There’s nothing quite like the contrasting pleasures of salty, crunchy potato crisps and a refreshing drink; it was the taste of the pub and the end of the working day in the 1990s. Snack technology has leapt out of the pub since the days when prawn cocktail was a novelty; bringing us more extruded shapes, fancier flavours and more ingenious ways to deliver high-salt, high-fat treats. As crisps came in bigger packs (in theory, ‘made for sharing’), and got more sophisticated (Kettle chips started in 1988), supermarkets devoted more and more shelf space to them. All those new kinds of Monster Munch, Cheesy Wotsits and Doritos specially designed for kids to afford on the way back from (or to) school; it would be rude not to, wouldn’t it? 

Drinks are also now designed for us to take in more calories without realising. In the 1990s caff, we ordered tea or coffee and added the sugar ourselves. The coffee shop chains that spread along our high streets around the turn of the century (1), have developed creamier and sweeter drinks; gingerbread lattes, iced coffee, bubble tea, mocha, chai latte, a salted caramel frostino. These drinks might pack 12 or 13 teaspoons of sugar but because we don’t put it in ourselves; it is nearly invisible. The bitterness of caffeine masks the sweetness of sugar; tea, coffee and cola all smuggle a bigger sugar hit past our taste buds and condition us to want more. Manufacturers answer this craving by making not just drinks, but biscuits, cakes, snack bars, breakfast cereals, even burger buns and hotdog rolls, sweeter and more, well, moreish.  

We have to crunch and sip between meals to fit in all these extra snacks. Or use them as a cheap replacement for a hot meal.  The trouble is that high sugar snacks lead to mood and energy slumps but there is always a shop or a vending machine nearby with another instant, brightly packaged cheap fix.    

In the queue at the 1990s sandwich bar or bakery, you thought about what you were going to have – coronation chicken, egg mayonnaise, cheese and tomato… before somebody behind the counter made it for you. Lots of bakeries doubled up as sandwich bars, so you could stock up on bread too. After M&S introduced the first boxed sandwich in 1980, sandwich bars and bakeries began to disappear. Supermarket sandwiches were cheaper, but they made up profits by selling more food; the ‘meal deal’ added a high-sugar (or sweetener) soft drink and a snack – crisps or confectionery. Confusingly, the drink and snack might be labelled as ‘2 portions’ though the calories are given for ‘1 portion’.  

Grocery shops introduced self-service when they discovered by accident in the 1950s and 1960s that interaction with a shopkeeper acts as a brake; without it we buy more than we need, which leads to more waste and bigger waists. Self-service, marketing, bogofs (buy one get one free), ‘three for twos’, portion sizes and other social ‘nudges’ have made us eat more over the years.  We buy way more bread than we can eat and throw away about 25 million slices a day.

We’re beginning to get a handle on this; many supermarkets have a voluntary ban on bogofs, for example, and we throw away less food than we did 20 years ago. However, we also eat more because food has gotten bigger.  A crumpet, for example, bulked up from 40g in the early 1990s to 55g today and a supermarket shepherd’s pie ready meal nearly doubled from 210g to 400g. The opposite – smaller portions for the same price – known as shrinkflation, is very unpopular and gathers much more media coverage than an increase in portion sizes.

Even our plates encourage bigger portions. Your grandparents’ dinner plates were 3-4cm smaller than modern ones, and their wine glasses were around two-thirds of the size.  Could some crockery shrinkflation help us with our portion control? 

[Nesta’s recent analysis shows that sandwiches and meal deals are top contributors to the calories consumed from food purchased or eaten outside of homes.]

In the 1990s, if you wanted a healthier diet you’d go to a ‘whole’ or ‘health’ food shop. The words were broadly interchangeable until dieticians and the food industry began to argue that only some parts of the whole food were healthy. ‘Low-fat’ became the mantra. Yogurts, biscuits, cakes and meal replacements drinks were all reformulated by removing fat and replacing it with stabilisers and, for taste, sugar. The realisation that this sugary, low-fat food wasn’t helping us win the war on weight helped launch a new arsenal of diets - keto, Atkins, paleo, Dukan – where carbs replaced fat as the enemy.  Carbs are a broad category and some cheap, nutritious foods such as wholegrains, oatmeal and rice found themselves in the sin bin with the white stuff in a packet.  

With fat and carbs both under suspicion, protein has emerged as the favoured macronutrient. There’s intense marketing of products that barely existed in the 1990s such as protein bars, protein shakes and whey powder. The trouble is that many of these ‘health foods’ lack the fibre, vitamins and minerals of whole food and often have additional salts, sugars and sweeteners.

So much for ‘macronutrients’. At least we all agree that micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – are essential and that’s why we increasingly see claims such as ‘added Vitamins C’ or ‘rich in zinc’ on a packet.  Our bodies, however, need a broader range of micronutrients. We got more of them in the 1990s from basic groceries such as milk, meat, fish, brown bread and green veg.

Over the last 30 years, ideas of ‘healthy’ food have changed at a dizzying rate and dietary advice and marketing have added to our confusion. The only healthy outcomes from ‘health food’ have been the profits of the industry that makes it. But three-fifths of us are trying to eat more healthily; edible seeds and rice cakes are in the consumer shopping basket (a measure of inflation) for the first time. There’s a commercial opportunity, too, for returning to ‘whole food’. 

Back when Bradford introduced the first LEA-funded school dinners, the Domestic Subjects head, Marian Cuff, created menus that were nutritious, balanced and cheap.  But she knew that it wasn’t just the food that was important; children sat around a table, with a cloth and some flowers in the middle, and used cutlery and crockery. Perhaps the most important thing she gave them was time, patience and attention. For decades this was the school meal ideal (even if the reality sometimes fell short).  Although the quality of school meals declined in the 1980s (thanks to changes in funding and legislation), people in the 1990s had grown up understanding that school lunches were a shared occasion that deserved a bit of time and care.  There were workers’ canteens in most workplaces in the 1990s (82% in 1995 compared with 47% in 2015) (2) and workers took an hour for lunch. Eating together can be fraught; Dad’s weird way of cooking, picky children, bolshy teenagers, argumentative relos… But many people still feel that it is important and enjoyable; psychologists show that it boosts hormones such as oxytocin that are good for our health and happiness.   

The time we spend eating meals together has fallen dramatically over the decades. Life feels busier; finding time to eat together is a balancing act with commuting, part-time jobs, after-school clubs, social lives.  Shift workers in particular find it harder to fit in regular mealtimes. Technology has made eating solo so easy: the ready-meal, the ping of the microwave and on-demand TV.  Although time spent preparing and sharing meals has fallen over the decades, there is happier news that parents, relatives and carers now spend more time with children and less on cooking (and cleaning).  

Can we keep that important time with kids and prepare a meal? Cooking with kids is time-consuming, floury, messy, chaotic… and lots of fun.