Andrew F. Smith

Historical Overview: From the 1960s to the Present: The 1990s

Appears in
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America

By Andrew F. Smith

Published 2004

  • About
The end of the 1980s brought a stock market recession and with it a reduction of conspicuous consumption, at least for a while. Staying home to eat, even if that meant eating a microwaved Lean Cuisine meal—as one popular brand of frozen food was called—became so fashionable that the term “cocooning” was coined to describe it. Expensive restaurants either closed or scaled back their menu prices from about eighty-five dollars per person to under thirty dollars per person.

During the recession, chic cooking magazines featured what they called cuisina povera, or the cooking of the poor. Italian food, particularly peasant Italian food, became more popular than ever. The simple foods of Tuscany were very fashionable, and recipes for Tuscan beans—featuring nothing more than beans, salt, and olive oil—seemed to be on every magazine cover. Beans also fit very well into the high-fiber, high-carbohydrate lifestyle that was considered so important for health—never more so than when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) revised its “Four Basic Food Groups” into the “Food Pyramid” in 1992. Because red meat was still considered not only unhip but dangerous and because fish was considered ecologically and nutritionally superior, the combination of fish and beans was a high-profile but short-lived trend of the early 1990s.