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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To ask what you ate in the 90s?

263 replies

Caligal · 16/07/2021 01:37

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....

OP posts:
SchrodingersImmigrant · 16/07/2021 10:46

I was a kid so not much choice in the matter. I lived off veg and fruit a lot because we grew a lot. And there were really no ready meals etc. Meat and veg, dumplings, saucy dishes like goulash, roasts, bbqs in a summer.
Sourdough type bread with butter, sliced tomatoes and bit of salt was my fave dinner in a summer

Essentialironingwater · 16/07/2021 10:54

We had au pairs who fed us on a diet of tortellini, baked bean pizzas (anyone remember those), oven chips, tuna pasta neopolitan (one of the Schwartz powder sachets you added milk and tomato paste, tuna and pasta to).

At weekends my dad would make moules mariniere, duck with orange sauce etc. Family weeknight meals when parents were around were spag bol, curry etc. My dad is North African so salad and bread with every meal as standard. I remember getting teased for having houmous in my lunchbox!

Essentialironingwater · 16/07/2021 10:56

Oh and on Saturdays we often got a rotisserie chicken with a French stick and salad! I'm veggie now but remember that fondly. Lashings of mayo!

Puddings were angel delight or tinned fruit in jelly on some sort of sponge flan base, or neopolitan ice cream (fighting for anything that wasn't vanilla).

Livpool · 16/07/2021 10:57

Findus Cripsy Pancakes with boiled potatoes followed by homemade cherry pie and ice cream. I am sure my mum fed me other things but that is what I remember

EsmeraldasTambourine · 16/07/2021 11:07

Chicken chasseur...doesn't taste the same these days!

JudgeJ · 16/07/2021 11:08

As someone who had teenage'20s children in the '90s it's like reading about the '60s and '70s, not the '90s! FIndus crispy pancake,, Sunny D, I don't recall those in the '90s, OH love crispy pancakes on the early '70s.

JudgeJ · 16/07/2021 11:09

@RampantIvy

If this thread is representative of how people ate it is no wonder we have an obesity problem.
I don't recognise a lot of this from the '90s at all!
MotionActivatedDog · 16/07/2021 11:11

Sunny D was definitely in the 90’s because my sister guzzled it by the gallon and brought herself out in hives! I also remember lots of talk of people turning “orange” from drinking it Grin

JudgeJ · 16/07/2021 11:11

@LemonRoses

are e sure we’re talking he 90s here? I can’t think of any families who ate some of these things as their regular diet. Can't think my children were ever offered bread and butter when they went to friends houses for lunch or supper. Where was this happening? Feels like a post war time warp.
Thank goodness it's not just me, I don't recognise most of these things at all! Someone never had a curry until '99???
SchrodingersImmigrant · 16/07/2021 11:16

I really surprised at how super process lots of the british diet was tbh.

Crowsaregreat · 16/07/2021 11:23

Late 90s I think was when bigger supermarkets opened, big Tescos popping up everywhere. We had a lot of fresh pasta as it seemed very fancy - stuffed or fresh tagliatelle with ready made sauce. Lots of frozen pizza and garlic bread too.

ToffeePenniesAreTheBest · 16/07/2021 11:52

Too many sweets. We went to the tuck shop in school almost every day. I was slim as a child though, in spite of that. Not so now sadly.

A lot of fruit. I'm not the biggest fan of most fruit now though do eat it sometimes but I prefer vegetables. I used to eat it by the ton as a child. We were never out of the local fruit and veg shop which also functioned as an Italian deli. Apples were a regular, bananas, melon, grapes, kiwi and I used to devour lychees and kumquats by the bag when they were available. I shudder to think what I cost my poor family in fruit. I also used to eat sticks of rhubarb dipped in a little sugar.

I was also obsessed with seafood. I still am. My Father would regularly bring back mussels, prawns or winkles from a market and we'd work our way through the whole bag.

I wasn't much of a breakfast eater but it was usually porridge, Wheetabix or cornflakes. Sometimes poached or scrambled eggs on toast. I did occasionally have Frosties, Sugar puffs or Start but generally I preferred porridge.

We ate a lot of Italian type dishes. The local Italian deli owners used to give my Gran recipes for authentic Italian food. The lasagne was amazing but so rich that you could only have a tiny piece. We also had a lot of stir fries, fajitas, beef stroganoff, curries,chilli, macaroni cheese, chicken salad etc. We ate a lot of roasted Mediterranean vegetables as a side.

We're Scottish so we had mince, potatoes and vegetables at times or steak pie. Sundays were usually homemade soup(Lentil, vegetable, Tuscan bean, minestrone, chicken noodle or spicy cannellini bean and tomato) and pudding.

We regularly ate out. Usually Chinese or Indian. Sometimes Italian, pizza or a burger place. I usually only went to McDonalds with my cousins or for a party. Takeaway was usually Indian. Usually Tandoori chicken. Occasionally fish and chips.

I'm getting hungry now.

VienneseWhirligig · 16/07/2021 11:57

Whatever my mum fancied from the Rosemary Conley book or Weightwatchers usually. It was a decade where she struggled a bit to shed baby weight and wasn't about to cook different things for everyone so we ate what she ate. It was always tasty though to be fair.

ToffeePenniesAreTheBest · 16/07/2021 12:01

Also this was the late '80s but I was thinking the other day of how good the food was at nursery school.

We took turns to set the tables. We often had soup, real homemade soup, to start. Then real food with plenty of veg for main. We occasionally had fish and chips but that was processed as the food got. One particular dish I remember was a peanut butter beef stew. It was amazing. I wish I had the recipe now. We didn't often have dessert. It was usually just fruit though occasionally we got a piece of loaf cake that our teachers had made. Usually containing fruit in some form.

They used to take us to a cafe once a month or so and buy us all a packet of Meanies crisps while they had coffee. It seems a little odd now but I guess it was the cheapest option.

This was in the East End of Glasgow.

AnxiousWeirdo · 16/07/2021 12:05

My diet is far better now than it was in the 90s ..or even 00s. Hotdogs noodles and beans mixed up in a bowl was a staple for us 🤮 we didn't have puddings or desert but I did eat a lot of sweets from the shop

Aroundtheworldin80moves · 16/07/2021 12:09

My childhood.

Breakfast was a bowl of cereal, slice of toast and jam, milk when youngest turning into tea as we got older.

Break time at school... something like a kit kat or Penguin.

Packed lunch... sandwich, crisps, fruit, carton of juice. (Definitely no salad)

After school... home made cake

Dinner...
Roast on Sundays
Leftover roast on Mondays
Tuesday/Wednesday.. stuff like chicken Kiev, gammon steak, mince and potatoes, spaghetti bolognese, stew... made at weekends, reheated during the week
Thursday .. salad.
Friday... fish. Cod in parsley sauce, or fish and chips
Saturday... stew, bolognese, toad in the hole etc but freshly made (with portions for the freezer).

My parents still use this dinner pattern. They don't understand why we don't have a roast every week or fish every Friday (or that we might have fish on a different day!!!)

Nothing spicy. Takeaways rare. McDonald's was an occasional lunch treat if I went shopping with my mum or friends.

IntermittentParps · 16/07/2021 12:20

I was a student in the mid-90s and have few food memories.
My best friend and I used to carb-load on Pasta n Sauce before going clubbing.
Pakora or chips at about 4am on the way home.
I sometimes went to some cheap pasta restaurant or other, the kinds that has an unlimited salad bar.
I'd have a Mars or Snickers and dreadful machine coffee in those scalding-hot plastic cups that caved in when you held them, in the student cafe.
I remember tea and custard creams being produced by a friend on the (rare) occasions I actually did some studying.

That's about it Confused I don't really know how I survived. I basically largely consumed alcohol and speed.

emilylily · 16/07/2021 12:23

I was a young child and my Mum mostly just made home cooked, healthy food- things like spaghetti (carbonara, bolognese, a special pasta dish named after our favourite place), nut loaf, fish and potatoes with occasional fish fingers/chicken nuggets. My absolute favourite was a restaurant dinner of sausages, chips and beans though with Appletiser-("in a little bottle with a straw, please") to drink. None of that stuff is really exclusive to the 90s though.

I remember other kids having really exciting lunchbox foods (crisps that they don't make any longer; lollies etc.) but we were just given a sandwich and a bottle of water!

If anyone had a hospital appointment we'd go to McDonalds afterwards and we had McDonald's pizzas in the 1990s as we were avoiding BSE-beef!

Youdiditanyway · 16/07/2021 12:29

I didn't eat an aubergine until I went to university.

Same. Ditto hummus, asparagus, chickpeas, tofu, olives and weirdly mince pies (Mum hated them so wouldn’t buy them).

Forgot about tinned meatballs, definitely had them every week. I don’t even eat meat now, the thought of tinned meatballs makes my stomach turn! It’s like dog food. My mum would cook corned beef hash once a month and I’d dread it when I smelt it, hated corned beef.

Astraturf · 16/07/2021 12:33

I was a vegetarian teenager and ate a lot of rice stir fries and cauliflower cheese with added veggies at home.
When I was at school I had an apple for breakfast and salad for lunch. I was very skinny!

40somethingJBJ · 16/07/2021 12:35

I was a teen in the 90’s. When I lived at home, we always had cereal for breakfast, sandwich and a bag of crisis for lunch, and an evening meal which was always done combination of meat, potatoes (chips/boiled/mashed) and veg. Very little snacking and no “foreign” food, as my dad was very set in his ways, although my mum enjoyed a jar of Uncle Ben’s sweet and sour occasionally!

When I left home, my meals got more adventurous and I ate a lot of chilli, pasta, pizza etc.

Crankley · 16/07/2021 12:41

The same as I ate in the late '40s, '50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and today - English food.

malteasergeezer · 16/07/2021 12:45

I didn't really eat. I was too busy going out, being hedonistic and being far too thin. 45 kg to be precise Sad

chocolateorangeinhaler · 16/07/2021 12:56

My mother discovered birds eye pan flair in the 90s. She had started working full time so we ended up having it quite often.
It wasn't that bad as I remember and was safe enough for teenagers to cook without destroying the kitchen.
My mum was a bit old school so we usually had some form of meat with two veg. Potatoes came from a big paper sack kept in a cool porch are we're almost always boiled. The smell of boiling potatoes makes me want to vomit these days.

goldenlilliesdaffodillies · 16/07/2021 12:56

I ate a lot of pot noodles, chocolate hob nobs and dark bounty chocolate bars (student in the 90's!).

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