A few weeks ago, Tina wrote a post all about the different foods she ate when she was growing up. I found it fairly interesting and wanted to share with you all the things I ate when I was growing up as well.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I grew up eating the Standard American Diet (SAD). This meant a diet full of refined sugars and grains as well as processed foods. Don’t get me wrong, my mom definitely made sure we ate our fruits, veggies, and balanced meals as well! However, we always had a pantry stocked full of junk foods at our fingertips.
My point in this is not to say that all of these foods are “bad bad bad”. Heck, if I wasn’t gluten free, I would probably still be consuming pop tarts from time to time (they’re just so good – it’s sickening). I believe moderation is key in any lifestyle. However, now that I am educated on healthy choices and how food works to fuel your body, I wouldn’t want to have my diet consist just of these junky foods.
I have always had a sweet tooth, especially when I was growing up – as you’ll find in my list. Some of my favorite foods included:
- Ritz Bitz
- Zebra Cakes
- Pop Tarts (specifically the frosted brown sugar cinnamon)
- Reese’s Minis (I’m ashamed to even tell you how many I would put back at a time)
- Chocolate milk made with Hershey’s syrup
- JIF Reduced Fat Peanut Butter (okay, this one is BAD – just go all natural people – peanuts and salt, that’s all you need!)
- Corn Dogs
- Morning Star Buffalo Wings
- White bread
- Cinnamon Toast Crunch
- French Toast Sticks
- Pizza Rolls
- Fruit by the Foot
- Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs
- Chips Ahoy Chewy Cookies
- The Blue Box (aka Kraft Macaroni and Cheese)
- Cheez Whiz (grroooossssss)
I find this list exceptionally hilarious because some things were on the “absolutely not” list when we were little. My mom would never buy us Capri Suns – we were only allowed to have Juicy Juice (100% juice for 100% kids!!). We also weren’t really supposed to have super sugary cereals – Cinnamon Toast Crunch was the most sugar we would get, and that was only on occasion. The Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs didn’t come into play until my sister and I could drive to the store by ourselves.
One of the greatest things about foods on the market these days is you can buy a lot of foods similar to the ones listed above – with real food ingredients. Obviously these foods will still be processed, but at least the ingredient list will be void of fake food substances. If you’re having a crazy Cinnamon Toast Crunch craving, you could buy Three Sister’s Cinnamon Sweets. Or if you’re like me and you get home late from a date night with your boyfriend and all you want is a snack (this exact scenario used to happen every single weekend around 1-2 AM when I would get home from a date with the now husband), instead of eating Pop Tarts, you could eat Nature’s Path Organic Toaster Pastries.
I honestly don’t know if any of these organic natural convenience foods existed when I was younger. Maybe because I wasn’t ever exposed to those kinds of foods – can anyone attest to whether or not they were around 10-15 years ago?
Question: What types of foods did you eat when you were growing up?
{ 68 comments… read them below or add one }
Haha is it bad that this list made me kinda hungry! Although I wouldn’t those foods on a regular occurrence, I would certainly have them occasionally. Other foods which come to mind that I used to love include Cheese-Itz, Oreos (still do), Lunchables, pepperami sticks, and Fruit Loops!
Oh my mom would refuse to buy me lunchables!!!!
Wow, that looks like exactly what I used to eat! It’s crazy, huh? I cannot even imagine eating a poptart, pizza rolls, or cheez-its today. I would feel awful knowing what they’re made of today! We’ve come a long way!
I remember my sisters and I begging our mom for sugary fruit drinks, like Capri Sun, and then when we tried it, we didn’t even like it, and ended up throwing it away, haha. I did eat pizza rolls a lot in junior high in high school, and Zebra snacks with lunch, just because it was so convenient (and “all the kids were doing it”).
haha I remember one of my friends would bring pizza lunchables to school every day and every day I would trade her something from my lunch so I could have one of hers!
I lived on Kraft Mac & cheese, white bread, hot dogs, and toaster strudels. It’s so funny to think of how drastically things have changed! Whatever though, it sure tasted good at the time!!
I forgot about Toaster Strudels!!! I lived on those too!
Thanks for the link love!
I forgot about milk with Hershey’s syrup. I used to drink it by the gallon as a kid! We had strawberry syrup sometimes too!
No problem! It was a great idea for a post - it’s interesting to look back and see how much my taste buds have changed due to education on what’s IN all those foods!
I was actually one of those odd kids that ate really healthy, with only the occasional treat. I didn’t like McDonalds or fast food except for Subway Veggie Delite and my friends and I would have lunch at the mall and they’d think I was crazy.
I did, however, enjoy treats too - my favourites being freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and chocolate. Also, whenever we went on a Disneyland vacation I HAD to have churros, but I couldn’t eat it anywhere else in the world because it couldn’t compare, haha.
LUCKY CHARMS!!! I’m gluten free and miss them
Just about any Little Debbie, ice cream sandwiches, oreos, Totino’s pizza rolls (those things are nasty!), waaay too much pop and candy….and many of the same things you loved too! I feel sick after thinking about all the crap I used to eat!! Thank God I feed my kids healthy!
Pop Tarts will always have a place in my heart. Mom made me eat my veggies, refused to buy me Cookie Crisp cereal, and had family meals most every night at the table. However, I got my fare share of Kraft Mac n’ Cheese, Golden Grahams, and those little frozen bagel pizza things. So much yum… so much fat and sugar! haha
You just described my pantry growing up, too! And made me want zebra cakes very badly haha; I used to love it when my mum would buy them as a special treat!
Cute post! I remember having dunkaroos, cape cod chips and nutella sandwiches! yum!
I lived a VERY deprived life- living in the middle of nowhere coupled with a mom that was super cheap- I didn’t get any of those things (unless I spent the night at my friend Lindsey’s house. They always had the good stuff…. my mom let me stay there about once every other month though. fun hater
)
My mom always said “Sorry, Julie. It’s too expensive. Maybe for some special occasion…” which never came around. Gosh, my mom was a tough one!!!!
I lived on steak, potatoes, hamburgers, and other veggies with some fruit thrown in.
I was a pretty healthy eater as a kid too, but we always had stuff like you mentioned in our pantry. My mon loved bringing new stuff she spotted at the grocery store. Sometimes we had lunchables for special occasions, like a field trip. I find it kind of funny that we could only have one pop tart or hostess donut with breakfast, we had to pair it with something better. I used to bring salads for lunch a lot, even in preschool, so I hope that balanced the junk out a little
I blame my chubbiness in middle school on poptarts… I probably ate 4 a day! So good but clearly not filling. I also loved fruit roll ups and fruit by the foot, and Oreo cookies! Other than that, not much junk food in the house. I love that my mom allowed poptarts for breakfast but not sugary cereal…
I grew up with a single Mom and two brothers who played hockey so we ate a lot of quick meals, but we also did not have many convenience foods since sometimes they cost more. My Mom made a lot from scratch and baked a lot but we still had some treats - chocolate milk (which we had to mix half with white milk to make last longer!), Oreo cookies, Frosted Flakes, Toaster Strudels, Pizza Pops and Dunkaroos - my favorite.
This is too funny! Those are a lot of the same things I ate, or liked, too while growing up. Which I know contributed to my chubbiness throughout schooling. Thank goodness I was highly active in sports year round, if I wasn’t who knows what I might have been! Sometimes I think back and am grossed out by what I ate, and the amount I consumed at times! I have to say though…they sure did taste good, and once in a while I might get a sneak a taste again
This list is so funny. I had a similar experience - my mom was big on making sure we ate healthy, but there was also a fare share of unhealthy treats in the house. I LOVED the cinnamon poptarts as well. I also had a habit of dunking oreos in peanut butter and having that as an after school snack. So bad! haha
Pizza rolls, bagel bites, ramen noodles, and Chex Mix were my four main food groups growing up
oh and you can’t forget ridiculous amounts of pasta! It’s crazy how much my eating habits have changed since I moved away from my parent’s house and out on my own! I’ve learned how to love healthy meals 
Hahaha I love that list. Ours are probably very similar! YES to the pop-tarts…especially the iced brown sugar ones. And I totally forgot about making chocolate milk with hershey’s syrup- I used to do that all the time! One of my other favorites was nutty bars
of course pretty much all my favorite kid foods are on your list - particularly ritz bitz, brown sugar cinnamon pop tarts, reese’s minis, reduced fat jif, corn dogs, cinnamon toast crunch, reese’s puffs, kraft mac ‘n cheese, cheez whiz (GROSS is right!)… haha! we truly were meant to be twins.
I ate so many things like that too when growing up. It’s amazing the changes that have happened over the years. I’m hoping to give a better balance to my kiddos.
Haha my mom did the SAME THING when it came to cereal. I could only eat Cheerios or Raisin Bran. My mom was totally against sugary cereals but she seriously let me eat anything else. Interesting…
Brown Sugar Cinnamon are the best! I don’t eat them anymore because for whatever reason, the sugar hurts my teeth (no dentist can tell me why. I think it’s just sensitivity). Pizza pockets were really big in our house, and there was a time when we had (still have, actually, but never use) a deep fryer, so if it COULD be deep fried, we WOULD. Glad I don’t do that so much anymore. There was a year I packed on so much weight because of that, as well as a job at the Pretzelmaker. But this is a nice trip down memory lane, but also explains why America is in the physical shape it’s in.
I was also a little weird with nutrition. I once organized my mom’s pantry in order of ascending fat grams - haha! It’s amazing I didn’t have more issues than just being weird. We ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, but also had my fair share of fruit by the foots
I lived off of junk food too! I remember during 5th grade I had a pizza lunchable (pepperoni kind) and a bag of funyuns for lunch EVERYDAY!!!! Lol
Some healthified convenience foods DID exist back then! I had a friend whose whole family was very allergic to dairy, and the mom was also in to very natural foods, remedies and etc. they always had “weird foods,” like rice cheese, gluten free pizza crusts, dairy free chocolate bars, natural sodas and spritzers, healthier versions of cereals. As weird as they were, i still ate them and asked for seconds
However, these items weren’t sold at regular grocery stores.They had to go to a local health food store (even for rice milk). So, those options weren’t as readily available as they are today, and there definitely weren’t as many options-however, some did exist!
Oh my gosh, yes! Ritz bitz, toaster strudels, sugary cereals, etc.
Oreos, Pringles, Funyuns, peanut butter popsicles (where you eat a spoonful of PB-i think my mom’s brand was JIF too i cringe at this now), you name it! I think the fact that I grew up on junk helped to drive my current healthy ways. Growing up in the early 90s you realize now how “confused” women were about eating low fat, fake diet food. I wouldnt trade my love of full fat almond butter or avocados for nothing!
Most of my childhood was spent in the Cayman Islands, where I am from, so I had a balance of Caribbean food - which, though often heavy was always all natural and homecooked - and the storebought American food that we get imported from Florida, like Fruit Roll-Ups, Pop Tarts and oh, the cereal - Fruit Loops, Cocoa Pebbles, etc! But then for a few years we lived in England and there it wasn’t nearly as processed, or as sugary, and portions weren’t nearly as large, so I never really stuck to one diet for long enough to know how I grew up! It was kinda all over the place.
A few American things I never experienced in Cayman, that I still get confused by when people make references to them (so many brand names! They don’t tell me what something is!) are Twinkies, Hostess goods, corn dogs (I’ve worked out what those are now I think), and so on.
chocolate milk made with hershey’s syrup - the best!! mostly syrup, a little milk.
What I ate:
dunkaroos and gushers
bagel bites
hot pockets
cinnamon toast crunch
chewy bars
entenmens chocolate chip cookies
mini muffins
Dunkaroos!!! I haven’t thought of those in years! Ha
I ate a balance of clean and natural and totally wholesome foods and I ate Twinkies. I ate homemade cherry pies from my grandma and Hostess cherry pies from the gas station. Life is a balancing act and I am grateful for all the carrots and broccoli and healthy habits I was taught and also for all the Samoas cookies I “sold” (ate) as a Girl Scout. Wouldn’t trade any of it!
As a kid, Kix was the most sugary cereal my sister and I were allowed to have! If we got the Kix with berries, we were being rebels. But in college, I practically lived off cinnamon toast crunch on frozen yogurt! It wasn’t until grad school (and cooking for myself) that I started to make conscious choices about eating real food, I think. What a fun post!
I LOVED cinnamon toast crunch growing up too!! I’ll have to try out that brand:) thanks for the tip! fun post!
Oh man I lived on:
Hamburger Helper, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Pop Tarts, Toaster Strudels, Handi-Snacks, Lunchables, Hot Pockets, fruit snacks and pretty much any other convenience food. My mom would sometimes make just some meat with a side of vegetables, but it was usually pasta or something else from a box. Some of those foods I loved at the time, but I can’t even imagine eating them now even if I didn’t have to be gluten-free.
Oh I most definitely ate a ton of those foods on your list growing up! My mom never really let us get super sugary cereal either, but cinnamon toast crunch was always the special treat! I still love it, but instead I buy the mom’s best brand since it’s filled with real food instead of fake stuff.
Bagel bites were my fave. Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at supper time! When pizza’s on a bagel you can eat pizza anytime! YUM!
Most of the foods on your list were my “oh please can’t we just get ____, Mom?” haha, we frequented the health food store a fair bit (but couldn’t afford to actually shop there for groceries, but the occasional carob mms, shortbread cookies, Rice Dream (blech, I used to hate that), or the healthier versions of those strawberry-flavored wafers and the pop tarts you mentioned, so yes, there were def. around most than 10-15 years ago
But ironically, through middle school/high school, we got Capri Sun packed nearly everyday for lunches.
I ate a lot of those foods, too. I had S’more Pop Tarts every morning. I also ate a lot of Chips Ahoy, Fruit Roll-Ups, Foot by the Foot, frozen chicken tenders/nuggets, chips drenched in vinegar (don’t knock it til you try it!), and the cookies that you tear and bake. I also drank many-a “Squeeze-Its” as a child! Horrible!
Mmmm yes to Pop Tarts! Although I never got to eat them as a kid. I only started buying them when I was old enough to buy food from the convenience store by myself. My parents really limited the amount of junk food we were allowed.
But when they treated us I loved to get dunkaroos, pizza pops, and froot loops!
Your list (minus the nuts - I’m allergic) is a lot like mine. I loved pop-tarts! Brown sugar cinnamon, s’mores, and frosted cherry. Yum, yum, yum! I probably could have lived off these if my mom would have let me.
In high school, I ate a lot of Oreo snack cakes. And Skittles. And soft pretzels.
Fruits and veggies were foods I never really picked for myself. Thank goodness I had parents, huh?
We never ate little debbie things but we had our fair share of boxed brownies and sugary cereals. Its hard though deciding how to feed your kids. I feed mine mostly organic whole foods, very little processed things. But at the same time I feel like if i without all sugary treats and cereals they will want to binge on it at friends houses and i think its human nature to want what you can’t have. So I don;t say they cant have it, but we call it “special treats” and they usually get 1 a day.
I grew up in Europe, and our food habits were seasonal, whole, and, I know that now, very healthy.
This list brought back some memories! I’m embarassed to say that I’ve only been eating natural peanut butter for the past 2 years. Before that I would eat that reduced-fat crap and even worse, Better n’peanut butter. In junior high I didn’t eat poptarts, but I loved cereal bars that had a layer of “milk frosting” in the middle! I don’t think they still sell them but I used to eat them all the time!
Gushers, Ramen Noodles (my FAVORITE), Pizza Bagel Bites, Mini Muffins were my absolute go to after school snacks as a kid!!!! Then when I got a little older I went through a phase of grapefruit and celery and carrots as regular snacks (pretty good phase to go through, too bad it didn’t last!), then I was obsessed with Boca Burgers…then my old best friend and I would eat a cheeseburger AND a large diet coke each from McDonald’s every day before dance team practice. UGH. Thank the lord I have half of a brain now and eat much, much better since I don’t have the same metabolism as I did back then, I’m not dancing for 4 hours after school every day and I realize how gross all of that stuff is!
This post brought back a lot of memories. I loved strawberry (minus outer crust) and brown sugar poptarts as a kid, but mostly my mom made us homemade waffles and pancakes every morning. I was a cereal addict, so we always had fruit loops, cheerios and frosted flakes in the cabinet. Salted nuts, ritz crackers adn krispy kream doughnuts were also enjoyed as well as countless frozen fishsticks and pizzas. Still, I ate pretty healthy with daily salads, fruits and lean proteins.
YEAH for Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs!
I love me chocolate and peanut butter put together. 
But I totally agree with you — peanuts and salt is all you need in peanut butter.
Same! My mom wouldn’t buy sugary cereals. But every time my grandma came to town, she would buy my sisters and me our own boxes of cereal - our choice. Oh, the little things in life…:) It made us so happy! I always picked Cocoa Pebbles.
Take that, mom;)
Spaghetti and meatballs!
(i’m such a loser of an Italian adult since I can have none of that!).
Cute post!
We ate pretty healthy. We didn’t get many unhealthy snacks or food except Kix, cheese its, and generic oreos as little kids. I loved going to my friends bc she always had gushers, fruit by the foot, fruit rollups, chips, Swiss cake rolls, Pop! and other junk. High school my mom let us pick so it was hamburger helper, pizza pockets, bagel bites, toster strudels, pringles, lays chips, some pop, and canned raviolis haha
I really enjoyed this Chelsey
It made me smile. I love talking about food and looking back on when I was a young girl 
Thanks for sharing 
This was a fun read
Haha ohhh mannn- you’re bringing back memories of my cheddar cheese Ritz Bits days. I remember taking all of the cheese out of those suckers, rolling them up into cheddar balls, then eating them once I at all of the crackers.
Priorities
I definitely ate the grossest foods when growing up. I was alllll about the candy and I would often replace meals with it! 7 cavities and many years later, I finally learned what true wholesome and delicious food is.
Oh man - I wish I could still eat Pop Tarts - something in them makes me sick as a dog. Growing up we’d have at least one McDonald’s trip a week for dinner. Kraft Mac and Cheese (my mom would add canned tomato to hers) was another staple.
Hahaha I used to live for poptarts! My favorite flavors were the dessert ones like hot fudge sundae, chocolate chip, oreo… As you can tell I ate junk food ALL the time. I think the only vegetable I ate when I was little were canned green beans. Sooo glad I became a vegan!
hey Chelsey,
this is a great post! I love how we’ve deemed the traditional way of american eating (SAD) - that’s exactly what it is! I grew up eating and loving a lot of the same foods you talked about here, and have since eliminated all those foods from my diet since becoming gluten and lactose intolerant. Needless to say I feel much better and have SO much more energy now than my body did before when it was all hyped up on processed, refined-sugar foods as a kid, but I still do miss my cinnamon toast crunch sometimes! I’ve been searching for a gluten-free version, do you know of one?
We always ate pretty decent food (my dad is a really good cook, so we would definitely get our veggies in!), but our snack selection was always terrible. Everyday it was cheeze-its, poptarts, bagel bites, reese’s puffs (those suckers are addicting!), and Kraft Mac and Cheese. The worst was breakfast though - I used to drink a Dr. Pepper for breakfast every morning at school for all 4 years of HS! I cringe now just thinking about what that probably did to my stomach lining! Gross!
Love this idea! It’s crazy to think of all the foods we used to eat years ago that we never thought of as “bad”. I used to love brown sugar cinnamon pop tarts! Fruit snacks were a big one too when I was younger!
Oh, man we ate terrible as kids! Ours was the house everyone wanted to hang out at bc there was unlimited junk to eat! Amazingly, my sister and I both started eating wayy healthier once we were on our own and my parents followed suit. My mom always made sure to give us what she thought were balanced meals, but it was mainly just a lot of frozen processed stuff that we warmed up! She does not mind that we tease her about it, she said she just did not know any better back then.
But as a kid, I LOVED klondike bars, honey buns (the super cheap ones that came in the unmarked cardboard box!), cheese balls, pringles, bugles, kudos bars, ssips, and pretty much every type of candy known to man! I occassionally will try something from my childhood palate for old times sake, but it usually just tastes like the crap it is. Turns out my memories are more satisfying!
It is so weird to think about what I ate when I was younger…pop-tarts literally gross me out now and I remember having to beg my mom to buy me lunchables (the pizza one was a favorite). Thank the lord I learned how to cook and feed myself with the help of a box. Great post!
Im pretty sure I snacked on all of this… plus my dad was a sucker for frozen rib sandwiches from schwaans, and my grandma always had Squeez-its in the house. Thinking about it now makes me want to gag!
I grew up on Mexican food. Refried beans, potatoes, tortillas…… The only veggies I ate was potatoes, corn and green beans. We had sugary cereal and fried food. I would be obese if I still ate that food.
Poptarts are one of my favorite splurges still. Sometimes, after a particularly trying week, I make them Friday breakfast. It definitely brings up my mood! When I was a kid, I loved fruit snacks…which my sister and I called “wrinkles” and eating Lays and Doritos all in one bowling during TGIF. It was the life.
It’s so fun to reminisce about the horrible foods we grew up eating! Haha! I ate everything on your list at least once. My mom was pretty good at choosing the best of the worst foods. We were not allowed to eat Pop Tarts. Ever. Little Debbies? Only the holiday special editions, like the Christmas tree cakes and valentine’s hearts. Seasonal splurges. We were allowed to have Gushers. I guess there was some vitamin C in those things? I really love Dunkaroos, but I had to barter on the playground to get those. Mom would NEVER buy me tiny marsupial cookies to dip in straight-up icing.
Oh, junk food memories. It makes me sad and nostalgic at the same time to think of what I knocked back as a kid. Zebra cakes, definitely. Lunchables, blue box mac, nutri grain bars (and those were supposed to be healthy, right?! right?), my favorite thing to do on weekends was get pizza from Little Caesar’s (extra cheese please) and I always drank capri sun, tang, those plastic cooler drinks you had to snap the top off…any commercialized sugar bomb cereal with a cartoon character on it (I remember specifically Barbie and Ghostbusters)…gushers, Doritos, any of those sugary fruit snacks…oh, and those awful Kid Cuisine frozen meals..tombstone pizza..the awful list goes on..I’m sure my body would reject those ‘treats’ today! By the way Chelsey I’m new to your blog, it’s fabulous!!
I never liked ritz bitz, but triscuits were totally my jam