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

I've seen lots of threads on here where children have bought letters home from school explaining the packed lunch policy (no chocolate bars, cakes for example).

I grew up in the 80s. We weren't that poor, but couldn't afford all that processed stuff. Coco pops for breakfast? I wish, that was costly stuff and was a treat. Sweets every day? Again, no. We had a sweet tin out of which I was allowed something once a week. Pic and mix was an occasional treat.

I don't know where all these kids having carrot sticks and hummus in their lunch boxes are, but I work as a supply TA, have worked in several different schools and most of the kids have crap in their lunch boxes. Crisps, dairy lea dunkers, chocolate bars...what astounds me is how MUCH they have these days. I had one round of sandwiches, a club bar or Jordan's crunch, and an apple.

We didn't die of hunger, we weren't all keeling over with dehydration because we hadn't had a drink for ten minutes and I could manage a few hours in the car without needing a snack.

Well that were the diet choices of your parents. I also grew up in the ‘80’s and we only ate home cooked meals, zero processed food. Veg from our own garden etc.

I think there still are people who eat like your family did when growing up. It’s about lifestyle choices and knowledge and partly money (I say partly as processed and ready made foods are not cheaper than home cooking. It just depends upon what type of ingredients you use for your home cooking. Seasonal veg and cheap cuts of meat are cheaper than processed stuff.

Primary school teacher here… course it wouldn’t 😂. What parents feed their children ( as long as they get fed) is literally none of my/schools business! We teach not raise kids 🙈

Nope @NotWantingToBeRude
I was a 70's and 80s child, nothing like that at all. Yes cereal for breakfast but usually weetabix or shreddies. We got a variety pack in the holidays as a treat and fought over the cocopops 😂
Packed lunch in the summer term only, sandwiches with cold meat or cheese, yoghurt fruit and crisps, box of juice. School dinners autumn and winter terms.
Proper meat and veg dinner most nights, occasionally pasta or rice. Friday was treat night so maybe a pot noodle or Findus crispy pancakes!
Pudding on Sunday only.
Very occasionally Chinese takeaway

My children still have lunches like this and breakfasts too.
We don't have dessert every night but when we do it'll be cake and custard.
My children and me are all healthy and ate healthy weights.

I don't understand why you think you'd get a letter home for a jam sandwich, crisps and a chocolate bar??

Yes I ate more veg it was usually fresh not tinned growing up than I did fruit.which was usually tinned and given as a pudding on a Sunday 😀

I used to walk to the shop every morning before school and buy 2 bars of chocolate, then I’d come home and eat them both for breakfast with coffee. Lunch would usually be chips and an iced bun or crisps and more chocolate. I was very thin but probably malnourished. Mum was pretty neglectful of my diet. I’m now obsessed with making sure DS has the best diet!

Disordered eating is quite different to a clinically diagnosed eating disorder.

I didn't eat much fruit as a kid (70s baby) and there was really only ever a few Granny Smiths and a couple of bananas in the house. My granny only had fruit in the house if someone was ill!

But we did have a lot of veg in home made soup, stews etc (along with the odd night of cup a soups and pot noodles for tea!)

My DD has never been keen on fruit but she does eat veg (knowingly and otherwise!) so I didn't stress about it after she became a toddler and the happy eating of fresh mango sticks went out the window!

1970's child and we were the same. Cereal for breakfast sugar puffs included but also rice crispies, cornflakes and shreddies. It's the lunchbox that gets me though - a sandwich of usually processed meat or spread, a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar - food which would be banned nowadays. That said I did see others eating salads and boiled eggs so some parents had awareness around healthy eating. Or maybe it was cost we didn't have much money growing up. Dinner was home cooked meat and potato and vegetables so quite healthy and frequently a pudding such as rice pudding or something with custard. We rarely snacked, if so it was something like bread and jam or toast. I remember the odd apple or orange but not much fruit and the odd bits of salad. We didn't have sugary drinks much either. Overall I don't think we did too bad. We walked everywhere or got the bus so I was a pretty healthy weight.

Yep appalling diet by today's standards. Not good even back then to be fair.

My mum was a bit “knit your own muesli”, and an early adopter of a wholefoods diet, so OP I would have been so jealous of your lunch. I had tuna fish on brown bread sandwiches and an apple for packed lunch, and my mum’s one concession to sugar was the occasional Jordan’s muesli bar. I side-eyed the kids with the jam sandwiches on white bread and the Um Bongo with rank envy.

There didn’t seem to be any moderation in the 80s. Either you had the sugar and carb fest, or you got the full lentil/carob/sugar free muesli shebang. It would have been nice to have a sensible medium!

I grew up in the 70s and 80s and I recognise bits of what you’ve posted OP but in the while our diet really wasn’t like that.

my dad cooked for us when we got home as my mum was still at work and that would generally be things like beans on toast or sausage and mash. My mum cooked from scratch at weekends & we didn’t have that many convenience foods. Plus we had school dinners rather than packed lunches

we were always out playing - big garden even though a council house or out on our bikes.

we just didn’t have access to the massive range of foods we have now. This was a time when an Avacado was considered exotic and resturants still had melon as a starter

My daughter eats Coco pops for breakfast, in her packed lunch she has plain crackers, a packet of pom bears, a yogurt, strawberries and a mini packet of party rings. The evening meals she will eat are curry, roast dinner, chicken burgers, chicken nuggets and chips, sausage and mash. She won't eat any other fruit but she likes cooked veg so I put lots of it on every meal. I don't really know what I could do to make it any better other than starving her or force feeding so I don't feel guilty about her diet.

I was born in 1973. We had similar, although dinner at night was very much meat and two veg. Things like pork or lamb chops with potatoes and peas. I couldn’t eat that now. My dad had a friend who worked on the boats so there was a lot of fresh fish - smoked haddock poached in milk with mashed potatoes, an egg, and peas was a favourite of mine.

What we didn’t have were loads of snacks, loads of water, and many takeaways. My parents used to get a Chinese takeaway one Saturday night each month and my brother and I got chips from there, but served with something like fish fingers and beans my mum made.

I’m an 80s child and we had loads of veg when I was a kid! And we definitely had fruit. Some processed foods, of course, findus crispy pancakes anyone? We typically had meat and 2 veg type meals. Egg and chips on a Saturday. I remember grisly sausages that I hated. There are more obese children nowadays so couldn’t have been too bad.

I was in my 20s in the 1980s and DS and I were caught up in the vegetarian wholefood movement led by cook Sarah Brown.
We must have been the healthiest people on the planet.
I'm still vegetarian but not so keen on buckwheat and lentils with bits of straw in.

a good rule of thumb: if you look at a food product’s ingredients and there are

1 loads of them
2 loads whose names you don’t recognise

it’s almost certainly bad for you. I’m a hypocrite because I eat a lot of crap, but we’re only now starting to realise what consequences this is all having.

What I do remember is that there was just far less food in the house. We didn’t get a freezer until I was 13, just a little one in the fridge to put ice cream in.
Only had proper meat for a Sunday roast. The rest of the week it was corned beef hash, egg and chips, liver and mash, on repeat.
We had a singular packet of chocolate biscuits on a Thursday to last a week. A few plain biscuits in the house. If you wanted a snack you had a jam sandwich.
No food got wasted. No restaurant eating unless it was a very special occasion. Christmas was a treat as there were more sweets and treats.
One family in my road had a full deep freezer in their garage packed with goodies and all four kids were obese, which was really unusual. They also didn’t leave the house. Although everyone wanted to go to theirs as their parents were very generous with choc ices!

i now have guilt that my own dc had more convenience foods than i did, chicken nuggets for instance! oven chips

My son eats Weetabix with butter and Vegemite. I'm not game to try it.

Is there such a thing as empty calories when you are outside all day running and playing. Children are much more sedentary nowadays but used to be able to play out and given the chance children prefer playing to watching to or playing on phones

I think it was balanced out though. I was born in 1981 so a proper 80s child. My parents cooked a lot from scratch- stuff like stews and roasts, even spaghetti bolognese sometimes! Yes there were findus crispy pancakes etc at times.
But then there would be dessert every night which was sometimes home made like rice pudding or sponge and custard but often angel delight etc.
We weren’t allowed too many sweets and breakfast was usually sensible cereal and we did eat fruit - but yes we did have crisps most days and always juice to drink never plain water.
None of us children were overweight though, neither were my parents, I think there were only maybe 2 overweight children in the whole school.
I think on the whole children these days eat more processed crap, and more salt, and less home cooked food.

My mum was an immigrant and sensitive to her kid not standing out in the school grounds so we had sandwiches with some form of lunch meat or cheese or spread in the lunch box. But at home everything was home made, no packaged breakfast cereals, snack foods etc, puddings were rare and generally some form of cooked fruit only. She did start making batches of homemade toasted muesli for breakfast at some point which was relatively sweet due to the fruit and possibly honey or syrup. I don't have much of a sweet tooth now but no idea if that's related to my childhood diet.