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

I grew up in the 60's, Fruit was very very expensive relatively, as was meat. Many meals were largely comprised of potatoes and snacks were almost unheard of. Milk was pricey, we all drank squash and water was free and squash could be diluted down to almost nothing. No sweets, except maybe once a week and turned outdoors to play in all weathers.

We were a healthy bunch, on the whole. There was no real knowledge of 'nutrition', your aim was to fill everyone up and keep them full until the next meal. I remember even packets of crisps being a real treat!

But I still hate potatoes to this day...

Spot on.

My daily diet as a child in the 80s was really similar to yours OP, except it was fish paste sandwiches in the packed lunch. It's the pudding after every meal that was the norm throughout childhood (lunch AND dinner), that I honestly think has done lasting damage to me. I have a terrible sweet tooth but also never feel like a meal is complete or finished until I've had something sweet at the end (not fruit) - it's massively programmed into my psyche and I've struggled my whole adult life to break the cycle and I can't. I feel agitated and unable to settle until pudding has been eaten, can't focus on anything else. I am about 1.5 stone overweight, I hate it, this compulsion to include pudding with every meal. I also still have that mental programming that Saturday is 'fun day' even though it is now invariably taken up with cleaning the house which I hate, and I still get that 'new start of term, new pencil case' feeling at the beginning of september - I'm 46. I honestly feel programmed by my childhood.

oh yes nesquick was my favourite drink

Can confirm, I was the child whose parents sent her in with pitta bread, veg sticks and home made hummus, and I wasn't allowed a Care Bear lunch box either (parents had Strong Views on plastic items being marketed at children only to end up in landfill). I attribute my career in law to the negotiating skills I learned swapping a carrot stick for a monster munch😂

In the 80's, I had to have several fillings around the age of 8 or 9 because of all the sugary crap around.I did use to brush my teeth twice a day, but clearly it wasn't enough. My mum was a stay at home housewife though and would cook different meals every day, but deserts, snacks, sweets were rife, and we'd drink sugary cups of tea with our meals.

I had a mixture of very healthy and quite unhealthy. Similar lunches to OP but always had fruit. We had cereal- often weetabix or ready brek but sugar was liberally sprinkled and I sometimes had sugary cereals. I loved "Toppas" - sugar crusted shredded wheat! Dinner was usually homemade - my Mum was quite adventurous for the time and we had a lot of vegetarian food from the Cranks cookbook. We also sometimes had fundus crispy pancakes and mini kievs though. Pudding every night. Sometimes homemade but also stuff like tinned rice pudding, or my favourite Birds lemon crunch.

I don't know where this idea that all 80s kids were outside playing in the fresh air every day comes from though. I was either watching TV or reading a book in my bedroom.

We had toast or cereal for breakfast.

Packed lunch, white bread sandwich, ham or Easy Singles.
Juice carton or milk. Pot of strawberry yoghurt.

Sweets in the shop on the way home.

Homemade soup & toast when we got in.

Cottage Pie or similar for dinner. Maybe some carrots.
Don’t remember getting dessert. Or any fruit apart from bananas.

Sausage, beans, chips & ice cream if we ate out.
Pick & Mix, crisps, donuts, when we were out shopping.

My mum was at home & made all of our food.

My diet in the 90s was very similar. Breakfast was sugary cereal - coco pops, Frosties, ricicles, sugar puffs etc.

My lunchbox would have been white bread sandwiches, packet of crisps. Toffee Crisp, Club or Penguin biscuit. No fruit or veg that I remember. Drink would have been squash.

After school snack was normally cake or biscuits and a glass of Nesquik/ Crusha milkshake.

Dinner/ tea would have been chicken nuggets, sausages or fish fingers with oven chips, potato waffles, smiley faces etc. We would normally have baked bean, peas or carrots on the side so I guess at least that’s one veg! We always had a pudding too.

I did have a friend who wasn’t allowed anything like that, she would have veg sticks and rice cakes with whole nut peanut butter and fruit in her lunchbox along with dips and other things I didn’t recognise, she could well have had hummus but the rest of us in the class definitely treated her food with a lot of suspicion!

I was born in the 80s but had such a different diet to my friends growing up. My mum grew up on a farm in Lapland so very different food attitudes which she brought over with her to the UK, plus she had coeliac disease at a time when there wasn't all the gf options there are today so all our meals were cooked from scratch with plenty of veg, our packed lunches were very often home made bread (she made normal bread for us, gf for herself) with things like pate and cucumber or tongue, always fruit and never things like Penguin or Club bars (which made me so jealous of my friends' lunches) but we did always have a packet of crisps. Pudding was only on Sundays and birthdays/Christmas.

I remember loving it when I'd go round a friend's house for tea and get some frozen processed food and pudding on a weekday! But looking back as an adult, I'm very grateful for the diet I had as a child.

i agree, we had no snacks,
apart from one biscuit in the afternoon
although i did have milky tea with lots of sugar so the spoon would stand up, but that was the 1970s

This is really interesting! I ate nothing but coco pops for breakfast for probably about 12 years, and definitely had treats in my lunch box - I was a child of the 90s so think those colourful lunchpack Pringles tubs, mini Jaffa cakes, BNs, penguins, clubs etc.

BUT my mum was also a fantastic home cook and we ate delicious home cooked meals every night, along with always having plenty of fresh fruit and veg in our lunch. “Snack” was also really not in our vocabulary back then - if we wanted something outside of meals it really was “appleorangeorbanana” as my mum would say. I have tried to emulate that with my kids!

I see what you mean! I suppose these we are more aware of healthier eating and we have healthy schools etc don’t forget also that I bet the majority of us were fitter and running around all over the place burning off all the sugar whereas these days more kids are likely to be just sat down watching tv and gaming x

OPs childhood diet was pretty similar to mine, and the lunchbox contents closely match what I and all my friends ate. And we came from a pretty varied mix of working class and middle class backgrounds. So I don’t think you can just say OPs family were an outlier.

Family dinners in my 80s childhood consisted exclusively of frozen stuff you ‘put in the oven for 20 mins at 200C’. Sometimes there were e.g. frozen peas as well, but thinking about it now, the serving size of any veg back then was tiny, compared to what I’d make now.

Also I have found myself chuckling at the rose-tinted view on this thread that 80s diets were offset by all kids being very active. I spent the 80s trying to avoid PE, I never cycled anywhere, I loved reading so spent loads of time in my room with a book, and particularly when we got satellite tv in the late 80s I watched hours and hours of tv each day.

Gosh there are some odd replies to the op's perfectly harmless post.

I have to say I envied kids like you when I was young. My Annie lunchbox contained wholemeal bread sandwiches, fruit, maybe a yoghurt or some nuts and a club or a wagon wheel. No crisps allowed! Squash was very diluted and we never had pop.
My mum cooked all our dinners from scratch and dessert was a piece of fruit.
We weren't allowed sugary cereal either, we had stuff like Weetabix and readybrek.
It's only as an adult I appreciate what a great job she did of keeping us healthy, despite me being a really fussy eater.
At the time, all I wanted was to eat like my friend who's mum had a deep fat fryer and a soda stream!

It was the opposite in my house. One weekly shop was done on a Thursday. The small amount of treats bought were gone by Sunday. Breakfast was weetabix, porridge or toast, lunch was a sandwich, apple, banana and yogert, dinner was meat, potato and veg. No such thing as a snack in my house maybe a digestive if you were lucky. Only got sugary cereal for easter and Christmas and dessert on a Sunday was usually trifle or apple tart.

Also kids back then had 15min morning break, 1 hour lunch break, 15 min afternoon break and we got out in the evening and went biking, swimming, youth club, hanging round with our mates, playing street games and getting exercise.

Now our kids are locked up at school, locked up at home, they are like caged animals, no wonder there are so many behaviour problems.

I don't think some processed ham was the problem

I WAS the fat kid at my school ! I didn’t even have breakfast , or lunch. There were 4 others in my class too.

Oh god. I am so sick of people churning this reply out for all sorts of posts. And this one is especially ridiculous as it's thinking retrospectively.

Yes there is a col crisis. But this is a public forum where people have mixed incomes and more importantly can post what they like. You are NOT the thread police so bore off.

Op. It was a different time with less awareness of upf and getting your 5 a day. I bet you were probably more active than children are these days with no tablets or phones and less choice on the television. No harm done

I think I would be more horrified if I grew up during the war and had fuck all to eat because everything was rationed. Growing up in the 80s was a sign of the times just like it was in previous years and just like it is now.

Great username!

I was an 80s Irish child and my mother told me we were too poor to have Turkey Drummers and Billy Bear sandwich meat and all the foods we now associate with the 80s. I was mortified by her veg and lentil heavy home cooking, refusal to buy fizzy drinks and all I wanted for my birthday was a shop bought cake. Fish soup in a flask for school lunches still makes me question her sanity, even though she was feeding us well.

I don't think it was a "utopia" or whatever I just said we walked and there wasn't as much snacking. It's hardly over exaggerating. Kids go through chubby stages even now so ",80s photos" will show chubbier kids.

Definitely nothing like my children had in the 80s. They still moan now that their lunch boxes were all healthy food while their friends had good stuff like chocolate and crisps. The way they carry on you'd think childline should've been involved!

For us, the 80s were about whole-food and homemade. I'm more relaxed as a nana but still prefer to make things myself than to buy them. Which works well when considering UPF.

I am so jealous!!!

My lunch was Vogels bread (which if you bend it, it just breaks in half because of all the seeds lol)... But it gets worse because the filling was vegemite and tomato slices.

Then I would also have some fruit... But not nice fruit... Usually a floury apple or a banana with brown spots.

My friends soft had white bread with ham and crisps etc and I was green with envy! They are all slim these days.

But I've struggled with moderation and disordered eating ever since childhood because of how heavily healthy was prioritised. I became obsessed with the foods I wasn't allowed to have.

The grass is always greener and there is a balance, but I know what I would have chosen.

And it wasn't due to a lack of money, we were well off. Vogels bread cost a fortune.