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....

Mid 90s I was in secondary school and my diet was dreadful. I drank nothing but Pepsi all day long, breakfast was a ring doughnut and chocolate hedgehog, lunch usually pizza and chips, I'd eat 3 chocolate bars and a bag of crisps on the way home from school. Evening meal was often freezer food (crispy pancakes, chicken kiev, ready meals), sausage/egg/chips or sometimes a home cooked spag bol.
Nowadays, a typical day is porridge for breakfast, soup for lunch, home cooked dinner (carbonara, chicken salad, cottage pie). I snack on yoghurt, fruit, nuts, mini cheddars and cold meats. I drink water, cups of tea and coffee and have a g&t or glass of wine most evenings.

I lived on chocolate, diet coke, cranberry juice and tuna ready meals through my tweens. Was always a size 10. Started cooking as I turned 30 and now a size 14

I feel like tuna & sweetcorn, Silk Cut, Hooch and pop tarts were my teen 90s

Findus crispy pancakes, potato smiles and haunted house spaghetti 😆

Breakfast was either start breakfast cereal, Readybrek with brown sugar, cheese and ketchup on toast, or brown sauce on toast. Always a glass of Five Alive. Occasional scrambled egg on toast or bacon sandwich at the weekend.

Lunch, I had short stint of school dinners, don’t remember them being great, square pizza with onions, tinned hot dogs in rolls, mystery meat roast, greasy sausage rolls with spaghetti hoops, frozen croquette potatoes, fish fingers, fishcakes, turkey dinosaurs and beans. I did like the iced buns or classic bars for pud. Clearly my school dinners were pre Jamie Oliver.

For the majority of time I was at school I had packed lunches, starting with cheese and pickle sandwiches, petit filous, penguin, grapes after about 4 years i branched out a bit and occasionally had tuna and seafood sauce with tuna or ham and lettuce. Sometimes a packet of hula hoops, salt and vinegar crisps or skips. Always a raw carrot or Granny Smith for break.

On a Saturday always a trip to the local bakery for French sticks, and we were each allowed to pick a cake/biscuit. Always served with a cheese board with grapes, celery, branston pickle, and pickled onions.

Saturday evening usually something on toast. Beans, eggs, spaghetti hoops etc.

Sunday lunch always a roast with at least three often more veg. Followed by crumble and custard, apple pie and custard, danish apple bar and ice cream.

Sunday tea time always fresh bread with butter and jam or marmite. Tomatoes and cucumber, sometimes ham and mustard. Then a homemade cake or scones.

Weekday evenings were pretty standard homemade meals, spaghetti bolognaise, lasagne, cottage pie, curry and rice, chicken chasseur, usually with peas, carrots, green beans, or salad. Also quiche, pork chops, beef casserole, coq au vin, cauliflower cheese none of which I liked. Stew type things often served with jacket potatoes (never ate the skin) or new potatoes. Occasionally chicken and breadcrumbs, fish fingers, oven chips or pizza but other than that not much prepared. Veg was definitely more of a side dish rather than the star of the show as I tend to make it now.

Occasionally fish and chips or take away pizza but pretty rare. Tended to eat out quite a lot though mainly at Brewers Fayre, Beefeater type places or the local pub.

Very few fizzy drinks, we did have sweets and chocolate now and then. But snacking not big.

Kid in the 90's
Breakfast - ready brek in winter (with syrup if we could wrangle it), healthy cereals sadly like sugar free muesli so I usually didn't bother.

School, sausage rolls for break, they were amazing and cost 20p. Potato scallops when I had never come across before or since, basically a HUGE ball of potato, deep fried in batter. Delicious. Floppy pizza from being under the heat lamp.

Lunches, if out and about always a home made picnic, never food bought out. Ham sandwich with that sandwich (picnic?) spread stuff which is clearly vile but also delicious to me in a nostalgic sense! If we ever needed to stop at a Little Chef to eat it was literally amazing. Happy Water was even better due to the coke floats.

Dinner, parents were good cooks when they weren't going through some random health food fad, however they were time poor. Weekday meals, chops and veg, frey bentos pie (came in a tin, WTF?!), smash, findus crispy pancakes. I preferred the ready meals to the boring meat and 2 veg.

Special mention for angel delight, amazing.

Pivotal food moment - I can still remember the first time I ate focaccia - boyfriend had middle class parents 😂 it would take me until the 00's before I learned about dipping it in oil and balsamic vinegar! The glamour of it all!

Daily diet of mini BusySittingDown:

Primary school, early 90s:

Breakfast - coco pops or a chocolate pop tart with a cup of coffee with milk and one sugar.

Morning snack - crisps.

Lunch - either cheese spread or corned beef on white bread, a yogurt and a penguin biscuit with a flask full of orange cordial.

After school snack - mum used to bring me sweets everyday from the corner shop when she picked me up. Usually a tube of smarties or packet of rollos.

Tea - Chips or over boiled potatoes, sausages and tinned processed peas.

Supper - pop tart or cereal and coffee one sugar.

As a teen was pretty much the same but my lunches changed from packed lunch to hot dinners at high school, so I had:

Oven chips, Turkey drummers and gravy for main, a slab of cake for afters and a can of dandilion and burdock! This was most days for 5 years. The Turkey drummer was interchangeable with sausage, sausage roll or cheese and onion pasty.

Hardly a fruit nor vegetable in sight, it's a wonder I didn't get rickets 😂. Terrible diet!

Oh turkey drummers!! I can literally taste the memory of them 🤣

Does anyone remember how disgusting ‘pizza’ was in the early 90s? You could only buy it frozen and it was horrible. My mum used to sometimes give it to us with oven chips and baked beans. Or there was Pizza Hut but their pizzas have always been rank - they still are. I thought I hated pizza for years because of it, then tried it again in the early 2000s (good old Pizza Express) and realised how nice it was.

Same for curry. I’d only ever experienced it as an insipid lean cuisine meal until the early 2000s.

@Runningquestion, I think that was a place/family thing, rather than a time one. I remember eating at Pizza Express in the 1980s, and going to the local Indian restaurant, and while Pizza Express didn't become a national chain until the 1990s, there were plenty of family run Italian restaurants.

@Runningquestion god yes they were revolting. I was a teen and our family didn’t have money to go to restaurants so I only experienced the awful ‘french bread pizza’ think it was by findus and was frozen. Definitely a lot of the processed crap we still eat today started off in the 90s.

I was veggie so beanfeasts, pasta n sauce, veggie fingers or cauliflower cheese grills. Food out would usually be the veggie menu staple of veg lasagne
Also greggs cheese pasties and dairy Lea dunkers

At school I always had sandwich, crisps, apple and juice carton.

At home chicken stir fry, pasta carbonara, turkey fillets, chicken with sauce and rice, chicken with salad and crusty bread. Thinking about it, very little red meat. At weekends roast dinners with grandparents and often a pub or cafe lunch out.