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 I used to have cheese and beans for lunch in the school canteen on a Monday, which cost 50p. It left me enough lunch money to go and buy a new single at our price. A jacket potato was £1 so that would have been too pricey!

I was a young teen in late 90’s. Extremely fussy with food - not so much now

School lunches - bread roll plain or ham, yogurt , fruit , crackers with butter , soup , chocolate muffin maybe once a week!

Dinners were mashed potatoes/ beans / sausage
Roast chicken dinner, chicken al a king , spaghetti bolognese, pizza , lasagne , chicken broccoli, Irish stew , basically that’s it .
My mum is an amazing cook and absolutely love her food, I honestly don’t know how she put up with me🙈

When out with friends I would always have McDonald’s- burger happy meal !
Only started to eat an actual cheeseburger when I was 16 and a Big Mac at 19!
Unfortunately I now love Big Macs too much

I went from newly married to having 2 young children to becoming a lone parent in that decade!
For economic reasons lots of mince made into bolognaise or chilli, veg stews, egg and pasta based dishes
Various curries including vegetarian
I made home made soups and used slow cooker for things like sausage and bean casseroles, corned beef hash
we ate rabbit, heart, liver, kidneys too
Did a lot of home baking, rice pudding and pancakes were cheap and filling

I was late teens / early twenties. I don't think my diet has changed as much as some people's! I've always cooked - and been overweight.

Breakfast
Toast / cereal- same now

Lunch
Various sandwiches or salads - same now but some different ingredients now eg falafel, avocado

Snacks
Tea and cakes - now coffee and cake. Coffee is better, cakes are better!

Dinner
Stir fry,pasta, curry, some traditional things like pie, roast, lasagne. More variety now with attempts at Thai and Mexican food and some ingredients like couscous I wouldn't have had then.

I was a kid and ate ham sandwiches, biscuits, pasta, pizza, "chicken supreme" with rice and peas, lots of fruit, cottage pie, casserole, roast dinner, spag bol. My mum was a good cook and pretty much always made our meals from scratch.

Pasta, jacket potato, cereal - my student years. And I worked at Pizza Hut 1992-1999 so a shed load of pizza.

I was a student and my diet was Smash, toast (with marmite for breakfast or sliced hot dogs, melted cheese, ketchup and mustard for lunch), fried egg sandwiches, pesto pasta, instant savoury rice and pink Snapple.

Wow, that looks horrendous written down!

Student, day consisted of

Breakfast - one egg on thin slice white toast
Lunch - coffee and cigarettes
Dinner - vegey burger and salad smothered in salad cream
Evening - copious alcohol finishing night off with cheesy chips

I had a lollipop head at the time! I could eat that food in one sitting now and it wouldn't touch the sides!!

Ecstasy

Half a packet of cigarettes that I bought with my friend for 1pound. With the rest of my dinner money 3 packets of Space Raiders.

I wonder why I was thin?

Highly processed but not much take away.

Breakfast would be cereal or toast, I'd mostly munch on chocolate or chips for lunch, occasionally a sandwhch or baked potato or soup if I was feeling 'healthy'.

Dinner was for the most part deep fried and had some sort of potato accompaniment. On the rare occasions we had pasta or rice, it would be served with chips.

Drinks would be pop (ay home) or squash or milk (at school). Bizarrely we were expected to go all day at school with only a tiny glass of squash at lunch and no other drink. I spent most of my childhood complaining of thirst.

I was 5 year old at the beginning of the 90's.

Pot noodles, bread, donuts, so much Coca Cola! Findus pancakes, homemade chips in a chip pan, anything with beans. Basically a diet processed to within an inch of its life 😂. But it's ok because my mum always had the fruit bowl full (I still don't eat fruit very often). Needless to say my mum, like her mum before her, has type 2 diabetes and struggles with her health every day, and I left home without a single clue how to cook beyond sticking something in the oven to heat up. I wanted better for my child and learned how to cook properly.

Supernoodle butties.

Half a lager with lime x 10. Followed by a donor kebab

Teen in 90s.

Panda pop
Crisps
Penguin bars/clubs
Squash
So many muller light yoghurts. When there were loads of flavours.
Pasta sauce from a jar (assume mum didn’t realise/notice it is mostly sugar back then)
Jacket potatoes
Quiche

I also remember chicken tonight. It was awful.

My sister lived on pot noodles for a while I seem to recall.

Dinners consisted of things like Chicken Tonight, spag bol, risotto, chilli and casserole. A treat was Findus Crispy Pancakes and potato waffles. Used to drink lots of Sunny Delight and Tizer and spend my pocket money on Fuse bars and quarters of bon bons.

In the nineties exH and I we were post-doc pre-kids.
We had an oven with a timer so set stuff up in the morning to eat st 8 ish when we got home.
Plate pie with jacket potato and beans
Casserole and baked potato (I used to work wonders with frozen cubed lamb, frozen 'stew pack veggies' and a can of homepride 'cook in' barbecue sauce.
Kievs made with chopped and shaped meat (never managed to eat one again after being pregnant)
Quiche
Steak and chips
bangers and mash
1001 cabbage recipes.
Curries
Takeaway burgers
I did a cool Thing with a whole roast celeriac in the 90s, but not sure anyone appreciated the genius until Jamie Oliver did something similar 10 years later

I remember cooking which seemed to mostly involve using tins of soup as a sauce .

A coffee bar opened opposite our office and I remember us oohing with excitement at the board with the pronunciations written out so we'd carefully order a cah-puh-cinno or a lat-tay.

Mexican restaurants were also very popular- I ate and made fajitas quite often.

I was 18 in 1990, so mainly vodka and cigarettes!

We were largely veggie students, because of money, would buy all the veg at the end of the Saturday market and make pasta bake, veggie curry etc through the week. Also worked at a restaurant, so ate there about three times a week.

When I started work, there was a canteen, so ate there. Gorgeous quiches and pies and many chips. At home I'd have a pot of marg, a loaf of bread and a block of cheese and if I was lucky a bag of pasta in the cupboard. I just never ate at home.

By the end of the nineties, I'd moved in with now DH, and we cooked 'proper meals'. Obviously I got fat and have largely stayed that way. As soon as he goes away, me and the kids still live on cheese sandwiches and vegetables interlaced with snacks. He very much forces us to eat like grownups 😆

I used to love those baked bean pizzas!

On school days I didn't eat breakfast, so 14-16, I'd take a couple of clementines with me in my pocket, and sometimes 2, 2-finger kitkats. Sometimes at first break 'tuck shop' I'd get a chip roll. Omg they were beautiful. Only 25p too. Then I'd have my free school dinner.

At home I'd eat whatever my mum made, which could be anything from stew or soup h homemade bread to fishfingers, chips and beans. Or those dalepak lamb grills or the ribz ones. Findus pancakes. Occasionally spaghetti bolognese, lasagna. Curry. Bernard Matthews drummers. Birdseye chicken or beef burgers. Mash. Chops, potatoes and veg. My favourite was lamb chops, peas, chips and gravy. Chips were proper chips, from a chip pan. Occasionally we'd have jamaican food, ackee & saltfish, fritters, fried bread. Roast dinners every sunday, with crumble & custard or ice cream.

Or if I was out I might get chips or cook for myself when I got back, that would be bag pizza, the ones you grill and supernoodles, or microwave lasagna or toast etc. Nuggets chips and beans.

Not a lot of takeaways or fast food really, not til later.

When I got a bit older and moved out I'd have spaghetti bolognese, chicken tonight sauces, with meat in of course & rice, stir fries and noodles, curries. I remember me and my work friends' favourite culinary delight was green micro noodles and bread and butter. And salt and pepper sandwiches. Lunches were meal deals. A lot of pub dinners. Cafe breakfasts on the weekends.

Oh but actually I did eat McDonald's 3 times a week, in 6th form, because I worked there.

i was a medical student living in digs with no proper kitchen. I had a toaster oven and a kettle thing and lived on jacket potatoes with broccoli and cheese (broccoli boiled in kettle) and spag bol (spag boiled in kettle thing). A couple of nights a week we'd sneak into the canteen to join the house officers free dinner- lots of chips and meat of indeterminate origin

Sunny Delight, Angel Delight, Mini Milks and Chomps

I remember fat was the enemy. Lots of low fat but high sugar recipes in magazines.

I was a teen in the 90s.

Just coffee for breakfast, usually.

School lunch - hotdog and chips followed by cheesecake or a doughnut. This was pre-Jamie Oliver days.

Snack: vending machine cappuccino or hot chocolate, either drunk through a Spira or with a Twix dunked into it.

If I went to my grandma's for tea, which I did fairly often as my mum worked long hours, it'd be meat and three veg, and some kind of home-made pudding, she made great puddings. If mum cooked, it'd be pasta or a ready meal or something like chicken Kiev and chips, then choc ices or Angel Delight for pudding.

I was so slim back then too! 😆