If you were a kid growing up in ’90s Australia, there’s a good chance that you had at least a few of these schoolyard staples in your lunchbox. Come with us on a trip down Nutritionally Questionable lane.
We’re using Babybel as an umbrella to refer to all weird individual cheeses here. String cheese, Laughing Cow, Babybel, Kraft cheese sticks, the list goes on. Same goes for Le Snak packs and the Franklins no-frills cheese and crackers.
Roll Ups, Fruity Metres, fruit leather, it’s all the same. A world of sugar, a whisper of fruit and a bunch of kids dealing with a sugar crash after recess.
Depending on what kind of health kick your mum was on at the time, there was either a ‘healthy’ tub of Fruche vanilla yoghurt, or a cute little pot of strawberry Petit Miam. It actually is French for ‘yum’ just so you know.
Dried noodles, crunched up and sprinkled with white pepper and flavour enhancer 621, Mamee noodles were the bomb.
Whether it was pre-sliced from the deli, hacked at from a dense roll by Dad, or the slightly fancier ‘smiley’ cylindrical meat, devon and tomato sauce sandwiches were ubiquitous with 90s lunchtime. Served with margarine on white bread, accept no substitutions.
The smell of rotting mandarin skins will forever be linked to primary schools. If you didn’t eat your mandarin the day it was packed, the handfruit would inevitably be found squashed at the bottom of backpacks the day before term starts again. Sorry Mum.
What even were these? Is it Soylent Green? Did astronauts even know these existed? In any case, we packed them, we ate them, we pretended to like them and never looked back.
They may have tasted a bit like burnt caramel cardboard but we all hoed into these wafer-like nutty snacks like they were going out of fashion.
Not to be confused with ‘ants on a log’ which had the very bougie addition of sultanas, peanut butter smeared on celery was a classic of the 90s lunchbox. The funnel of the celery ribs was the perfect canoe for a line of peanut butter. Editor’s note: wet celery is the enemy of this particular staple.
The best lunchbox treat of the 90s came by way of these teeny little malty chocolate circles. Nothing compares to the satisfaction of dissolving the embossed face off before crunching down.
Dunkaroos were pretty fancy to be honest, and usually reserved for a particularly special packed lunch but there’s no denying that smug feeling we all felt when you whipped out one of these bad boys at lunch.
No, but why was the Incredibites mascot so hunky? Weird childhood crushes aside, Incredibites were incredible. Crunchy wafer pockets filled with a Nutella-like spread? Too good.
