To be slightly horrified now by what I ate as a kid in the 80s?

My mum was like this! We had wholemeal everything and weren't allowed the sugary cereals aimed at kids so could never get the free toy. It was always branflakes with extra fruit chopped up on top.
Now I'm older I'm glad my mum ingrained healthy eating in us all. We were only allowed fizzy drinks on a birthday or Christmas. This was in the 80s and we were not posh by any stretch.

@SheridansPortSalut It’s not only the UPF which have indeed got worse - also the almost complete absence of fibre and any vitamins at all!

people weren’t overweight because they ate much less, overall, I think, vs the ingredients being massively different

I do think "puddings" have been a bit demonised in that people used to bake more at home & they were far less processed and had less sugar. My mother made things like rice pudding with not a lot of sugar, homemade crumbles that were mainly fruit (again, not much sugar added compared to shop bought). The key ingredients were nutritious unprocessed ingredients like milk, eggs, rice, flour, butter, cream and fruit. These are not bad things for growing children to eat.

A few years back i worked out the nutrients in her old recipes for jam roly poly, banana bread, carrot cake etc and they were miles healthier than shop bought versions.

i always had sugar with my strawberries and cream, still do,
and on my shreddies

My diet was good, my DM was into healthy eating.
Sunday - a different roast on a four week rotation, home made cake.
Monday - curry with the leftover roast meet
Others days meals such as spag Bol, cauliflower or macaroni cheese, tropical chicken which was a pressure cooker chicken and pineapple recipe with rice, homemade minestrone soup with crusty bread, homemade chips with homemade burgers (every couple of weeks). All meals were completely made from scratch. Pasta was wholewheat, packed lunch’s were brown bread egg or tuna or both and a penguin bar and piece of fruit. I was never a big breakfast eater but I remember shredded wheat and weatabix. Occasional fish and chips and ate out a few times a year. Out shopping on a Saturday I could choose something from the bakers, I usually picked bread pudding or soup and a roll.
Birthday party food was handmade, big cake, fairy cakes, cheese straws, sandwiches, jelly and ice cream.

I'm 45 and my diet in the 80's was very similar, although did also have fruit and veg.

But laugh at this, my mum used to cut me up an apple or strawberries and put sugar on it!!! Was lush but I wouldn't dream of doing that with my kids.

I think it's just we didn't know in the 80's how bad sugar was.

@AliasGrape agree

@BritishFoodFan the dispute wasn't about whether it existed or that people ate it though?

My lunch box was white bread with sandwich spread, skips a lion bar and capri sun:-)

I always see this argument that kids in the 80s/90s were outside all day and that there wasn’t much - if any - processed or packaged food, or we didn’t snack. And it’s absolute bollocks. I think it’s just generic ‘the past was better - we never had all this’ rose tinted glasses.

I certainly wasn’t outside all day, my mum wasn’t sending me off on my bike with a sandwich wrapped in brown paper and an apple not to be seen again till dinner time. Truth be told we spent a lot of time in front of the tv, sat in the back of the Toyota with a bottle of coke and a packet of crisps whilst our parents were in the pub (realise this wasn’t all parents!) and when we were left unsupervised in the park there were several seriously questionable characters hanging around.

OP has also covered the sugary cereals. I remember Mr Men jellies, munch bunch yogurts, a whole plethora of biscuits and chocolate bars, monster munch, space raiders, discos, frozen pizza, vienetta, Findus crispy pancakes, uncle bens sauces, capri sun, panda pops - blue raspberryade!, sherbet dib dabs, 10p mixes, Sarah Lee gateaux and strudel, space dust, fizzy Vimto, angel delight, ice magic topping, smarties still with the e numbers, frazzles, caramac, - just off the top of my head!

I never drank water, only ever juice (from concentrate), squash or pop.

We did actually eat fairly healthy dinners as a family and vegetables did feature, and we did get fruit. But yeah, it wasn’t some utopia of whole foods and minimal snacking.

It wasn't a great diet. However, the ingredients in those foods wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad as they are in those same foods now. Yes, there was a lot of sugar there but I bet none of you were overweight. That sugar has now been replaced with high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners. Manufacturers keep swapping out ingredients for cheaper and cheaper alternatives.

Re the hummus, my mother was making it in the 70s, so it was definitely around then in the UK, although not commercially available (and she had to buy dried chickpeas and tahini from the hippyish health food store).

I had the opposite as a child, my mother was an excellent and adventurous cook, and my lunchbox was always filled with wholesome homemade food, and I got water to drink. Born in '73.

I would have killed for a juice carton and a wagon wheel!

@faerietales

you were born much later than the period we are discussing here. I’m early 70’s so started school during dire economic times. We are pretty badly

The 80s was the start of the packed lunches - all my schooling was in the 60s and 70s and nobody had a packed lunch until 6th form, and then it was called "bring your own dinner" rather than packed lunch! We could also drink tea or coffee with it as we had a boiling water urn, and ate it in the common room and played records 😁 It was usually a sandwich and a biscuit or a cake slice, nothing that was messy or spillable. I certainly had a home cooked meal in the evening with lots of veg as it was cheaper than meat, and fruit too - as did most of us. Very rarely as a weekend treat we had Findus crispy pancakes or a Vesta ready meal!

Bowel cancer is indeed soaring in our generation and inflammatory bowel disease also as well as obesity. The diet Britons had between 1970 ish and 2000 ish is responsible for so much ill health imo (and I work in the field). Thank god attitudes are changing now. We don’t need to eat exotic foods, just apples and porridge and potatoes would do!

-edited for typo in date

Mine was similar except cheese spread was on the menu as well. We did get satsumas sometimes or apples. We got Trio’s often with our Um Bongo - both heavily advertised though again much of the time we got squash in a flask not a carton

I know someone who works as a school lunchtime controller and she says more than half of pupils have processed crap in their lunch boxes, and plenty of sugary items too (despite the school policy on chocolate etc parents still add it to their lunches). For those that have school meals the vegetables are invariably left but the puddings are always eaten. Probably not much has changed from generation to generation.

I grew up in another country where from memory it was a a bit late to the party with being able to buy processed junk food in the 80’s. I always had sandwiches with Vegemite, cheese or ham, my DF would make me tinned salmon & cucumber sandwiches which I hated because they stank! A treat was Vegemite and crisp sandwiches. Then always a yoghurt and in winter I often had a Thermos of homemade soup (lots of kids did too). No such thing as mid-morning snacks at school either, and having a snack after school wasn’t a thing either.

My dad is 72 and still hasn't gotten over that he can't get "proper" sugar puffs anymore 🤣

Did you drink the milk? I hated it. It sat in crates outside on the playground, so in summer it was warm, congealed and a bit sour. Sometimes there were lumps of cream that wouldn’t go through the very thin straw.

At my village primary we had a kitchen (now a classroom) so all cooking was done onsite and the village butcher provided the meat. It wasn’t bad. His shop is a house now and they bring food in.

Sadly we lived in a new style village where there was a supermarket and lots of promises of other things that never arrived, so getting tona market wasn't possible. I don't think it even occurred to my parents to grow fruit and veg, although I do remember my grandad grew runner beans (but they lived too far away for us to take advantage of that)

For most of primary school I had to have free school meals, I was so jealous of the sandwich kids with lunches like yours OP. I was such a picky eater that I mainly just ate the pudding, unless it was a chips day. No breakfast at home but at DGP on the way to school I’d have a glass of Alpine lemonade and a KitKat. There was the small bottle of milk at school, probably the healthiest part of my day. Evening meal would’ve been along the lines of crispy pancakes, potato waffles and Heinz spaghetti. Or one of those tiny frozen pizzas which went under the grill, I’d almost forgotten about those! A Frey Bentos pie was a big treat. I wouldn’t eat any fruit or veg until I got into my later teens. I don’t remember many snacks, pudding at home was a treat and portions were not big. I was slim as a child, and so far, into my fifties, haven’t had any major health problems. My diet as an adult has been much better!
What shocks me looking back is how little we drank. At school, after Thatcher the milk snatcher had her way, the only drink was water with lunch. I would just have a sip as I hated water! Even as an older kid finally taking a packed lunch, that juice carton or can of pop was the only hydration all day. How did we survive and thrive on so little liquid?

I relate to this and lots of my friends do too. There’s a reason bowel cancer in under 50s is at an all time high and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to all the rubbish our generation ate as children.

My mother was terribly old fashioned. We never had the fancy branded foods like coco pops or pop tarts. We had porridge with brown sugar or whole meal toast with butter and marmalade. No margarine or semi-slimmed milk either. School lunch. Supper was usually a stew or chops followed by stewed fruit and custard.

i had egg curry in primary school in the 1970s, it was green!

My parents grew the veg and what fruit they could.

Also, fruit and veg markets (the kind that's moves around towns) were pretty cheap in the 80s - supermarket veg and fruit was probably £££ idk