So I have a genuine curiosity:
What do people in the US outside the South drink with meals at home? Like, growing up every day, what got served as a drink with dinner? Obviously at a restaurant you order soda and stuff, but what was common at home? Do they keep sodas and such at home and serve it consistently, or what?
I know down here it’s sweet tea, and I know that’s foreign to the rest of the country, so I’m curious. Reblog if you can, I’m interested in as many responses as I can get.
When I was a kid I had a glass of milk with dinner every night, but these days I usually have soda. I grew up in Oregon.
From what little I can remember, tap water or Kool-aid (because Kool-aid is cheap and we were poor). I grew up in Eastern Oregon.
I grew up near Saint Louis. Usually we had tap water, sometimes coca-cola if we ordered a pizza or something. For barbecues and summery family gatherings and stuff, sometimes we’d make sun tea. (usually two batches, one sweetened and one unsweetened)
Michigan: milk or water, or lemonade in summer.
When I was growing up it was milk or Tang on military bases in various parts of the country. Now it’s tap water, sometimes wine or fruit juice.
minnesota: milk or fruit juice when i was a kid. pop, iced tea (not sweet tea, but earl grey or herbal brewed with a tea bag and then poured over ice), or iced coffee as i got older.
my parents would sometimes have a bottle of beer or a glass of wine instead, and now that i’m middle-aged i do that too. not every meal but when it was something that harmonized, you know? wine with pasta, beer with burgers or steak, lemon shandy with fried chicken, that sort of thing.
even though it’s cold as a republican’s heart half the year here, we almost never have hot drinks with dinner. i don’t know why. i have hot coffee with breakfast, hot tea with a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, but with a sit-down dinner i always want a big glass of something cold. i don’t even like red wine at dinner because it’s served room temperature – gotta be a nice cold white. or sake, i like sake cold during dinner and hot with dessert. no clue why. it’s just what i like. *shrug*
The idea of drinking with a meal is really weird to me. My family only ever did water. If I want a booze drink, I typically have it before or after dinner, not during.
I drank pretty much only water growing up. Other beverages were treated like snacks: nice for the taste, but not a thirst-quencher. To this day, water is the only thing that ever quenches my thirst. Any other liquid just makes me thirstier.
My parents insisted we have milk with every meal, even with things it really doesn’t make sense to pair milk with, like steak with red wine based sauce. Adults drank wine at the table, or very rarely beer. We had pop in the fridge but that was only to have with snacks, never with a meal.
As a little kid I always had milk or juice, occasionally soda. At some point in my early teens I started mostly drinking water with meals, and I’ll have alcohol with my meal on the rare occasions I drink it.
I grew up in the South, but nobody in my family likes sweet tea. We almost always drank water at meals, even at restaurants. When we didn’t drink water, we drank seltzer (or tonic water, in my dad’s case), but that was usually because the tap water tasted awful or wasn’t potable, which was not uncommon.
russian jewish, grew up in a lot of places but mostly new england and california; usually tap water or sparkling water, occasionally milk if it makes sense with the food, small amounts of wine on friday past age 13. everyone got their own beverage if it’s nonalcoholic.
New England
when I was a kid I had milk with every meal
at some point in high school I switched to hot tea with breakfast (because I needed it to stay awake in first period), unsweetened iced tea with lunch (what my mom did, my dad had Coke), and red wine and seltzer with dinner (what both my parents did)
I drank soda on occasion when I was a kid but don’t really anymore. I’ve never drunk much water