DH upset about his childhood diet.

It doesn’t really make sense which is why maybe your DH needs to chat to his parents to clarify.

For example, the breakfast. It’s cheaper, easier and quicker to give children a bowl of cereal for breakfast than cook some chicken nuggets! So there must have been a reason. I’m thinking maybe they were told to avoid dairy? For the eczema. And they did it in a clumsy way. Maybe they knew they’d eat chicken nuggets so at least they’d actually have food in their stomach before school…many kids don’t get breakfast. The DF was clearly taking some time to cook these chicken nuggets!

Maybe vegetables caused a flare up? So they had to have a very plain diet.
I can’t think of any other reason why parents would not offer any fruit to their children for example.

Unless they have psychological problems and are hugely abusive it doesn’t make sense. There may be an element of misremembering too.

I had the opposite problem when I was growing up. My parents are older boomers and were raised just after the war years. Every evening meal for us was boiled potatoes, veg, meat and gravy. Every day. They still eat that way now. They are also what I see termed as an "ingredients" household. We never had snacks. On a Sunday we may have had a vignetta.
When I met my now husband at 18, his family ate all sorts and I was blown away. I had never had a takeaway of any kind , never had pizza or pasta, occasionally a McDonald's if going to a party. Unfortunately for me that resulted in me eating all of this new stuff id never had before and completely ditching veg etc. I'm in my 40s now and still not able to eat properly. And I am hugely overweight.
I try really hard to let my children eat everything. Healthy and unhealthy so nothing is restricted and hopefully doesn't cause them to want to binge on it as a result. I dont know if im doing the right thing or not

That all sounds very sad, your husband's food memories of his childhood.

But are you sure the memories are entirely accurate? We see so many posters on here whose children will only eat nuggets/plate of mash/white bread/toast etc., for every meal. They are told 'that's fine, it's food, just get something in them'.

I wonder how they'll remember their childhood meals.

Some harsh advice I don't see that you really need to get rid of your MIL by any stretch as it shouldn't affect your kids if she says oh mushrooms are gross or let them have cake

DH is adamant that our kids won’t grow up the same

Well I’d say that’s a little optimistic given what you describe is going on and fact that you and DH allow this woman around your children

I know a similar parent. She constantly tells her DC (and anyone who’ll listen) about how DC is ND and will only eat her ‘safe foods’.
However when said DC is at my house she will try most things and enjoys some of them.
It really gets my goat but there’s not a lot I can do as the woman is adamant about it. Really weird and damaging to DC

Give DH a hug from me to his childhood self.

I bet MIL will claim she cooked healthy varied food for him and his brother.

You need, as others have said, boundaries. I would not be inviting her to any meal unless she cuts it out.

Keep your MIL away from your DD. She'll screw up her eating.

That sounds like abuse and/or neglect.

I agree with PP - no visits or contact around meal times. There are some serious food issues there and you don't want it rubbing off on any way o to your own DC.

That’s hilarious! I’m an atrocious cook, like very bad. It’s like I have ADHD in respect of cooking. Everytime I try to follow a recipe something goes horribly wrong. I burnt two pots making a lasagne recently. I was told a had to provide a cake for the school bake sale recently and it was both burnt and had lines in it like cracks in the equator. I tried to cut it into “brownies” and it crumbled. I also managed to F up the icing.

I can’t cook on instinct either. My carrots are probably undercooked. And I can’t really season as u grew up in a household with no salt as my dad had a heart condition.

I still manage not to feed my kids total crap though. They eat a lot of raw vegetables!

It sounds to me like if she’d cared about what they ate they might have been much less poorly.

id support my dh in how he feels and say for the next few months while you think we will avoid your pil for meal times, but if we try again with seeing them at food times I will have to tell your mum that vegetables are healthy and the more different vegetables they eat the better, we dont allow talking about vegetables and healthy food in negative ways, im sure you understand. Please dont do that again.

You see far too much of your MIL, and she has too many opinions.

🤣🤣

That's awful, diet is so important. I would not let my PIL negatively impact my child's relationship with food. Politely tell them to FO.

Your MIL sounds like a more extreme version of my DM... my DM was/is an atrocious cook. I love her, but I've reached the point in my life now where the only logical explanation I can come up with for her cooking is that she simply does not have functioning tastebuds. Everything she cooks is both overcooked and severely underseasoned, and its even more depressing because she's a brilliant gardener and has oodles of gorgeous home grown produce that she then proceeds to boil the absolute shit out of or massacre in other ways. And she genuinely thinks her unsalted carrots that have been cooking on the stove since the last election are lovely 😬

He had a horrible diet as a child due to neglect and it is no surprise that watching his parents try the same shit on his children is seriously upsetting him.

I would ban them from all meal times with your DC. I would supervise all visits so they can’t push their awful disordered food view on your DC. I would even go so far as to tell your DC in an age appropriate way that their grandparents are of a generation that got nutrition all wrong so ignore anything they say food wise.

(kind of like my chain smoking nan telling my dad that smoking a clove cigar every day would cure my asthma. )

It’s hard because he had probably thought he had worked past all this childhood trauma and now he’s being pushed into reliving it by watching them doing the same thing to his child. So be kind to him and let him feel the upset. It’s really common that having your own DC awakens the trauma in survivors of childhood abuse/neglect

What do you mean what they can’t eat? Allergies?

I agree with a previous poster, these are serious issues, and no wonder your husband is upset with the way he was treated. His mum's behaviour seems almost pathological.

I know someone who is equally bizarre, but in a different way, with regards to their children's eating habits. They're obsessed with what (in their view) the kids can't eat, and can talk about it for hours...even though the children are now older teenageers. It's like a form of Munchausen's by proxy, via food.

His parents were presumably bringing him up in the 80s and 90s? It was very common knowledge that chips were unhealthy then, that nuggets for breakfast everyday was not a good idea, that fruit and veg were important for health. But there wasn’t the same value put on a long healthy life in the same way, especially not in the 80s. People took a lot more risks in virtually all areas of life.

I grew up in the 70s/80s and we knew you needed fruit and veg. We knew chips were bad for you and being overweight wasn’t healthy. We weren’t aware of the damage UPFs did, but the rest was pretty clear.

But food was, relatively, more expensive then, with people spending a higher proportion of their income on it even though they focused more on lower cost items like milk, potatoes, (and chicken nuggets!). So lots of people didn’t eat healthy as they just didn’t feel they could afford to. That left it seeming more normal to eat the cheap and/or frozen food that was so common.

Also, I think a lot of parents back then reacted to their own upbringing and the lack of sugar from war time restrictions by valuing the ability to give children sweet treats. (I have noticed a lot of people who grew up in the 50s think it’s “cruel” to not give very young children lots of sugary things).

But not healthy! I remember having a burger on a couple of occasions as well 😂

Sausages are a breakfast food though, but chicken nuggets is really an odd one. Doesn’t make sense to me, if the parents really didn’t care about nutrition why not a box of cereal? Instead of cooking chicken nuggets every morning. That makes me think that maybe the kids were v fussy.

No comment on the lemonade! That’s funny!

My mum used to give me sausages and lemonade for breakfast. She has 3 As at A’level and a degree 😫

I do think people ding understand UFPs. They knew cake was to be restricted but not so much stuff like chicken nuggets etc.

My own mother who is pretty savvy said recently she regrets giving us stuff like potato waffles. She could cook she we weren’t eating waffles day & night but we did eat stuff I don’t think she’d give us now.