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....

I was a kid in the 90s in northern Ireland and we had a lot of potatoes. Potatoes, beans and sausage, potatoes beans and bacon. Champ (potatoes and onion), potatoes, roast chicken and veg. Sometimes beans on toast, or egg on toast. Very very occasionally we would have chilli or curry and rice, and pasta was a posh treat (that my mum had no idea how to cook), or a goodfellas pizza.

I moved abroad for a bit in early 2000s and I remember telling people I was allergic to potatoes because I was sick of them by then!

I was vegetarian and my diet was actually pretty good. The 90s was the decade when it became much, much easier to be veggie.

At the start I was still buying specialist products from health food stores like Beanfeast, sosmix, sizzles, Tartex - I drew the line at Nutolene though.

As the decade worn on it changed, Italian food was really fashionable, quorn appeared in the shops, supermarkets carried veggie ranges and I no longer had to ring ahead to restaurants to check if they could cater for me.

I'll gloss over the Thunderbird ......

And to answer your question it's a completely different story today - all home cooked proper food, plenty of vegetarian meals and getting our 5 a day! You might even say I grew up

Paninis! They were all the rage in the late 90s.

Ha- forgot about those. They were, as was Ali G. My cousin once asked for a "ham and cheese punani" by accident when v drunk.

@NeverRTFT Oh yes, I totally forgot about my "1 pot noodle a day" diet phase.

I know people worry about the impact of SM on girls growing up now but I actually think it's better than magazine culture- there's more diversity of body types on SM at least and there are people calling out body shaming in all its forms.

I was a vegetarian child/pre-teen/teen (still am veggie) in the 90s. If we went out for a pub meal I had cheese sandwich and chips (no idea whether it was actually on the menu). The sandwich was white sliced bread cut into four triangles arranged pointy side up and adorned with some cress.

I ate a lot of frozen cheese and tomato baguette pizzas from the co-op. Drank Sunny-D. Frozen ice cream snickers (not an ice cream, but an actual snickers bar with ice cream inside, can you still get them 🤔).

In the later 90s and early 00s I had a weekend job in a pub waitressing. I did Sundays and the menu was:
Starters: soup, melon, fruit juice (a small glass of orange, apple or pineapple from the bar), prawn cocktail (in an ice cream sundae glass with little toast triangles), pâté or a plate of Yorkshire puddings with gravy.
Mains: beef, lamb, pork or chicken or any combination of meats, with the usual trimmings. Can’t remember there being any other option or anything veggie.
Puddings: sticky toffee, chocolate sponge, jam sponge, spotted dick etc with either custard, cream or ice cream.

Not much of it was homemade.

Egg and chips mostly . But also fish finger sandwiches, fishcake sandwiches, fried egg sandwiches, toad in the hole, mince and dumplings, veg soup, sunday roast, liver and onions, waffles with egg and beans or potato croquettes/smiley faces with tinned spaghetti.
A treat would be a curry or pizza on someones birthday. Rarely had mcdonals, that was also considered a treat.
Mum always had awful cheap choc ices in the freezer, raspberry mousse pots and ice pops/cups.
We used to make cream soda by chucking some ice cream into a cup of lemonade and would run in from playing outside to put butter and sugar on bread, or we would put salad cream on bread which I used to think was delicious

I was a vegetarian and had a very small appetite. I lived on findus cheese crispy pancakes, packet pasta (cheese and broccoli), lots of corn on the cobs, jacket potatoes, cawl (Welsh stew, but with no meat), French onion soup, toffee popcorn, primula cheese (the stuff in tubes!), jam sandwiches and chocolate nesquick, tons of biscuits and lemon sorbet. I ate a vegetable cup a soup and a bread roll for lunch every day at comprehensive school because it was the cheapest meal (35p) so I had the rest of my money to spend in the shop next to the school. A rare eat out dinner was a pizza restaurant.

Jacket spuds, supernoodles and baguettes mostly while in uni.
After I graduated I enjoyed cooking. I remember doing lots of from-scratch curries, coq au vin, stir fry dishes etc. Basically very similar food to now, the only difference being the availability of foods from different countries.

I also remember having a lot of those cheap frozen fish packets that had sauce in them. Or mashed potato with corned beef mixed in.

I was a university at the start of the decade, where I lived on crisp sandwiches and alcohol. Then I was in London living on white wine and crisps. With a fair few lovely restaurant meals and gastro pub meals thrown in. I probably started my cook book obession and experimented with Delia, Nigella and I remember have the River Cafe Book too for dinner parties. Every so often I went on the Atkins diet and ate ham. I don't really remember sitting down and eating meals really. We ate out alot.

My ds was born in 1999 and my dd in 2000 so I embraced Annabel Karmel and started cooking proper family meals from then.

Inadvertently, a lot of horse meat

I got married in 1991 and became a mother in the 90's.

Chilli, spag bol, cottage pie, pastas, casseroles, pizza, roasts, steak and chops, fresh fish (salmon fillets had just become plentiful), stuffed peppers, ratatouille, pies, occasional deli meal, occasional barbecue, liver and bacon (dc won't eat it), salad, fresh fruit and veg, omelette. I made more ornate puddings if we had people to dinner: mille feuilles, roulade, chocolate bombs etc, pavlova, summer pudding, etc. Nowadays they might get strawberries, good ice cream and a flake

I'd say the only thing that has changed is that we sometimes now have grilled halloumi or a baked camembert as part of a meal.

To be fair my repertoire could do with updating a bit - perhaps when I retire.

Crisps, lots and lots of delicious fat ridden crisps.
I’d kill for a bag of old style Monster Munch, they were so greasy that the flavour would stick to them so much….

Roast every Sunday
Meat, potatoes and 2 veg every night
Occasional it was something (fish fingers, crispy pancakes, egg) and chips or spag bol/cottage pie.
Rarely any puddings, chocolate or sweets.

I was a student in the early 90s. I was little bit overweight so stuck to heavily carb based meals, which was the ‘healthy choice’ then. This now makes me so sad and angry for my poor young self! Of course I didn’t lose weight. Quite the opposite.

I can remember pasta pesto, a lot. Enormous baked potatoes with a small amount of cottage cheese. I lived in halls my first year at uni and we had catered meals which seemed like a throwback to the 50s: cooked in-house, lots of salads and veg, balanced with fish, meat and veggie options, homemade soup every day and chips only once in a while. People complained, but we were lucky.

Then I shared with friends. Delia’s Summer and Winter collections came out, so we cooked from those. Some of the recipes in them were really new and interesting: halloumi, what’s that? I remember my flatmate looking for limes for a recipe, which seemed a bit exotic.

I moved to London in 95 and then all I can remember is alcohol… we drank at lunchtime, at work, in the evening, all the time,

Actually, thinking hard, it was quick food at home: stir fries, pasta, toast and hummus, and out: Chinatown, Pollo in Soho, Wagamama by the British Museum (queues), the West End Kitchen (three courses under a fiver) and other cheap places. I was skint. Borough Market was just getting going in its current foodie form and you could have a full meal of free tasters. Big chunks of pie, cheese, sausage etc.

By the late 90s there was Nigel Slater and How to Eat by Nigella. My friends all seemed to be foodies, and one gave up his job to become a chef. I had been brought up cooking from scratch at home, with lots of cookbooks, so I never really was into fast food. To this day I’ve only been to McDonalds a handful of times.

A lot less variety of veg. Peas, carrots and broccoli were the mainstays, my mum rarely bought peppers, squash, aubergine, kale,

Less variety of fruit: mainly apples, bananas and satsumas, plums & strawberries in season. Almost never anything like mango.

Fewer sweets - these days every single shop sells sweets, they are at the till in top shop, every off license has a few.

Chops. For some reason my parents bought lamb or pork chops quite a bit (cheap maybe?) I remember them being tough and hard work.

We hardly ever cooked anything at home except meat & 2 veg or something and chips. We didn't do anything like the variety of cuisines, we didn't do thai or middle eastern type foods etc and while we might have bought takeaway curry my mum didn't make it herself.

I was following the Rosemary Conley Hip and Thigh Diet so whatever I ate, it was 4% fat or less.

I was a child in the 90s so I mainly remember ham sandwiches and pick and mix on a Saturday. Cereal with the toy inside. Roast dinner every Sunday. Dip dabs from the tuck shop on Fridays after school. Dinners were mainly spag bol, chicken/pork chops with veg and potato, casserole. We hardly ever ate out - maybe a couple of times a year and that was it!

I ate a lot of crumpets. With melted cheese.
Coco pops for breakfast. Dinner was pork chops and potato. I feel like I had that everyday but that can't be true.

My favourite thing aged about 15 so mid 90s would be to buy a tub of taramasalata and toast some crumpets and dip them in. While watching Friends on VHS from Blockbuster. Such good times.

Late 90s I was a student so I'd eat oven food, potato waffle sandwiches, tinned hot dogs or sandwiches from the campus shop.
And much alcohol.

I was vegetarian, now vegan so a bit different. I always ate fairly healthy at home, but lots of junk food when out will friends. I definitely eat healthier now.

Square Sausages, frozen potato hula hoops, turkey dinosaurs, potatoe fritters and Mr brain faggots.
Snack wise Discos (the star shaped one's)
Rocky chocolate bars, wagon wheels, pop tarts and crappy mouse ice cream things lol
I do miss growing up in the 90s

Sunny D. Beanfeast. Sosmix. Doll noodles (wonton)

Very similar to what I eat now, I was probably a bit more ambitious in my cooking those days - I was married in 1988 and it was a time when 'entertaining' (often called 'kitchen suppers' ) was popular... I had all the Delia books but to be honest I still use them and make the same old recipes.

Pretty much what we eat now, except we eat more vegetarian/vegan meals, and more Asian dishes.

I have always cooked Indian and Chinese dishes, but didn't really do Thai or Korean meals back then as they weren't really a "thing" and ingredients weren't readily available. I didn't eat sushi back then either, but do now.