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

My diet wasn't so bad. There was more sugar in everything & agreed that breakfasts were bad - we had a sugar bowl on the table and added it to cereal!

But my mum didn't feed us junk. We were fed plenty of fruit & veg & freshly cooked food. Lunches were sandwiches, fruit, yoghurt . My children eat more salad than i ever did.

Oh yes I didn't have an avocado from a shop (as opposed to in a restaurant meal) until the 00s. I just remember them being so hard & often bland.

true, yes there was a key markets, i worked there in 1984

I think I had hummus in my first year at university in 1998 for the first time. Other things I tried having never eaten before were avocado and sweet potato. I remember laughing with my sister as this was all stuff my niece was weaned on.

I grew up inthe north in the eighties. Same breakfasts I loved sugar puffs and coco pops. Remember the gift inside? Like literally in the cereal usually somewhere near the bottom.
I had school dinners, I remember mutton pie, spam, cottage pie, and chocolate concrete, lemon meringue or semolina for pudding. In my teens it was the chip shop or sandwich shop for lunch with crisps, chocolate bar and a can of pop.
Biscuits for snack after schooleither two choc digestives or one Kit Kat, or blue ribbon.
My mum would cook tea it would be some form of meat, veg, potatoes so meat pie, cottage pie, grilled chicken, Sunday dinner, pork or lamb chops all with roast or baked potatoes and carrots , peas or broccoli. When we got a bit older she would buy packet flavours (the type you add water too to make a sauce) and make spag bol, chicken chop suey, beef bourginion or chicken chasseur.
I dont really remember drinking water but I assume we had water with dinner at school. I remember warm cartons of milk 🤢 at break. And I remember drinking pop at home - cherryade , cola, orangeade, lemon and lime, dandelion and burdock. Or a milky tea.
We had thick slabs of cheese on toast for breakfast at a weekend and I remember having sugar sandwiches as a treat and Yorkshire pudding before the dinner with sugar on. Picknmix from the shop once a week, everything was a penny except the little teddies were 2 for a penny and black jacks and fruit salads were 2p each.

I was so skinny and full of energy when I was young, now I eat healthily, drink loads of water , exercise and yet I struggle with weight and have an ongoing aches and pains.

Interesting isn’t it. I had a similar diet, but I think I worry less about the impact of the specific foods on my health, and more about how they influence me behaviorally (found it very hard to break the sugar = reward connection for example).

my son has a super varied and much healthier diet than I did- with a decent amount of sausage rolls, Nutella pancakes, biscuits, ice cream etc in the mix too- and I’m sorry to say he had desert every day (usually an ice lolly, or a biscuit rather than a full on pudding) … I don’t feel guilty about that. He’s healthy. He’s a healthy weight. The greatest food treats in the world to him are sushi or a seafood bbq. He’s fine. If he’s wringing his hands in 20 years time about the Nutella so be it

No Supermarkets? In the 80s? We always used to do the Asda shop on a Friday evening and got home to watch Knight Rider.

My sons now in their mid 30s, had toast / cereal, packed lunch, sandwich, crisps, choc bar biscuit, and normally water, home made dinners, not puds tho
Seemed normal then

What’s with the first few comments on any post being grumpy and argumentative as fuck?

Some probably fed their dc similar so are a tad defensive 😆

Our tastes would also have changed, more people going abroad on holiday. eating in different restaurants means people were exposed to different options.

All the sugar ruined our teeth. But I think much worse was the lack of sun protection as a child.
That’s for another thread though.

What on earth? I don’t think the mumsnet clientele are generally starving.

It is perfectly reasonable to be horrified by the masses of ultra processed food we used to eat. It really is shocking that nutrition etc was just not a thing.

What’s with the first few comments on any post being grumpy and argumentative as fuck?

we did start having occasional boil in the bag fish, findus crispy pancakes, angel delight
and i agree, there were no supermarkets

We are constantly bombarded with big companies trying to get us to spend money. Ages ago, they'd tell us cigarettes were good for us. In the 60s and 70s they plugged sugary cereals, white bread, sweets, convenience foods, etc. Remember Sunny Delight?! Now it's things that are supposed to be healthy but aren't: 'free from' stuff, things with sugar substitutes, protein and cereal bars, energy drinks... We try to do our best with the information we have but we have powerful enemies!

Our packed lunches always included an apple.

But a sandwich, bag of crisps, a chocolate bar (penguins or club were the best, but mostly some Fine Fare Yellow Label wannabe) and a can of pop were very much required.

My mum was a whole earth, Cranks Cookbook, Fan of The Good Life and dreamed of getting a smallholding in Wales kind of woman, so we had brown bread. Which brought shame on our heads.

We did know about hummus because of the whole Cranks/smallholding deal, but there was no way in hell I’d have been seen dead taking it into school.

Most kids seemed to live off of fish fingers and over chips for dinner. We did always have a veg, even if it was (Yellow Label ) baked beans.

Late 80s into the 90s things got better as the economy improved. But late 70s through the mid-80s was pretty dire as I recall.

I know our parents didn’t know much better and had a tough situation to deal with, and I look back with humor. But we are the generation that really started to get obese in large numbers as we got older. It wasn’t good at all.

I preferred some of the chocolate & sweets from my childhood vs today as they have removed E numbers etc. How good were orange smarties!

In the 80’s I would have egg on toast / bacon and eggs for breakfast, school dinner which was ham and beetroot salad, fish and chips or pork, chicken beef, followed by semolina, chocolate pudding or jelly and ice cream. Tea which was salad with thick real bread and butter, ploughman’s if hot or pork chops, chicken, sausages or beef and two or three vegetables for tea / dinner, cake or pudding. I was skinny on this and cycled and ran a lot. I still eat same now without all the puddings and eat things like pasta, rice noodles. Still have a jam sandwich. I ate mainly unprocessed food and the veg was usually from the garden, milk & eggs from the farm, meat from the butcher. Bread from the bakery. There wasn’t really a near supermarket. Supermarkets have given us all easy processed food. The ‘we ate awful in the 80’s’ thing is not true for everyone same as now. I ate like a king then, my kids eat well now but I don’t have access to a bakery so less lovely bread.

i had buttered weetabix as a snack, and often with syrup on it, started that in the 1960s!
i stopped though because I put on weight!

We used to have Buttered weetabix for breakfast and Banana sandwich as an after school snack.

My mums childhood snack was a sugar & banana sandwich, too sweet for me.

We were a low ish income 80s household who had a microwave, they were common by the 90s.
I ate a lot of the junk food the OP had mentioned (haven’t thought about Um Bongos for years but I loved them!) It wasn’t necessarily regularly or in large quantities though. I think I had toast with marmite or peanut butter most days for breakfast which is still a regular in my household to this day. I did love coco pops though, as does my daughter, but they were not an every day breakfast. I had school dinners
I remember chocolate concrete and pink custard being the absolute highlight.

I ate some junk, I ate plenty of good stuff. Probably like my kids now and I wouldn’t say I was more active than them. I did loads of sporty stuff but also loved to read and watch tv as a child, my kids do loads of sporty stuff but also love PlayStation and YouTube.

Middle class parents and my diet was not dissimilar - Coco pops for breakfast, chocolate biscuit and crisps in the lunch box. Apple came home every day. Thankfully had 'good' dinners. I do remember it seemed I was constantly starving compared to everyone else, and my tummy rumbling in French just before morning break time was so embarrassing.

So for thousands of years its eaten but its not recognised until supermarkets put it on shelves

You claimed it was an everyday food? I have not said no one ate it, just that the masses didn't. What are you struggling to comprehend?

I am out of this thread due to the absolutely none two way thinking

It's not a biggie to be wrong but you can have a tantrum if you prefer. It's a shame you couldn't add some more valuable insights!

This is so irrelevant 🙄 we are reading all the time about the dangers of UPF. Of course the OP might start looking back and thinking about their own childhood diet.

OP. Sorry about yet another thread full of unnecessarily rude responses. My mum was always super strict with my diet and loved to cook but I remember being jealous of alot of friends who ate the way you did! We all seemed to get through life the same and hopefully eating a bit more wholesome now 😅

We used to have Buttered weetabix for breakfast and Banana sandwich as an after school snack. No one else I know has ever had buttered weetabix but it was just always the way mum made them, had to make sure you had nice softened butter though.

Not my 80s diet (born mid 70s). Loads of veg, home cooked meals, proper sandwiches- in fact by the mid 80s I was in my vegetarian phase, only allowed sugary cereals on holiday and sweets on a Friday. Though school lunches had a full dessert everyday - didn’t have them routinely at home. I was a fat child though - because I enjoyed it all. We were definitely more active and you really couldn’t get a takeaway on a whim.