Bernard O'Shea: The Dad Bod Diaries — Where has the food of my youth gone?

With the likes of the red Bounty and Lilt quietly disappearing from our shelves, I wonder if middle age is really a case of just becoming homesick for the snacks that shaped us

The red wrapper on a Bounty meant dark chocolate, which, in the Ireland of the 1990s, felt impossibly mature and continental.

The other day, I stood in the freezer aisle of a supermarket staring blankly into the distance. I wasn’t really shopping anymore. I was searching. Not for food exactly. For proof that somewhere out there, the foods of my youth still existed.

Not modern, ‘inspired by the classic’ versions either. The real things. The foods that built Irish childhoods in the 1980s and ’90s, that tasted slightly artificial, but emotionally perfect.