Kiev’s!?? I loved those

Everything was drenched in balsamic vinegar. I still hate the stuff because I ate so much in the 90s.

Boil in the bag curries, faggots chips and mushy peas, shepherd's pie with chips .

Beverages were MD 2020 and I liked those weird lemon flavoured tea granules .

Spaghetti Bolognese once a week. Chicken and chips. Roast dinner, chilli con carne, chicken stew, sausage, egg and chips. Every time it was hot, salad with a sliced boiled egg, Wiltshire ham and beetroot cubes. Whenever we or my parents alone went on holiday, cuisine from
that place, for ages. We had Cous-cous with apricot and Moroccan ginger chicken for weeks and it was vile. My favourite that my mum did was beef casserole with mustard mash. My most hated was liver and bacon. Why? It's gross! And my little brother always got sausages instead but I was fated to eat the horrible organ meat.

I've just realised that I've never cooked, nor eaten actual Bolognese

Gregg's Tuna stottie or chips and gravy for lunch every day.
Loads of fizzy pop and chocolate.
Beige food at home, only veg I liked was baked beans.
Was about half the weight I am now

A rollercoaster of fast & feast: early 90s I survived on this weird shake diet from Boots & M&S microwave meals so low in calories, they were just moist dust. I exercised like crazy & knew FA about the horrific damage I was doing to my metabolism. I had a fantastic, tightly-toned body so wouldn’t have listened to anyone telling me I was doing it all wrong! Mid 90s got married & settled into ‘enjoy food’ mode with DH1, lots of meals out & takeaways, I ate everything until I crested 9st, then I’d do a week of Slim Cuisine & I’d drop half a stone no problem. Still regular aerobics & walking/cycling. Moved to U.S. for a year, all went to pot, ate all the shite & came back a stone heavier & out of exercise mode. Alone, I comfort ate crap & nights out were booze fuelled with an Indian meal at least twice a week. Late 90s, new bloke, lots of pub meals & restaurants, very, very, deeply unhappy, food was a drug and armour. I piled weight on, haven’t really recovered weight-wise, despite being extremely nutritionally aware now. I eat extremely healthily now, very clean, nothing processed except milk & cheese.

Cereal or toast.
School lunch primary school the same that had been on offer since the 70’s chicken fricasee, cheese flan, cottage pie, curry with sultanas then turkey drummers and beans occasionally. Semolina, rice pudding, marble cake and chocolate custard, jelly etc for pud.
Secondary chips, pizza, turkey twizzlers, jacket potato, curly fries,
Dinner 3p beans and cheap white bread from aldi, crispy pancakes, jacket potato with beans and cheese, marmite toastie.

At grandparents meat and 2 veg and fruit crumble.

Stuffed peppers. Occasionally steamed veg pudding until the day mum made sweet pudding without thinking with the usual veg.

Also, snacking between meals was an alien concept to me - it never occurred to me.

I was in my late teens/twenties.. toast n tuna, tuna sandwiches, macaroni cheese with tuna n sweetcorn (used to make a big pot of this on a Monday which would last til Thursday)! Loadsa fruit especially apples, shredded wheat and weetabix. Ate 2 loaded salad rolls everyday for lunch at work, usually with tuna and salad cream lol.
As it was the 90s was out out 4 nights at weekend.. so it was bacardi n coke or beer, Silk Cut and chicken pakora from recently opened first kebab shop in home town. Smith's cheese n pickle crisps, KP Worcester sauce crisps, Riley's tomato or pickled onion crisps (I miss decent crisps). Big breakfast on a Sunday washed down with lashings of lovely irn-bru with full sugar! (Damn you sugar tax!! 😢)
Lush diet and I was healthy size 10! Those were the days! 😋

Everything in my house came out the freezer when I was growing up in the 90's. Vegetables, meat, whole meals. It hasn't done me much good though, I'm useless at cooking and I've no idea how to freeze fresh food and defrost it. I can only buy freezer stuff if it's designed to be shoved straight in the oven.

We'd have things like frozen chips, crispy pancakes, chicken Kiev's. I think I had a cheese roll for lunch the whole way through primary school! Also a lot of Mac Donald's at the weekend. I don't eat MacD anymore. Think the Big Mac every weekend for a number of years actually put me off, they were bigger then I think. There used to be an offer of BOGOF on the back of the local car park parking tickets so my family used to treat everyone to a Big Mac as that was the biggest thing on there. Wow how we lived

Teen. I ate a couple of sandwiches around 3 PM, dinner, fruit and some sweets. I hated brealfast and was too lazy to make sandwiches in the morning to take to school with me. Had a better weight than now though....

Fat was the eny, nobody ccared about carbs.

*enemy

I was a teen. My mum didn’t / doesn’t cook so it was all frozen micro meals for me. Usually beef curry, Sweet and sour chicken, chicken supreme, macaroni cheese, cottage pie etc. It was always from Asda as they had a huge selection and good deals - something like 5 meals for £3.50 or £4.
Cereal and cheese toasties also made regular appearances as that was all I could cook for myself (never taught how to cook back then).
Lunch was a ham sandwich, bottle of juice (usually Robinson’s summer fruits) and I would buy a cup of soup from the canteen to go with it. (It cost 28p).
Takeaway was alway Chinese and usually a chicken curry, fried rice and prawn crackers.
We always had plenty of crisps and chocolate biscuits in the cupboard.

On a rare occasion my mum would ‘cook’ Bolognese (mince and Dolmio) and that was a treat. She would always serve it with spaghetti and tortilla wraps for some reason though.

Ciabattas were very in - as were sun dried tomatoes. Remember feeling very sophisticated eating them!

In the early ‘90s, I was at uni and in a house share. We took turns cooking veggie from books like Anna Thomas’s The Vegetarian Epicure (one of my former housemates recently remembered our typical dinners as “things on pasta or rice”). We borrowed a friendly professor’s car to stock up on 24-packs of cheap beer in cans, drank tap water, and knew the cheapest things to order when we hung out for hours at the cafe/bar on campus (grilled cheese sandwich and chamomile tea for me).

Once I started working full time and had a bit more money, my focus shifted from “cheapest possible” to “cheap and convenient”. I worked for a US investment bank for a few years and they bought us lunch (ordered in for delivery - we had a choice of about 5 menus) every day - bliss! My favourite place had huge main-dish salads and you could choose exactly what you wanted from dozens of ingredients. It only occurred to me later that yes, we were also working through lunch every day with no extra pay. We also went out to eat with clients a lot and the company paid, so I ate a lot of salmon, scampi, and scallops (colleagues appreciated the steak, but I was/am pescatarian) and drank a lot of comped cosmopolitans, greyhounds, and martinis in those days! I had a flatmate who considered himself a bit of a mixologist and made weird cocktails at home on the weekends - I remember balalaikas, grasshoppers, manhattans, and frozen mudslides. I also remember sushi being our favourite splurge for non-work meals out.

By the end of the decade, close to thirtyish and “nesting” in London, I was actively avoiding eating dinners out. A toasted bagel and coffee or a smoothie on the fly for breakfast and sandwich-salad-soup for lunch were fine, but dinner at home was sacrosanct. By the early-mid ‘00s, Donna Hay-style cookbooks ( New Food Fast ) were my bible, and a < £10 bottle of drinkable wine was the holy grail.

Looking back, I think the biggest difference was that we relied a lot more on physical experience and word of mouth or on what was around us and we didn’t have - or at least, didn’t fully use and didn’t take for granted - the whole world of possibilities now available through the internet.

Fish fingers, chips, waffles, sausage casserole, beans on toast with coleslaw, green ketchup, loads of ketchup and a shit ton of milk and angel delight.

Let's take 1996. I was mid-teens

Breakfast

Cereal (anything from Shredded Wheat or Ready Brek to Golden Grahams or Frosties - although sugary cereals were generally reserved for school holidays)

Toast - butter and marmalade. Maybe two pieces. Mighty White bread.

Lunch

A school packed lunch would be sandwich (ham or cheese & marmite), packet of crisps (Frisps were may favourites), yogurt (Fruit Corner) and a chocolate biscuit like a Penguin.

Dinner
Either homemade Chilli / Cottage Pie etc. or a quick oven meal like Fidus Crispy Pancakes or Bernard Matthews Mini Kievs with chips and beans. Pudding might be Hot Lemon Crunch or Jamaica Ginger cake and custard.

First half was still at school/living at home so Mr Brains pork f***s, Uncle Ben's sauces, chicken tonight ( honey & mustard), home made deep fat fryer chips, omelette, chops. 2nd half of 90's was a student with a kitchen shared with 8 others so lots of macaroni cheese, omelette and toasted sandwiches and things that could be cooked in microwave but on a student budget.

Cheese on toast. Baked potato with cheese, maybe beans or broccoli. Eggs with spinach. Spag bol. Savoury crepes were a favourite. chicken soup. Sandwiches or a tuna bap for lunch. Coffee and a fag for breakfast, until I started having children.