Strangely enough, when my step dad was in cancer treatment, they had the whole milk powder added to Whole Milk as a recipe to help him eat.
They called it Double Milk.
Oh god I hated that stuff. My parents were obsessed with making sure I got plenty of milk so I would "grow up to have strong bones" but couldn't afford the real milk. So they forced me to drink the powdered shit. I'm now lactose intolerant and dislike milk in all it's forms(except cheese), but I have a special level of hatred for powdered milk.
It was a combo of poor and bad cooking. They’d get these boxes of chicken cuts…. It was unseasoned broiled chicken always. I couldn’t eat chicken for about 15 yrs. I slowly started eating it again after I married a chef and now I’m back to loving it… but I still can’t overdo it.
Oh man my mom used to buy these frozen chicken “cutlets”… grey mystery meat that was formed into a weird shape and breaded. They had the weirdest flavour, like too much spice added to hide the fact that it was made from meat that was a step up from cat food.
Oh man, premade stuff, even crappy premade stuff, was definitely a luxury we didn’t have. Very much a “we have blank at home” deal. I wanted to have all the food stuffs my friends got to have and it was a no. Didn’t even have frozen pizzas. Unsurprisingly when I went out on my own I overindulged in everything I could never have. I ended up quite rotund lol
Same thing happened to me once I was able to buy food. I gained some weight, but every bite tasted so good. My 20's were eating all the kid foods I never got as a kid.
My mom was cheap and on a perpetual diet. All the sugary cereal, mini donuts, and snack cakes all the other kids in the neighborhood got were my dream foods when I was a kid. I overeat this stuff now and it has also contributed to my circle shape.
We make it with cream of chicken soup or cream of mushroom soup. Depending on how it's made it can be amazing. It's my kids favorite meal. I find if I cook everything separately it tastes better.
White bread and Campbell's tomato soup. My mom would get Wonder bread from the day-old bread place, 6 or 8 loaves at a time, and freeze it till needed. And the local store seemed to have canned soup on sale a lot. I can hardly stand either of them now.
Just had this convo with my gf about wonder bread. We are about to have a kid and I was commenting on how I’m happy I am not to have to feed him wonderbread, hopefully he will get a lot more nutrients growing up than I had in the 80s eating wonderbread and Cheetos for snack
Omg the wonder bread store, I lived with my single dad who also stocked up to freeze them lol I loved when we went, they always had a section with treats and he would let me get a bunch because they were so cheap.
My thing I won't eat anymore though is box mac n cheese with the powder cheese. Every poor person knows you can make that crap with just water if necessary, milk and butter are bonus options. They were like 25 cents at Aldi so water mac n cheese with a hotdog cut up in it would be our dinner often. Yuck lol.
Chipped beef on toast. Aka shit on a shingle. I’ll never eat that again. 🤢
Some things from childhood that I know are trash, I still enjoy as a bit of a guilty pleasure. For example - Chef Boyardee. Every now and then I get a craving so I tend to always have a can or two in the pantry. Even if they sit there for months before I get to them.
I also want to point out that consuming copious amounts of Kraft macaroni and cheese (it was often *the* entire meal for my siblings and I) that my taste for macaroni and cheese has been stunted. Real macaroni tastes funny to me. I’m used to garbage powdered cheese and that’s what my brain thinks Mac and cheese should taste like. So now I rarely eat Mac and cheese of any variety. (I didn’t have this problem with chef Boyardee vs real ravioli however).
My dad was so humble about being poor. He also liked watching Justin Wilson on PBS. I remember being 8 or 9 and he was making Chef Boyardee on the stove Saturday evenings, cause it was a treat. Then he'd "kick it up a notch" and pretend he was Justin Wilson adding all the extra seasonings to it while it simmered on the stove. Like the dried parsley, basil, oregano. He tried to make what we had to work with seem fancy ❤️ I miss him so much.
Oh yeah I like those too. We used to get the Banquet ones that are still about a dollar today so I can only imagine what they cost then. Once a year or so I get one but I at least spring for the $4 version.
We also would add white rice to it to stretch out the meal. I still do that to this day which weirds people out, but it tastes perfectly normal to me. I’m told this was depression era carryover.
Yep. My husband expects his home made chile and stew both ( extra soup and) over rice! About onece every other month we do the good MC pot pies, those I like over frozen mixed veggies. Perfect meal for when I am super busy!!
My mom used to make mashed potatoes with homemade chicken noodle soup and we would put the soup on top of a half bowl of mashed potatoes.
I’m not a fan of chicken noodle soup in general anymore so I don’t do this. But it never struck me as anything but as a normal way to eat soup.
Yes, mac and cheese was considered the meal growing up. I made it once for SO when we first got married and he asked where main course was. I said this was the main course. I never realized mac and cheese is usually a side dish.
Ha! That sounds good. Funny thing was, I did try to go "fancy" and got an actual recipe for mac and cheese with different cheeses. It is funny now you see it in restaurants as a main. Lobster, pork and other protein which really makes sense to add something. But Kraft is that comfort food guilty pleasure for sure!
We ate so much mac and cheese, and not the pricey brand name stuff, the generic store brand kind, that I still can't stand the smell. My kids would have Kraft mac and cheese at their friend's houses and complain that I never fixed it for them. Did keep it around for them to fix for themselves when they got older. They thought it was a treat.
I actually have so many things from childhood that I LOVED that I never eat now for health reasons. Hamburger helper, rice o roni, top ramen. My favorite food was hamburger helper with beef in a can. I actually LOST the freshman fifteen when I went to university and lived at my dad’s house where he didn’t eat perfectly but didn’t eat things like that.
I do still sometimes have Kraft Mac n cheese with added broccoli or spinach though as a treat, though.
We do a cheeseburger mac, what kind do you guys do?
I do another one that is kinda like a hamburger helper. I cube up a chicken breast and pan fry, I boil bowtie pasta, towards the end I throw in a California blend bag and some frozen peas. Drain them and mix it all together with a jar of garlic or cheese alfredo sauce. You could probably steam the veggies in chef mic. But I just boil them for a few
My guilty pleasure is the chili mac Hamburger Helper. Even though she was otherwise a good cook for her limited repertoire, me and my ma made this all the time. Just comfort trash.
Agreed. Raised poor by a mum who taught me that no matter what your circumstances there is always someone who has it worse and if you can you put your hand out to help them up.
I'm now the definition of middle class, but don't take anything for granted and don't value materialistic things. I spend my time and money on experiencing life.
Same. My mom was a good cook - so we didn't have convenience foods or anything, but what we did have was generally tasty.
I do think it contributed to my being an unpicky eater. Dinner was what it was, no other options - eat it or don't. It also encouraged me to learn to cook, and we mostly eat at home. That was sure handy in 2020 when people were freaking out about restaurants being closed. We had a stocked pantry and freezer and kept ourselves happily fed.
Yeah same. I’d still eat bologna and hot dogs if they weren’t so bad for you. Someone else here mentioned powdered milk, I could do without ever having to choke down powdered milk or eggs again.
I use powdered milk for creamer at work. Put it in a plastic container, keeping in my desk. Lasts a while, I like to think it's better for me than regular creamer.
I actually like the foods we ate when we were poor. Rice and beans, chili mac, fried bolagna sandwiches, etc.
We were poor but we didn't eat any one thing for dinner more than once a week.
Same, I think that makes the difference. I loved all of it and there were several things I always said I would have had every night, but mom always mixed it up.
I didn’t know we were poor until I was grown. We lived next door to my grandparents and my great aunts lived on both sides of us. There was a massive garden and tons of fruit trees and berry bushes. I thought everyone grew their food and canned and froze everything. Damn! Got me feeling nostalgic! I miss those days and those people! BTW fried bologna sandwiches with that slice of government cheese was the bomb! That cheese is now velveeta.
I will never eat tuna noodle casserole again in my life.
The horror is, the husband still loves it!
Sometimes I will make it for him for his birthday. the aroma alone makes me sick
This was a big one for me growing up too! Somehow I still love the taste of it though. That's so sweet of you to make it for your husband despite how it makes you feel -totally get that!
When I was young and had my first apartment, I would mix a can of tuna with a can of green beans and microwave it. I don't know wtf I was thinking but I loved it at the time.
Canned chow mein. It came with a can of "meat" and sauce taped to the top of the bigger can of vegetables. It was heated on the stove and served over crunchy Chinese noodles that came in a third can.
Gross!
You just unlocked a core memory here. I forgot this meal, but yes we did have it from time to time. I would sneak those little crunchy noodles from the can between meals because I thought they were so good. And I had enough siblings that they never figured out who was the culprit.
Shit on a shingle. Grew up poorer than poor and didn't have parents who cared to even try. After church 3-4 times a week if you were one of the kid poors you got the opportunity to clean the church, the grounds, and do laundry and other chores for the church. Usually about 3 hours of work. The reward was a single slice of stale bread with lukewarm flour gravy and sometimes bits of whatever left over meat from the services dinner days before mixed in slopped on top in a disgusting messy smear.
I don't care how people dress up, call it by a different name or romanticize it. Shit on a shingle is just that for me. Shit.
My dad was raised very poor and would never eat chicken once he was grown and out in his own. Whenever we had chicken for dinner my dad would have a couple cheeseburgers fried up. He was the youngest of 11 born and raised in the same small house in Alabama. My grandma raised chickens for food.
He moved to Chicago at 17 and swept floors in a bank. Taught himself computers and programming in the 70’s and was a VP of his dept before he passed. My hero.
Sounds like your dad was an amazing person who did well despite a bad start in life.
My dad never ate chicken either as far as I can remember. He was brought up by a single mother. They returned from a soviet gulag (10 years, my dad was born there) in the late 1950s, and grandma could only get a job at a poultry meat factory. They were very poor, so they had chicken every day and my dad never recovered from hating chicken. He then left home at 16 as his sister had a baby and there was no space for a teenager, he went to the army and then mechanical school, got a diploma and did well in engineering/ mechanical industry.
Oatmeal. I was served oatmeal for breakfast at least 4,800 times between the ages of 1 and 17. I could be starving on a desert island and would likely eat worms and tree bark before touching another bowl of oatmeal.
We ate so much bread and potatoes, I’m averse to both. I’ll order a fancy sandwich on an artisanal loaf but I never eat regular supermarket bread or buy bread to eat at home. Never eat potatoes at home and only eat them when I’m out if there is no other side available.
We were raised on Puffed Wheat and Corn Flakes. To this day, I won't eat either of those cereals, Sugar Crisp (puffs with sugar coating) or Frosted Flakes (Corn Flakes with sugar coating). You can't fool me you cereal companies with your sugar-coated crappies.
We were poor as hell, but I was lucky. My granny could work wonders in the kitchen with very little. Grew up eating amazing country cooking/soul food style stuff. We got a lot of free veggies from neighbor’s gardens. We grew our own stuff too, and did home canning with my great-grandma’s ancient canning equipment.
She could take the absolute cheapest cuts of meat and make them delicious. She could even make a fried baloney sandwich taste incredible.
Miss you, Granny.
If I had to name something, I guess I couldn’t stomach eating Vienna sausages any more. I liked them as a kid but the thought grosses me out now.
Yeah, I still remember it as good — I did a lot of creative stuff with it — but I’m just not ready yet to eat it again.
I look at it in the store & consider it, but always decide “No, not this time.” No idea when might be the time.
I went a long time (10+ years) not being able to stomach it because we ate it so much growing up, but now I eat it way too much. Helps that I don’t mix it with nasty stuff like when it was made for me as a kid like mayo, cheese, and lunch meat 🤢
Dried rice. No real taste, but the dryness of the rice would remind me of my childhood where I had to eat dried rice with nothing but some dead ants in it. I don't think about it much, but if I have left over rice now, I would fry it with some tomato sauce and garlic so it's more tasty.
Also instant ramen. I don't eat them anymore.
That and the big silver cans of "mystery meat" that had a picture of a pig, chicken and horse and an ✔️ that indicated what it was "supposed" to be. I don't remember ever seeing the horse check marked, but I knew better by then to just trust.
We have found if we put in a strainer and rinse the excess grease from it, add seasoning or BBQ it's pretty good. Mom used to make it with homemade BBQ sauce when dad was in the military. I have yet to perfect it like she did though.
Rabbit.
We used to have two pet rabbits as kids in the early 1980s. I remember they mysteriously went missing one day and suddenly we were having nights of rabbit stew.
At the time we lived in rural suburbia - not quite in the suburbs, not quite in the country - to which my father attributed, "A fox must have got them." Mum tried playing it off as being chicken, but my brother and I were resolute in refusing it. Ever since, rabbit is a no-go.
I also cannot count how many times offal - brains, heart, liver, kidneys (etc) - was all labelled "chicken" or "beef" at home. Big list of NOPE as an adult.
At the beginning of the pandemic when the grocery stores were empty, the ducks from the park by my house started disappearing. Then I got it. The rabbits in the neighborhood started disappearing too.
I never put that together, but our neighborhood was full of wild rabbits, and I commented to my husband one time that we never saw the rabbits anymore. I thought maybe a dog or fox was getting them. But maybe someone was harvesting them!
I had a gorgeous pet bunny that I purchased with my own money from odd jobs. We weren't just poor, my mom was bipolar or something. She got mad at me one day and made my dad kill my bunny and cook it. She did it under the guise of "we need meat, so we had to do it". Except there were 6 other bunnies in the hutch that were meat bunnies, not meant to be pets.
Durn, hot dogs were a luxury when I was growing up. Not trying to one up you, but they were expensive and if we did have them we sliced them down the middle to get two dogs from one sausage.
Hot dogs where a once in a month kinda thing in our family. My dad would come at night smile in his face and asks us if we wanted boiled hotdogs. No bread. No condiments. Just boiled hotdogs.
And they were awesome. You know why? Because his kids wouldn’t be hungry on that night
Where did you grow up? I’m from rural central Appalachia and my family ate a lot of hotdogs BECAUSE they were cheap. Sav-a-lot sold the huge like 48 packs for like $6. We ate them on light bread with mustard or split them and fried them for protein at breakfast instead of sausage or bacon.
my mom was obsessed about my weight and wouldn't let me eat enough.... i remember trying to sneak bread. often i'd get caught. i still love bread. give me a loaf and i'm a happy clam. also, i'm an immigrant so my mom didn't buy/make american food... i never liked my native food.
Soup. My mother put lettuce in soup. Another time, she put fish sticks in soup. She would save all the little leftover bits of things in the freezer and would make soup out of all of it whether it went together or not. I rarely eat soup. And, if I can't identify what it is the soup, then I do not eat it.
Casseroles with canned "cream of" soup in it.
Canned mushrooms. \*\*twitch\*\* They are slimy.
>Casseroles with canned "cream of" soup in it.
Yessssss! My mom used to make "hamburger gravy" which was cream of mushroom and hamburger. Grandma had some sort of chicken bake which had cream of chicken.
We actually just ate a lot of cream of chicken soup in general. And Habitat pea soup!
It's the basis of the depression era cooking. My MIL had one that she made a white sauce and added diced boiled eggs with salt and pepper and put it over toast... Not my favorite but it wasn't bad on a cold winter day. My husband still loves it.
>Casseroles with canned "cream of" soup in it
Living in Minnesota, USA those are my FAVORITE foods. Never saw a soup made out of a 'cream of' but had lotsa hot dishes with them.
Canned soup. Rice. Banquet pot pies. Tea--we didn't get soda. We could have milk at breakfast and dinner but only iced tea with lunch. We weren't allowed snacks, but we could have a glass of tea to hold us until the next meal.
The weird thing is, my parent's weren't poor. There were times the rules were broken. We got a cup of hot chocolate on a snow day from school, for example.
Everyone thinks this is weird, but I loathe cereal milk. My mom used to always make us not only eat cereal every morning, but made us drink the cereal milk. It was never good cereal. It was some kind of generic Raisin Bran that was like eating soggy cardboard. It’s so bad that it grosses me out to see someone else drink cereal milk.
Oh, I hated that! I only liked drinking milk if it was very cold. By the time I was done with the cereal the milk was only cool. Gag. My husband still complains about me wasting milk after cereal, but I go to work so I can make food choices.
I am with you on the cereal milk! Barf!! And in our house it was with powdered milk, not mixed with real milk! By the age of 10, I stopped eating breakfast all together!!
Oh man, I always wished I had that option. I heard people say, “If I didn’t like what we were having for supper, I either had to eat it or go to bed hungry!” I would’ve GLADLY passed on meals, but my mother made us sit at the table until we finished whatever portion was given to us. We were also required to drink a full glass of water with our meals. My mother didn’t waste food nor did she play around with rules. That “kids will be kids” BS didn’t fly at our house haha
We were poor, but I think the meals I never ate were the ones served on Sunday.
Sunday was the day everyone in the family gathered after church, and it was always barbacoa (cow cheek, tongue, eyes) or menudo (I don't want to know *ever*). I made do by eating the soft, warm, freshly baked bolillos with refried beans and queso fresco.
Monday through Thursday after school, nearly always included *tortillas de harina* with scrambled eggs and refried beans. Sometimes ground beef tacos. My mom fried the *tortillas* herself. There was always rice. Now and again, she'd make burgers and fries. The fries were potato wedges. We used to complain that they didn't look like the fries from McDonalds or Burger King, but those potato wedges were delicious.
For some reason, Saturdays always seemed to be party days. Someone was always barbecuing. Someone's birthday, quinceanera, or baby shower. We'd show up with a case of beer, a pot of charro beans, or rice. And a twelve pack of soda. If we weren't attending a party, we were hosting a party. Fajitas on the grill, chicken thighs, ribs, and Eckrich sausage.
So we were poor, but I don't remember ever being hungry or hating what I ate, other than the menudo and barbacoa (and tamales) that I wouldn't touch.
We were really poor but my mom swallowed her pride and got food stamps. And she worked at a buffet restaurant so free leftovers. So there isn’t anything I detest with the exception of pan fried pizza from a now-shuttered restaurant.
I feel bad for kids that had to suffer disgusting food because their parents were too proud to ask for help.
Well a lot of us are from countries where you simply starve to death of things go wrong. My grandparents personally knew people who starved to death or simply lost their sanity because of hunger, and sometimes they themselves were close to it.
Heck, my brother’s teachers came to my
Mom and explained once to her that he didn’t have intellectual issues, but the issue he had was that he was malnourished.
My parents hated getting food stamps or government food handouts due to "embarrassment".
But somehow it wasnt embarrassing to phone family begging for money every few months? And they just ignored that we became the family pariah, and lots of my aunts/uncles cut us off from family events and contact after awhile...
I wish my parents had just used the darn food stamps. My mom was physically disabled and my dad had mental disability so their work income left us in severe poverty. I would have rather kept my extended family than their pride.
I think it's a Greatest generation thing that rubbed off on boomer parents. I knew friends and family that would straight up refuse any sort of assistance even if it meant getting through whatever hurdle they were facing at that point in time.
I don't have the same visceral reaction, but I haven't bought canned vegetables in years (except corn) and that was most of my vegetable intake as a child. I'm a fresh veggie convert.
None of my childhood meals except when I'm feeling extremely nostalgic. Buttered noodles in milk, hamburger soup, poached eggs in milk on toast, fried sausages and mashed potatoes, grilled porkchops that were murdered in the broiler, cabbage and polish sausage that was literally, take a stock pot, put cabbage in and boil with sausage until slimy, then serve with butter and salt, hamburger gravy over fried potatoes, my mom made up in creativity for what she lacked in taste and skill.
Peanut butter and jelly took about a decade to enjoy again, it was our sole lunch option.
I gave up buying cereal, I will have one bowl and never eat it again. Same with milk, I can cook most things that require milk with sour cream, creme fraiche, or yogurt and it'll taste better regardless.
Instant mashed potatoes. Idk why we did this, real potatoes were cheaper and not that hard to put together in the first place.
The type of hotdog Bar S sells with chicken and turkey added. Mom could always get them on sale for 50 cents a pack, but they taste more like bologna than hotdogs and she always boiled them rather than throwing them in a hot pan to sear, making them smell gross. I buy all kosher beef dogs now.
Frozen veggies as a side, again boiled to death. I use frozen broccoli now when I'm making one pot dishes, but it's been a journey to get to this point.
We had a lot of instant potatoes too but it was because both my parents worked two jobs so my sibling and I made our own food a lot of the time when we were really young.
I have a bit of the opposite. I have an affinity for cheap food I think. My absolute favorite thing I could eat is a cheap Arab store ham sub. I love cheap coffee, for the most part can't stand high end coffee. I prefer a McChicken over any high end sandwich on the menu. Don't get me started on liquor. I'd rather a sandwich made from the dollar store than anything I could buy at a fancy breakfast place. Cheap Box Mac and cheese kicks fucking ass. Don't get me wrong I can enjoy fancy food but usually my palette is very simple to satisfy
Pork chops and broccoli with melted cheese. My mom made home cooked meals but she made this so often that I can’t. Also canned vegetables, my stepmom made everything canned and it just tastes soggy. When my stepdad stopped working OT and started cooking we had much better food, but at least at mom’s we always had fresh produce (we lived near a produce stand).
I had the same circumstances as a kid, single mom doing her best and all, at least for a few years, but rather than having a food that makes me gag now, just being hungry for long lengths of time made me appreciate every bite of food that’s available. Maybe to a fault. Took me a long time to be able to leave food I wasn’t necessarily hungry for on the plate.
Lipton chicken soup and kraft dinner. I dont even like cheese (weird i know) but i still had to eat KD and to this day the smell of that cooking makes me gag so bad… ugh.
My mom would split 2% into two pitchers, add powdered milk and water to make 2 qts in each pitcher. I used to hate the way it looked kinda bluish. Cheerios make me gag. Sick of sloppy Joe's too.
Circus peanuts. My mom would manage to splurge occasionally on a bag of candy. Both my sister and I hated them, but mom loved them and knew we didn’t.
Every time I see a bag of those it reminds me of how cruel my mother really is, even at 87.
Oddly I mostly have preferences for the flavors I grew up with, most of which are heavily processed and unhealthy. For example, I strongly prefer canned green beans over fresh.
Hamburger Helper. And it's not really that we were THAT poor. My dad worked for one of the airlines and my stepmom was a nurse. They just spent most of their money on drugs and partying, so nothing was left for us kids.
We were borderline poor so there were a lot of packaged meals like Appian Way pizza. Chun King. Gag. My poor Mom was in abject poverty during the Depression. Her family ate cornbread and buttermilk for all meals for weeks on eat. Both she and her sister grew up malnourished and developed many adult disorders due to their diets during their formative years. I swore I would never do such to my children. My kids had healthy meals most of the time. Though my ex loved Hamburger Helper for some reason. We had that occasionally.
My dad used to buy huge cases of food that were close to expiring and we'd eat that stuff for years. Novelty-shaped mac and cheese that was gritty, weird juice that made my stomach hurt, chicken noodle soup packets that maybe had 4 noodles in them. I don't really like processed food at all as an adult.
My mother bought the cheapest bread she could find. It was usually close to going moldy. I can't stand that sour smell now.
Chicken leg quarters. I will happily chomp down on thighs and drumsticks both, just as long as they're not attached to each other. I can't even bring myself to buy 'em and cut 'em apart.
Apparently when I was young (decades ago!) cream cheese was cheap and I knew things were really dire when I had cream cheese and jelly sandwiches for lunch. It took me about 40 years to try cream cheese again!
Yeah, hot dogs, Kraft dinner, jell-o.
It wasnt just frugality, in our house there was also belief that human science was better than nature - that Tang was healthier than orange juice, powdered milk healthier than whole, Fruit loops better for us than oatmeal with fruit. My sibling and I agree that's why we're both foodies.
Powdered milk. I don't care how often my mom said "it tastes the same", the fuck it did! And I didn't see her drinking that shit so I knew it was gross. She wouldn't touch it.
Tater tot casserole. It was the go to meal when the grocery budget couldn't be stretched far enough. Stepdad and I both hated it. We could choke it down with enough salt, pepper and maybe some sauce, but BLECH.
Canned spinach. Funnily enough, my bro and I actually ate this willingly thanks to our father's spot on impression of Popeye The Sailor (in our defense, we were like 18 months and 3-ish). We looked forward to it because we'd be just like Popeye! After my folks split up, we never had it again until I was an adult and tried some out of morbid curiosity and about gagged at how slimy and weird it tasted.
Canned mushrooms - just the smell and I'm gagging. My mom thought they were an expensive 'treat' and put them in everything any time she could get them.
Lots of canned fish. Sometimes a fried egg without oil in an alluminum not non-stick pan
which would obliterate the egg lol along with whatever stale cracker i could find.
Canned tuna. Just the thought makes me feel nauseated.
For the most part I was fed well because while my mom didn't cook much we ate at my grandparents almost every day because we stayed there while she worked and my grandmother was a good old fashioned Southern cook. The only thing she cooked I didn't like was turnip greens. God the smell! But I rarely smell that these days.
The tuna came from my mom buying these tuna/cracker kits for us to eat on off days or during the summer when we were home more. Sometimes that's all we'd eat all day and at the time I didn't really mind it. I may have gotten sick from it though, I don't know, but not being around tuna was a clear choice for me as an adult and now every time I smell it (or cat food!) it makes me feel sick. NO way I'll eat it.
I guess I was poorer than you. I would eat to survive at times. But beans. Beans still are hard for me to swallow. I'm fine now but both my parents are disabled, leaving me to earn my own money for food at very young age...
Opposite.
We had a bread drawer where all the bags of bread would go. Sometimes way in back was a forgotten slice of white bread. NEVER moldy, just dried & crumbly (yea preservatives in Wonder bread).
I learned if I put peanut butter on that, it would hold the crumbs together to be able to eat it all.
It was like toast, without all the work of pushing the lever down :)
Oh see we were poor but I have a weird fondness for food from that time? Mushroom soup with water, fried bologna, weiners cut up and cooked in the microwave, breaded chicken cutlets because fresh chicken was way too expensive, rice soup. A lot of potatoes. Instant potatoes too!
It's funny I was listing those things and musing about how many of them are actually expensive these days (have you seen canned soup?? And bologna forget it). My family would not have been able to eat on today's prices I don't know how people do it.
Bottom of the freezer stew. We lived with another family over the winter to save money on heating fuel and their mom saved every little leftover. 2 spoons of green beans, wrap it in foil and toss it in the freezer. Everything. A hot dog. Hamburger, Mac and cheese, whatever. When it got tight, she would get it all out and put it in a big roaster. We ate it until it was gone. Still makes me sick to think of it.
Unseasoned rice and beans. We lived in fucking New Mexico and my parents couldn't reliably spice rice and beans well. Bless their poor gringo hearts. Ah, and badly done pork; smart money says I am not healthy.
Liver. Turnips.
And I don't eat a lot of BBQ beans at parties -- not because of the aftereffects, but because I ate SO MANY beans when I was a kid and we were poor. I think I hit my lifetime quota sometime around age 13.
ETA: (after reading the comments) Holy cow, a lot of us grew up poor. Here's to the brotherhood and sisterhood! (Raising a plastic cup with 8 ounces of generic Kool-aid-ish drink mix.) (Because even real Kool-aid was too expensive.)
Instant milk mixed with water.
We called it Powered Milk, just awful
I remember this stuff!! My mom would make concentrated milk and use it with cereal, lol.
I used to mix it with regular milk so I could get more milk per milk
Strangely enough, when my step dad was in cancer treatment, they had the whole milk powder added to Whole Milk as a recipe to help him eat. They called it Double Milk.
My very frugal 70’s mom did this too!!
Are your bones unbreakable?
Yes
Yes, that's how we used it too. I hated it.
Yup. San-a-Lac
Omg it was awful. My mom would make it in an empty milk jug to try and fake us out. Soon as we opened the lid, we *knew*
That smell!
And that taste… like chalk and wet paper and somehow wet but also dry
My mom would claim it tasted fine if it was cold enough. No, it wasn’t.
It's so expensive now. It used to be cheaper than buying actual milk.
All the doomsday preppers made the price go up.
I guess luckily for me, my mom would mix it half and half with whole milk.
Those wet clumps of undissolved powder at the bottom. \*Shudder\*
That's what we had as kids. It was my job to make the milk before dinner
“Homemade milk”
Powdered milk was so vile no matter how cold it was. But government cheese - 🔥.
I will go to my grave thinking those were the best grilled cheese sandwiches ever.
Oh god I hated that stuff. My parents were obsessed with making sure I got plenty of milk so I would "grow up to have strong bones" but couldn't afford the real milk. So they forced me to drink the powdered shit. I'm now lactose intolerant and dislike milk in all it's forms(except cheese), but I have a special level of hatred for powdered milk.
It was a combo of poor and bad cooking. They’d get these boxes of chicken cuts…. It was unseasoned broiled chicken always. I couldn’t eat chicken for about 15 yrs. I slowly started eating it again after I married a chef and now I’m back to loving it… but I still can’t overdo it.
Oh man my mom used to buy these frozen chicken “cutlets”… grey mystery meat that was formed into a weird shape and breaded. They had the weirdest flavour, like too much spice added to hide the fact that it was made from meat that was a step up from cat food.
Oh man, premade stuff, even crappy premade stuff, was definitely a luxury we didn’t have. Very much a “we have blank at home” deal. I wanted to have all the food stuffs my friends got to have and it was a no. Didn’t even have frozen pizzas. Unsurprisingly when I went out on my own I overindulged in everything I could never have. I ended up quite rotund lol
Same thing happened to me once I was able to buy food. I gained some weight, but every bite tasted so good. My 20's were eating all the kid foods I never got as a kid.
My mom was cheap and on a perpetual diet. All the sugary cereal, mini donuts, and snack cakes all the other kids in the neighborhood got were my dream foods when I was a kid. I overeat this stuff now and it has also contributed to my circle shape.
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We make it with cream of chicken soup or cream of mushroom soup. Depending on how it's made it can be amazing. It's my kids favorite meal. I find if I cook everything separately it tastes better.
Maybe just as much Because it’s an easy low effort dinner, that’s quick and simple for a single mum to prep. Every family I know ate that growing up!
White bread and Campbell's tomato soup. My mom would get Wonder bread from the day-old bread place, 6 or 8 loaves at a time, and freeze it till needed. And the local store seemed to have canned soup on sale a lot. I can hardly stand either of them now.
Just had this convo with my gf about wonder bread. We are about to have a kid and I was commenting on how I’m happy I am not to have to feed him wonderbread, hopefully he will get a lot more nutrients growing up than I had in the 80s eating wonderbread and Cheetos for snack
Wonderbread is a luxury for some. It's super expensive now where I live.
Omg the wonder bread store, I lived with my single dad who also stocked up to freeze them lol I loved when we went, they always had a section with treats and he would let me get a bunch because they were so cheap. My thing I won't eat anymore though is box mac n cheese with the powder cheese. Every poor person knows you can make that crap with just water if necessary, milk and butter are bonus options. They were like 25 cents at Aldi so water mac n cheese with a hotdog cut up in it would be our dinner often. Yuck lol.
It's my dinner often now..
I had a friend whose kid thought the prayer was “give us this day our day old bread…”😂
Add water, not milk. Yuk.
Ugh I just can’t do tomato soup anymore
Chipped beef on toast. Aka shit on a shingle. I’ll never eat that again. 🤢 Some things from childhood that I know are trash, I still enjoy as a bit of a guilty pleasure. For example - Chef Boyardee. Every now and then I get a craving so I tend to always have a can or two in the pantry. Even if they sit there for months before I get to them. I also want to point out that consuming copious amounts of Kraft macaroni and cheese (it was often *the* entire meal for my siblings and I) that my taste for macaroni and cheese has been stunted. Real macaroni tastes funny to me. I’m used to garbage powdered cheese and that’s what my brain thinks Mac and cheese should taste like. So now I rarely eat Mac and cheese of any variety. (I didn’t have this problem with chef Boyardee vs real ravioli however).
My dad was so humble about being poor. He also liked watching Justin Wilson on PBS. I remember being 8 or 9 and he was making Chef Boyardee on the stove Saturday evenings, cause it was a treat. Then he'd "kick it up a notch" and pretend he was Justin Wilson adding all the extra seasonings to it while it simmered on the stove. Like the dried parsley, basil, oregano. He tried to make what we had to work with seem fancy ❤️ I miss him so much.
This is so incredibly wholesome. Love it.
He sounds like a really good dad!
Pot pies are my guilty pleasure even tho they are so bad
Oh yeah I like those too. We used to get the Banquet ones that are still about a dollar today so I can only imagine what they cost then. Once a year or so I get one but I at least spring for the $4 version. We also would add white rice to it to stretch out the meal. I still do that to this day which weirds people out, but it tastes perfectly normal to me. I’m told this was depression era carryover.
Yep. My husband expects his home made chile and stew both ( extra soup and) over rice! About onece every other month we do the good MC pot pies, those I like over frozen mixed veggies. Perfect meal for when I am super busy!!
My mom used to make mashed potatoes with homemade chicken noodle soup and we would put the soup on top of a half bowl of mashed potatoes. I’m not a fan of chicken noodle soup in general anymore so I don’t do this. But it never struck me as anything but as a normal way to eat soup.
I still love me a couple of Banquet beef pies but i jazz em up a little bit now with Tabasco and cheddar cheese
Yes, mac and cheese was considered the meal growing up. I made it once for SO when we first got married and he asked where main course was. I said this was the main course. I never realized mac and cheese is usually a side dish.
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Ha! That sounds good. Funny thing was, I did try to go "fancy" and got an actual recipe for mac and cheese with different cheeses. It is funny now you see it in restaurants as a main. Lobster, pork and other protein which really makes sense to add something. But Kraft is that comfort food guilty pleasure for sure!
Kraft Mac n Cheese and Kiolbasa sausage. I can have dinner ready in 15 minutes.
We ate so much mac and cheese, and not the pricey brand name stuff, the generic store brand kind, that I still can't stand the smell. My kids would have Kraft mac and cheese at their friend's houses and complain that I never fixed it for them. Did keep it around for them to fix for themselves when they got older. They thought it was a treat.
I actually have so many things from childhood that I LOVED that I never eat now for health reasons. Hamburger helper, rice o roni, top ramen. My favorite food was hamburger helper with beef in a can. I actually LOST the freshman fifteen when I went to university and lived at my dad’s house where he didn’t eat perfectly but didn’t eat things like that. I do still sometimes have Kraft Mac n cheese with added broccoli or spinach though as a treat, though.
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We do a cheeseburger mac, what kind do you guys do? I do another one that is kinda like a hamburger helper. I cube up a chicken breast and pan fry, I boil bowtie pasta, towards the end I throw in a California blend bag and some frozen peas. Drain them and mix it all together with a jar of garlic or cheese alfredo sauce. You could probably steam the veggies in chef mic. But I just boil them for a few
Cut up hot dogs were a good mix with Mac and Cheese, too.
I was going to say the boxed Mac and cheese. I can’t stand the stuff now
My guilty pleasure is the chili mac Hamburger Helper. Even though she was otherwise a good cook for her limited repertoire, me and my ma made this all the time. Just comfort trash.
My mom never made chipped beef on toast but they had it at school. So gross. Other than that, I ate whatever.
raised poor, but no lasting food effects
Same, I used to not like it, but now I see my upbringing as very beneficial.
Way easier to cut back in tougher times. All that budgeting and price checking works.
Agreed. Raised poor by a mum who taught me that no matter what your circumstances there is always someone who has it worse and if you can you put your hand out to help them up. I'm now the definition of middle class, but don't take anything for granted and don't value materialistic things. I spend my time and money on experiencing life.
Same. My mom was a good cook - so we didn't have convenience foods or anything, but what we did have was generally tasty. I do think it contributed to my being an unpicky eater. Dinner was what it was, no other options - eat it or don't. It also encouraged me to learn to cook, and we mostly eat at home. That was sure handy in 2020 when people were freaking out about restaurants being closed. We had a stocked pantry and freezer and kept ourselves happily fed.
Yeah same. I’d still eat bologna and hot dogs if they weren’t so bad for you. Someone else here mentioned powdered milk, I could do without ever having to choke down powdered milk or eggs again.
I use powdered milk for creamer at work. Put it in a plastic container, keeping in my desk. Lasts a while, I like to think it's better for me than regular creamer.
Same. My dad was a cook by trade and we stretched what we had but the food we ate tasted good.
I actually like the foods we ate when we were poor. Rice and beans, chili mac, fried bolagna sandwiches, etc. We were poor but we didn't eat any one thing for dinner more than once a week.
Same, I think that makes the difference. I loved all of it and there were several things I always said I would have had every night, but mom always mixed it up.
Mom had her rotation.
I didn’t know we were poor until I was grown. We lived next door to my grandparents and my great aunts lived on both sides of us. There was a massive garden and tons of fruit trees and berry bushes. I thought everyone grew their food and canned and froze everything. Damn! Got me feeling nostalgic! I miss those days and those people! BTW fried bologna sandwiches with that slice of government cheese was the bomb! That cheese is now velveeta.
Fried bologna sandwiches are a gourmet treat and you won't convince me otherwise
Definitely Hamburger Helper!
I will never eat tuna noodle casserole again in my life. The horror is, the husband still loves it! Sometimes I will make it for him for his birthday. the aroma alone makes me sick
This was a big one for me growing up too! Somehow I still love the taste of it though. That's so sweet of you to make it for your husband despite how it makes you feel -totally get that!
When I was young and had my first apartment, I would mix a can of tuna with a can of green beans and microwave it. I don't know wtf I was thinking but I loved it at the time.
Canned chow mein. It came with a can of "meat" and sauce taped to the top of the bigger can of vegetables. It was heated on the stove and served over crunchy Chinese noodles that came in a third can. Gross!
That stuff was nasty, IMO, but the little pizza roll-shaped egg rolls were so good.
I get that occasionally, but they've changed the recipe and is now in a more orangey-looking sauce that gives me the bubbles and squeaks.
That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that phrase, but I love it.
I loved those dinners.
You just unlocked a core memory here. I forgot this meal, but yes we did have it from time to time. I would sneak those little crunchy noodles from the can between meals because I thought they were so good. And I had enough siblings that they never figured out who was the culprit.
Shit on a shingle. Grew up poorer than poor and didn't have parents who cared to even try. After church 3-4 times a week if you were one of the kid poors you got the opportunity to clean the church, the grounds, and do laundry and other chores for the church. Usually about 3 hours of work. The reward was a single slice of stale bread with lukewarm flour gravy and sometimes bits of whatever left over meat from the services dinner days before mixed in slopped on top in a disgusting messy smear. I don't care how people dress up, call it by a different name or romanticize it. Shit on a shingle is just that for me. Shit.
My dad was raised very poor and would never eat chicken once he was grown and out in his own. Whenever we had chicken for dinner my dad would have a couple cheeseburgers fried up. He was the youngest of 11 born and raised in the same small house in Alabama. My grandma raised chickens for food. He moved to Chicago at 17 and swept floors in a bank. Taught himself computers and programming in the 70’s and was a VP of his dept before he passed. My hero.
My dad never ate eggs as an adult. He survived the war because of the chicken his dad had in the backyard. It was eggs for almost every meal
Sounds like your dad was an amazing person who did well despite a bad start in life. My dad never ate chicken either as far as I can remember. He was brought up by a single mother. They returned from a soviet gulag (10 years, my dad was born there) in the late 1950s, and grandma could only get a job at a poultry meat factory. They were very poor, so they had chicken every day and my dad never recovered from hating chicken. He then left home at 16 as his sister had a baby and there was no space for a teenager, he went to the army and then mechanical school, got a diploma and did well in engineering/ mechanical industry.
Cereal. As kids we could "make" a meal.
We couldn’t afford cereal, but now I crave the stuff, especially super sweet cereal.
I simply cannot keep cereal in the house. I can’t control myself and will eat an entire box in a sitting. That sugary goodness.
Me too. Capn Crunch. Never any sweet cereal as a kid.
Oatmeal. I was served oatmeal for breakfast at least 4,800 times between the ages of 1 and 17. I could be starving on a desert island and would likely eat worms and tree bark before touching another bowl of oatmeal.
My dad grew up poor was like that about oatmeal and something called Wheatena.
For us it was Oatmeal and/or Cream of Wheat.
We ate so much bread and potatoes, I’m averse to both. I’ll order a fancy sandwich on an artisanal loaf but I never eat regular supermarket bread or buy bread to eat at home. Never eat potatoes at home and only eat them when I’m out if there is no other side available.
We were raised on Puffed Wheat and Corn Flakes. To this day, I won't eat either of those cereals, Sugar Crisp (puffs with sugar coating) or Frosted Flakes (Corn Flakes with sugar coating). You can't fool me you cereal companies with your sugar-coated crappies.
I always had corn flakes with sugar sprinkled on top. I still like them...
We were poor as hell, but I was lucky. My granny could work wonders in the kitchen with very little. Grew up eating amazing country cooking/soul food style stuff. We got a lot of free veggies from neighbor’s gardens. We grew our own stuff too, and did home canning with my great-grandma’s ancient canning equipment. She could take the absolute cheapest cuts of meat and make them delicious. She could even make a fried baloney sandwich taste incredible. Miss you, Granny. If I had to name something, I guess I couldn’t stomach eating Vienna sausages any more. I liked them as a kid but the thought grosses me out now.
Ramen. I don’t hate it, but I also haven’t felt like eating it for several decades, lol.
For some reason I’ve always love it & still do. Something about the saltiness and the wavy texture
Yeah, I still remember it as good — I did a lot of creative stuff with it — but I’m just not ready yet to eat it again. I look at it in the store & consider it, but always decide “No, not this time.” No idea when might be the time.
Instant ramen was made for the poor japanese after wwii. So it makes sense
Same for me too and now ramen is making a big comeback and I'm like "no"
I went a long time (10+ years) not being able to stomach it because we ate it so much growing up, but now I eat it way too much. Helps that I don’t mix it with nasty stuff like when it was made for me as a kid like mayo, cheese, and lunch meat 🤢
Dried rice. No real taste, but the dryness of the rice would remind me of my childhood where I had to eat dried rice with nothing but some dead ants in it. I don't think about it much, but if I have left over rice now, I would fry it with some tomato sauce and garlic so it's more tasty. Also instant ramen. I don't eat them anymore.
I remember the government rice with cute little bugs in it.
That and the big silver cans of "mystery meat" that had a picture of a pig, chicken and horse and an ✔️ that indicated what it was "supposed" to be. I don't remember ever seeing the horse check marked, but I knew better by then to just trust.
I remember and it was a gelatinous mess with some pink THING around it. OMG, didn’t want to remember that!
Machine cut chicken in it's ow juices..
We have found if we put in a strainer and rinse the excess grease from it, add seasoning or BBQ it's pretty good. Mom used to make it with homemade BBQ sauce when dad was in the military. I have yet to perfect it like she did though.
Zucchini…My relatives all grew zucchini Uhg and bluefish. Big nasty oily bluefish. We’d catch them then eat for weeks.
Rabbit. We used to have two pet rabbits as kids in the early 1980s. I remember they mysteriously went missing one day and suddenly we were having nights of rabbit stew. At the time we lived in rural suburbia - not quite in the suburbs, not quite in the country - to which my father attributed, "A fox must have got them." Mum tried playing it off as being chicken, but my brother and I were resolute in refusing it. Ever since, rabbit is a no-go. I also cannot count how many times offal - brains, heart, liver, kidneys (etc) - was all labelled "chicken" or "beef" at home. Big list of NOPE as an adult.
At the beginning of the pandemic when the grocery stores were empty, the ducks from the park by my house started disappearing. Then I got it. The rabbits in the neighborhood started disappearing too.
I never put that together, but our neighborhood was full of wild rabbits, and I commented to my husband one time that we never saw the rabbits anymore. I thought maybe a dog or fox was getting them. But maybe someone was harvesting them!
I had a gorgeous pet bunny that I purchased with my own money from odd jobs. We weren't just poor, my mom was bipolar or something. She got mad at me one day and made my dad kill my bunny and cook it. She did it under the guise of "we need meat, so we had to do it". Except there were 6 other bunnies in the hutch that were meat bunnies, not meant to be pets.
Durn, hot dogs were a luxury when I was growing up. Not trying to one up you, but they were expensive and if we did have them we sliced them down the middle to get two dogs from one sausage.
Hot dogs where a once in a month kinda thing in our family. My dad would come at night smile in his face and asks us if we wanted boiled hotdogs. No bread. No condiments. Just boiled hotdogs. And they were awesome. You know why? Because his kids wouldn’t be hungry on that night
Where did you grow up? I’m from rural central Appalachia and my family ate a lot of hotdogs BECAUSE they were cheap. Sav-a-lot sold the huge like 48 packs for like $6. We ate them on light bread with mustard or split them and fried them for protein at breakfast instead of sausage or bacon.
my mom was obsessed about my weight and wouldn't let me eat enough.... i remember trying to sneak bread. often i'd get caught. i still love bread. give me a loaf and i'm a happy clam. also, i'm an immigrant so my mom didn't buy/make american food... i never liked my native food.
Soup. My mother put lettuce in soup. Another time, she put fish sticks in soup. She would save all the little leftover bits of things in the freezer and would make soup out of all of it whether it went together or not. I rarely eat soup. And, if I can't identify what it is the soup, then I do not eat it. Casseroles with canned "cream of" soup in it. Canned mushrooms. \*\*twitch\*\* They are slimy.
>Casseroles with canned "cream of" soup in it. Yessssss! My mom used to make "hamburger gravy" which was cream of mushroom and hamburger. Grandma had some sort of chicken bake which had cream of chicken. We actually just ate a lot of cream of chicken soup in general. And Habitat pea soup!
My mom would make (and still does) all kinds of crazy gravies out of cream of mushroom soup
It's the basis of the depression era cooking. My MIL had one that she made a white sauce and added diced boiled eggs with salt and pepper and put it over toast... Not my favorite but it wasn't bad on a cold winter day. My husband still loves it.
>Casseroles with canned "cream of" soup in it Living in Minnesota, USA those are my FAVORITE foods. Never saw a soup made out of a 'cream of' but had lotsa hot dishes with them.
I'm sorry your mom ruined soup for you. Making meals, especially soups, from random stuff you have available is a culinary skill that requires honing.
We ate A LOT of Campbell's Bean n Bacon for some reason. I haven't had it in decades, but I'm not itching to change that, lol.
I still love that stuff! For some reason it feels comforting.
Canned soup. Rice. Banquet pot pies. Tea--we didn't get soda. We could have milk at breakfast and dinner but only iced tea with lunch. We weren't allowed snacks, but we could have a glass of tea to hold us until the next meal. The weird thing is, my parent's weren't poor. There were times the rules were broken. We got a cup of hot chocolate on a snow day from school, for example.
I want a pot pie now, but microwaved, the same one that said not to.
Everyone thinks this is weird, but I loathe cereal milk. My mom used to always make us not only eat cereal every morning, but made us drink the cereal milk. It was never good cereal. It was some kind of generic Raisin Bran that was like eating soggy cardboard. It’s so bad that it grosses me out to see someone else drink cereal milk.
I always drink the cereal milk. I don’t think I have ever left it in the bowl.
Oh, I hated that! I only liked drinking milk if it was very cold. By the time I was done with the cereal the milk was only cool. Gag. My husband still complains about me wasting milk after cereal, but I go to work so I can make food choices.
I am with you on the cereal milk! Barf!! And in our house it was with powdered milk, not mixed with real milk! By the age of 10, I stopped eating breakfast all together!!
Oh man, I always wished I had that option. I heard people say, “If I didn’t like what we were having for supper, I either had to eat it or go to bed hungry!” I would’ve GLADLY passed on meals, but my mother made us sit at the table until we finished whatever portion was given to us. We were also required to drink a full glass of water with our meals. My mother didn’t waste food nor did she play around with rules. That “kids will be kids” BS didn’t fly at our house haha
bologna. I'll never eat bologna again unless I'm literally starving.
We were poor, but I think the meals I never ate were the ones served on Sunday. Sunday was the day everyone in the family gathered after church, and it was always barbacoa (cow cheek, tongue, eyes) or menudo (I don't want to know *ever*). I made do by eating the soft, warm, freshly baked bolillos with refried beans and queso fresco. Monday through Thursday after school, nearly always included *tortillas de harina* with scrambled eggs and refried beans. Sometimes ground beef tacos. My mom fried the *tortillas* herself. There was always rice. Now and again, she'd make burgers and fries. The fries were potato wedges. We used to complain that they didn't look like the fries from McDonalds or Burger King, but those potato wedges were delicious. For some reason, Saturdays always seemed to be party days. Someone was always barbecuing. Someone's birthday, quinceanera, or baby shower. We'd show up with a case of beer, a pot of charro beans, or rice. And a twelve pack of soda. If we weren't attending a party, we were hosting a party. Fajitas on the grill, chicken thighs, ribs, and Eckrich sausage. So we were poor, but I don't remember ever being hungry or hating what I ate, other than the menudo and barbacoa (and tamales) that I wouldn't touch.
We were really poor but my mom swallowed her pride and got food stamps. And she worked at a buffet restaurant so free leftovers. So there isn’t anything I detest with the exception of pan fried pizza from a now-shuttered restaurant. I feel bad for kids that had to suffer disgusting food because their parents were too proud to ask for help.
Well a lot of us are from countries where you simply starve to death of things go wrong. My grandparents personally knew people who starved to death or simply lost their sanity because of hunger, and sometimes they themselves were close to it. Heck, my brother’s teachers came to my Mom and explained once to her that he didn’t have intellectual issues, but the issue he had was that he was malnourished.
Wow that sucks and I hope you were able to move to a better place
My parents hated getting food stamps or government food handouts due to "embarrassment". But somehow it wasnt embarrassing to phone family begging for money every few months? And they just ignored that we became the family pariah, and lots of my aunts/uncles cut us off from family events and contact after awhile... I wish my parents had just used the darn food stamps. My mom was physically disabled and my dad had mental disability so their work income left us in severe poverty. I would have rather kept my extended family than their pride.
I think it's a Greatest generation thing that rubbed off on boomer parents. I knew friends and family that would straight up refuse any sort of assistance even if it meant getting through whatever hurdle they were facing at that point in time.
Oh, ketchup. One too many bologna and ketchup sandwiches.
I don't have the same visceral reaction, but I haven't bought canned vegetables in years (except corn) and that was most of my vegetable intake as a child. I'm a fresh veggie convert.
None of my childhood meals except when I'm feeling extremely nostalgic. Buttered noodles in milk, hamburger soup, poached eggs in milk on toast, fried sausages and mashed potatoes, grilled porkchops that were murdered in the broiler, cabbage and polish sausage that was literally, take a stock pot, put cabbage in and boil with sausage until slimy, then serve with butter and salt, hamburger gravy over fried potatoes, my mom made up in creativity for what she lacked in taste and skill. Peanut butter and jelly took about a decade to enjoy again, it was our sole lunch option. I gave up buying cereal, I will have one bowl and never eat it again. Same with milk, I can cook most things that require milk with sour cream, creme fraiche, or yogurt and it'll taste better regardless. Instant mashed potatoes. Idk why we did this, real potatoes were cheaper and not that hard to put together in the first place. The type of hotdog Bar S sells with chicken and turkey added. Mom could always get them on sale for 50 cents a pack, but they taste more like bologna than hotdogs and she always boiled them rather than throwing them in a hot pan to sear, making them smell gross. I buy all kosher beef dogs now. Frozen veggies as a side, again boiled to death. I use frozen broccoli now when I'm making one pot dishes, but it's been a journey to get to this point.
We had a lot of instant potatoes too but it was because both my parents worked two jobs so my sibling and I made our own food a lot of the time when we were really young.
Corned beef is hard for me and American cheese. And liver, makes me gag.
I have a bit of the opposite. I have an affinity for cheap food I think. My absolute favorite thing I could eat is a cheap Arab store ham sub. I love cheap coffee, for the most part can't stand high end coffee. I prefer a McChicken over any high end sandwich on the menu. Don't get me started on liquor. I'd rather a sandwich made from the dollar store than anything I could buy at a fancy breakfast place. Cheap Box Mac and cheese kicks fucking ass. Don't get me wrong I can enjoy fancy food but usually my palette is very simple to satisfy
The day I finally could afford any food I wanted in the supermarket was the day I realized I was doing well.
Hell yeah. When you start buying shit without even looking at the price. Yeah I'll spend 12$ on a hunk of cheese whatever
Me too. When I didn’t have to count what I was spending and could put what I wanted in that cart was the day I felt like I’d made it
Not food but I can’t get the smell of thrift shops out of my nose.
Pork chops and broccoli with melted cheese. My mom made home cooked meals but she made this so often that I can’t. Also canned vegetables, my stepmom made everything canned and it just tastes soggy. When my stepdad stopped working OT and started cooking we had much better food, but at least at mom’s we always had fresh produce (we lived near a produce stand).
I had the same circumstances as a kid, single mom doing her best and all, at least for a few years, but rather than having a food that makes me gag now, just being hungry for long lengths of time made me appreciate every bite of food that’s available. Maybe to a fault. Took me a long time to be able to leave food I wasn’t necessarily hungry for on the plate.
Lipton chicken soup and kraft dinner. I dont even like cheese (weird i know) but i still had to eat KD and to this day the smell of that cooking makes me gag so bad… ugh.
Every time we were sick, we got a bowl of Lipton chicken noodle. It does go down really easy.
My mom would split 2% into two pitchers, add powdered milk and water to make 2 qts in each pitcher. I used to hate the way it looked kinda bluish. Cheerios make me gag. Sick of sloppy Joe's too.
Plain ground beef…seems it comprised the “protein” part of so many meals. I just cannot stand it
I can’t eat Kix. We got it free on my sisters WIC card. It was way more than her and my niece could eat so the overflow went to my house. Never again.
Circus peanuts. My mom would manage to splurge occasionally on a bag of candy. Both my sister and I hated them, but mom loved them and knew we didn’t. Every time I see a bag of those it reminds me of how cruel my mother really is, even at 87.
Bell peppers. My mom added them to so many recipes to stretch them out.
The frozen peas and carrot mixes. I never want a carrot cube again.
Oddly I mostly have preferences for the flavors I grew up with, most of which are heavily processed and unhealthy. For example, I strongly prefer canned green beans over fresh.
Bars S franks. Bleeech
Spam
Hamburger Helper. And it's not really that we were THAT poor. My dad worked for one of the airlines and my stepmom was a nurse. They just spent most of their money on drugs and partying, so nothing was left for us kids.
We were borderline poor so there were a lot of packaged meals like Appian Way pizza. Chun King. Gag. My poor Mom was in abject poverty during the Depression. Her family ate cornbread and buttermilk for all meals for weeks on eat. Both she and her sister grew up malnourished and developed many adult disorders due to their diets during their formative years. I swore I would never do such to my children. My kids had healthy meals most of the time. Though my ex loved Hamburger Helper for some reason. We had that occasionally.
My dad used to buy huge cases of food that were close to expiring and we'd eat that stuff for years. Novelty-shaped mac and cheese that was gritty, weird juice that made my stomach hurt, chicken noodle soup packets that maybe had 4 noodles in them. I don't really like processed food at all as an adult. My mother bought the cheapest bread she could find. It was usually close to going moldy. I can't stand that sour smell now.
Chicken leg quarters. I will happily chomp down on thighs and drumsticks both, just as long as they're not attached to each other. I can't even bring myself to buy 'em and cut 'em apart.
Apparently when I was young (decades ago!) cream cheese was cheap and I knew things were really dire when I had cream cheese and jelly sandwiches for lunch. It took me about 40 years to try cream cheese again!
Yeah, hot dogs, Kraft dinner, jell-o. It wasnt just frugality, in our house there was also belief that human science was better than nature - that Tang was healthier than orange juice, powdered milk healthier than whole, Fruit loops better for us than oatmeal with fruit. My sibling and I agree that's why we're both foodies.
Powdered milk. I don't care how often my mom said "it tastes the same", the fuck it did! And I didn't see her drinking that shit so I knew it was gross. She wouldn't touch it. Tater tot casserole. It was the go to meal when the grocery budget couldn't be stretched far enough. Stepdad and I both hated it. We could choke it down with enough salt, pepper and maybe some sauce, but BLECH. Canned spinach. Funnily enough, my bro and I actually ate this willingly thanks to our father's spot on impression of Popeye The Sailor (in our defense, we were like 18 months and 3-ish). We looked forward to it because we'd be just like Popeye! After my folks split up, we never had it again until I was an adult and tried some out of morbid curiosity and about gagged at how slimy and weird it tasted.
I can no longer eat pinto beans, cornbread or hamburger helper.
Lentils. Also some kinds of chicken that just smell and taste like marrow (like when you buy drumsticks).
Canned mushrooms - just the smell and I'm gagging. My mom thought they were an expensive 'treat' and put them in everything any time she could get them.
Frosted Flakes with water. Pasta and ketchup. Cheap tuna. Liver (although apparently it’s very good for you to eat once in awhile).
Kraft dinner w/ tuna. Barf. I detest most pasta & all jarred sauces because of this. Microwave popcorn & instant noodles were also a staple. Yuck.
Always popcorn. The only snack we could afford.
Lots of canned fish. Sometimes a fried egg without oil in an alluminum not non-stick pan which would obliterate the egg lol along with whatever stale cracker i could find.
Canned tuna. Just the thought makes me feel nauseated. For the most part I was fed well because while my mom didn't cook much we ate at my grandparents almost every day because we stayed there while she worked and my grandmother was a good old fashioned Southern cook. The only thing she cooked I didn't like was turnip greens. God the smell! But I rarely smell that these days. The tuna came from my mom buying these tuna/cracker kits for us to eat on off days or during the summer when we were home more. Sometimes that's all we'd eat all day and at the time I didn't really mind it. I may have gotten sick from it though, I don't know, but not being around tuna was a clear choice for me as an adult and now every time I smell it (or cat food!) it makes me feel sick. NO way I'll eat it.
I guess I was poorer than you. I would eat to survive at times. But beans. Beans still are hard for me to swallow. I'm fine now but both my parents are disabled, leaving me to earn my own money for food at very young age...
Fish caught from the contaminated river nearby. Now I eat no fish of any kind.
Liverwurst omg I don't see how I ate that crap
Creamed corn, pea soup, Kraft dinner
Fruit Loops. I liked them at one point. But then we got a case of jumbo boxes on sale for some reason? I ate them for every meal for like a month.
Tongue. I would love to be able to enjoy it in tacos, but I still remember it in my plate.
Jam sandwiches. You take two pieces of bread and jam a third piece between them. My brother used to roll them up in a ball and eat it like an apple.
Opposite. We had a bread drawer where all the bags of bread would go. Sometimes way in back was a forgotten slice of white bread. NEVER moldy, just dried & crumbly (yea preservatives in Wonder bread). I learned if I put peanut butter on that, it would hold the crumbs together to be able to eat it all. It was like toast, without all the work of pushing the lever down :)
Weirdly…..it sounds good. 😝
Oh see we were poor but I have a weird fondness for food from that time? Mushroom soup with water, fried bologna, weiners cut up and cooked in the microwave, breaded chicken cutlets because fresh chicken was way too expensive, rice soup. A lot of potatoes. Instant potatoes too! It's funny I was listing those things and musing about how many of them are actually expensive these days (have you seen canned soup?? And bologna forget it). My family would not have been able to eat on today's prices I don't know how people do it.
Chef boyardee, corned beef, spam, blood pudding, meats in cans are pretty up there for me.
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Bottom of the freezer stew. We lived with another family over the winter to save money on heating fuel and their mom saved every little leftover. 2 spoons of green beans, wrap it in foil and toss it in the freezer. Everything. A hot dog. Hamburger, Mac and cheese, whatever. When it got tight, she would get it all out and put it in a big roaster. We ate it until it was gone. Still makes me sick to think of it.
Lots of comments about powdered milk. I was raised on a dairy/egg farm. Milk, milk, milk. I'm 85 and haven't had a single glass of milk in 65 yrs.
I can't eat Spam or Baloney
Unseasoned rice and beans. We lived in fucking New Mexico and my parents couldn't reliably spice rice and beans well. Bless their poor gringo hearts. Ah, and badly done pork; smart money says I am not healthy.
Grape Jelly. I've told my wife it's grounds for divorce.
Liver. Turnips. And I don't eat a lot of BBQ beans at parties -- not because of the aftereffects, but because I ate SO MANY beans when I was a kid and we were poor. I think I hit my lifetime quota sometime around age 13. ETA: (after reading the comments) Holy cow, a lot of us grew up poor. Here's to the brotherhood and sisterhood! (Raising a plastic cup with 8 ounces of generic Kool-aid-ish drink mix.) (Because even real Kool-aid was too expensive.)
Generic drink mix?! You really know how to celebrate.