To some, the 1990s was the decade of the Spice Girls, slow Internet, and Go-Gurt. But on a larger scale, it was a decade of building gateways between different parts of the world. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant a reemerging of individual countries’ food identities and an increase in trade between those countries and the U.S. The Immigration Act of 1990 brought 20 million immigrants to the United States. The 1990s also brought the dulcet tones of dial-up Internet connections into people’s living rooms around the world.

The decade also changed the way we ate as a culture—not only with the dawn of modern food media like the Food Network, Epicurious, and Martha Stewart Living, but because it was an era of home cooks and restaurantgoers alike looking outside their comfort zones when deciding what to cook and eat.

The decade took us from jars of Prego to specialty olive oils and regional Italian cooking introduced by writers like Marcella Hazan. Cartons of instant masa and plastic containers of sushi hit the shelves of American grocery stores, and the once-exotic kiwi went mainstream.

In the TASTE ’90s Issue, we look at some of the joys, fears, and SnackWell’s-fueled anxieties of the decade. It wasn’t always as pretty as our Lisa Frank–tinted glasses might lead us to believe, but it will go down in history as a time when we looked around and decided to recalibrate our taste buds and try something new. —Anna Hezel, Senior Editor

Illustrations by Ellie Skrzat and Dingding Hu