What was your diet like growing up and what is your diet like now?

[Chkchk]

As a kid growing up in the 80s/90s we ate a ton of convenience food masquerading as real food. Our dinner rotation was:

Mashed potatoes and sausages
Oven chips and beans or fish fingers
Pasta with sauce from a packet

Supplemented with school dinners (usually a greasy pastry supplemented with crisps and chocolate, I chose the very worst canteen stuff!). Never ever ate breakfast.

I think my parents were singularly unable to cook (I've never seen either of them chop an onion) but tried their best!

These days I wouldn't dream of using a premade pasta sauce. Even if I want pesto, I make it fresh. No judgement on anyone who does but I enjoy cooking and I enjoy eating fresh stuff even more! It's hard to say what a typical week's diet is because we get a seasonal veg box which dictates what we make, but in the last week our dinners have been:

Chickpea, beetroot and coconut curry with rice
Salmon, asparagus and rice
Mezze (hummus, flatbread, halloumi, salad veg)

And I've been making various soups for us all to have for lunch with bread. For breakfast we might have an egg on toast or yoghurt with seeds and honey.

So when did you grow up, and how different is your diet now from then? I'm wondering if this is indicative of a shift in how society eats overall, or if my parents really were quite hapless even for the time period!

My childhood menu sounds like yours, a combination of little money, DM not really enjoying cooking and my fathers assertion that anything not in his repertoire of five meals he would eat was "foreign muck"
I laboured on for years until DS was born, when I taught myself to cook using Annabel Karmel books.
Today cooking is one of my favourite things, along with mooching round local butchers, farmers markets etc. I've worked extremely hard to get past the fussiness of my youth (caused simply by my lack of exposure to "foreign muck" I suspect) and pride myself on our varied and good quality diet.
I'm also a terrible bore when it comes to talking about cooking now!

Also a 80s/90s kid. My diet was pretty good - parents cooked, always fruit and veg and a few treats. No I'm an adult my diet is awful - loads of treats! I live alone so can't be bothered to cook so just eat oven food. My mother despairs of me.

The biggest difference for me is that at home all meals consisted of protein, carb and veg, not necessarily meat and two veg but a meal without a protein, carb and veg element didn’t exist.
I don’t work like that, rarely eat carbs and get protein across the day but not necessarily heavy protein in the evening meal. When my parents come to me I have to remember to include a carb as otherwise they look a bit lost!
Other than that though I was brought up with a fair range of foods from different cuisines so that stayed. I do however eat a ton more veg, having gone from a fussy with veg kid to a veg obsessed adult.

Growing up was things like goat curry, rice, chickpeas, lentils, vegetable soup. Nothing ready made. Much the same now really, except less goat because it's expensive now!

Sounds familiar. Same meal on same day every week. Parents are still the same. Looking back I can see my mum had issues with food. She's really weird with eating. Won't try anything, doesn't eat veg. Thankfully I travelled a bit so our diet is much more varied. Loads of fresh veg & home cooked meals. We love nothing better than a platter of olives, breads, chorizo etc. Don't get me wrong we still have the odd quick dinner of fish fingers, chips & peas. I love cooking now. I look back at what we ate compared to now & it makes me boak!

Grew up in the 80's/90's also. Meals were crispy pancakes, fish fingers with mash and peas or beans. Roast dinner twice a week. Home made cottage pie. Sausage, mash gravy.....so a real mix. I eat healthier now though often return to my fav dishes from when I was a kid!

My diet growing up was good - my mother is a fabulous cook. It was very much meat and veges, but she was quite adventurous in that. I had an interlude of several years where I lived in a pub, so depending on how drunk or bad the cook was, I ate either very well or very badly! (The drunken or bad cooks didn't last very long, not with my Mum).

Nowadays, DH is an amazing and adventurous cook, who loves to cook, and I'm a good plain cook, who doesn't hate it too much. So we have Chinese, Thai, Greek, Mexican, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, American, Italian, Japanese, and of course English and Kiwi based meals. . . so a lot more variety.

Heavily meat and veg when growing up .. like ALOT of meat .. . Massive Fillet steak on Saturday night with tonnes of chips // huge sundays dinners with loads of puddings My dad was such a feeder . Now I eat well , I'm a vegan but I'm still a bit overweight .

my diet wasn't bad per se but i don't think it included enough protein and i was quite clearly suffering with blood sugar instability as a result. i make sure i and my kids get protein in at breakfast. my family were and are quite heavily plant based and made from scratch.

Loads of processed foods, white bread, didn’t know what mange tout was until I encountered it at my friends house at the age of 13.

I wouldn’t see my kids have a perfect diet but they don’t have any processed cereals as I lived in them as a kid and I just hate them. So breakfast is poached egg on toast (wholemeal) or porridge with berries. Lunch is normally a ham or cheese sandwich and crisps with yogurt and dinner can be anything from chicken curry, sausage and chips, roast chicken and yorkshires or a spag Bol.

The difference is that I’m around. Mum worked when I was young so I was letting myself in the house with a key from around seven. So I can monitor what the kids eat and cook from scratch around 4-5 times a week.

Child of the 70s. Very much ‘meat and two veg’ meals with the veg’ often being home grown so only what was in season. My mum basically cooked the same five meals in rotation during the week - you knew what day it was by what was on your plate . School meals were pretty awful - badly cooked rather than unhealthy and an over-reliance on cheap cuts of meat. Strangely enough, I’m now a veggie! I eat very differently from when I was a child and enjoy cooking Indian food in particular (mum’s greatest fear is something ‘have curry powder in it’).

90s/00s kid lots of frozen food. Frozen smileys, chicken nuggets etc. At my grans we'd get homemade pasta sauce but everything else was packets. On a Sunday we'd always get a roast though which was of different standards. Strangely my mum is a much better cook now. I think I was quite a fussy child so it was easier just to give me frozen food. I wish she had made me try more things. However now we cook everything from scratch we have Thai curry a lot, last night we had Swedish meatballs, big salads and chicken.

I was a kid in the 70s/ early 80s. My childhood diet was very narrow and old fashioned, but relatively healthy, mum cooked a small number of recipes from scratch and we had lots of fruit & veg. It was meat, potatoes and veg most days, no rice, pasta, pizza, any carb really other than bread and potatoes. Veg were what dad grew in the field and were lovely and fresh but extremely repetitive. Carrots, cabbage and sprouts all winter long. Summer was better with salad stuff and peas and beans. Fruit was basic too, we had a few fruit trees in the field so loads of plums, pears and apples in the Autumn. I remember gorging on ripe plums. We had more sugar and salt than I do nowadays, salt in everything as standard and a lot of homemade puddings, cakes and biscuits. Virtually no fish or seafood apart from fish & chips from the chippy once a week, this was our treat, we didn’t have any other takeaways near me and never ate out. I did o level food & nutrition at school which really helped start me off and I have tried to broaden my cooking skills ever since. I love food and enjoy cooking.

Grew up in the 50s. No convenience food. Everything was cooked from scratch including bread.
Typical weekday menu would be porridge for breakfast, homemade soup with bread and cheese for lunch, meat or fish with potatoes and very well cooked veg for dinner. If you were hungry between meals you had fruit or some of the ever present soup. There would always be a homemade cake or fruit pie for pudding. Weekends would always be a roast which would be stretched to provide another meal.
As an occasional treat my mother would buy a bag of broken biscuits from the greengrocer and you would have a couple of biscuits with a cup of tea. Sweets were allowed on Sunday after mass and chocolate was for Easter and Christmas.
Apart from the overcooked veg, it was probably quite a healthy diet.

@Lyricalle I'm blessed with fairly picky children. I can hear them saying that in the future and me getting very frustrated!

Mine is probably very similar to when I was growing up. Shepherds pie, chicken and rice, stews and casseroles, pork chops and mash, salmon and boiled potatoes,
omlettes, fish pie. All those sorts of things. Fishfingers too of course, but home made chips. We were never allowed crispy pancakes and alphabites and stuff. I probably eat far more junk now than growing up as I wasn’t allowed it growing up!

A kid in the 80s and early 90s.

My mum cooked everything from scratch and we had a mixture of her more adventurous endeavours - Indian, Middle Eastern, Hungarian, Italian, all from cookbooks - and plain, meat & two veg type meals and stews/casseroles from the slow cooker. Also plenty of quick stuff like macaroni cheese, jacket potatoes with beans or soup and cheese on toast.

Fridays we had ‘convenience’ stuff - new fangled things like oven chips and frozen pizza, crispy pancakes, frozen lasagne.

Saturdays we often had an ‘evening fry up’ or homemade egg & chips. Sunday was usually a roast dinner.

I’m a similar cook to my Mum. Mostly cool from scratch but not afraid of the odd quick n easy or freezer beige food dinner. The main difference is we get a couple of takeaways a month, which was unheard of when I was a kid, other than very rare trip to the chippie.

Pretty standard for an ordinary white upper working class family in the eighties and nineties, I think; or at least, when I went to friends’ houses “for tea” as a child, they would generally have similar meals to the ones we had at home. Traditional and not very exotic or adventurous. Meat and veg casseroles; roast dinners; corned beef hash, fish on Fridays; sausage, beans and mash; slow cooker imitations of very inauthentic curry. That sort of thing. Breakfast was always a “worthy” kind of cereal like cornflakes, weetabix or shreddies. Lunch was pretty much always a sandwich with ham, cheese, tuna or marmite. We didn’t have a lot of sugar and we didn’t snack - I don’t recall snacking really being a “thing” when I was younger, except for elevenses. We ate out on special occasions only.

Nowadays I eat a lot more adventurously in terms of ingredients but I pick and graze quite a lot and often skip mealtime meals. I probably eat at least 25% of my weekly food in cafes and restaurants.

I was a very picky child. Ate omelette with peas and corn and chips, oven pizza, shepherds pie with quorn mince, beans on toast, pasta with plain tomato sauce, baked potato with beans and cheese, cheese and tomato sandwich, macaroni cheese with tomato on top, that was about it.

These days I’m vegan and eat a much more varied diet with a wider variety of legumes, vegetables, nuts and seeds, but I also eat chocolate every day which I wasn’t allowed to do as a child

80s vegetarian health food diet as a kid - brown rice, lentils, carob, porridge, honey sandwiches, all that jazz. Packed lunches for every day out with sad looking apples and chewy wholemeal rolls. Hedgehog crisps! Dried fruit as snacks.

Now eat mostly vegan and fairly similar but with more treats/variety as I'm better off than my parents were! But we have home made bread, brown rice/pasta, etc. And just like my parents, I bulk buy from a wholefood supplier and have huge bags of lentils/rice/oats on the top shelf

My diet was poor then and poor still. I try really hard, but I'm addicted to sugar (yes really) Earliest I can remember having Coke was 4 but weirdly we had home cooked food for evening meals 6 days out of 7, but the unlimited snacks which still gets me as it's a difficult habit to break!

Grew up 80s/90s.

Everything was home cooked. Takeaways were a rare treat. We always had plenty of fruit in the house to snack on. The only time we had chocolate was when we visited our nan every weekend.

I try to cook every day, we have a takeout once every 1-2 weeks. There is always fruit and veg in the house (and a cheeky pack of chocolate buttons) DS usually asks for fruit or cucumber sticks but every now and then he asks for the buttons. I think we have a good balance going on.

I have my own chocolate that he's not interested in, but I love popcorn and will eat a sharing bag very quickly. Aside from that, we try to be healthy.

My diet was pretty good. My Mum was quite adventurous and we used to have things like avocados and chickpeas which weren't as commonplace as today. It was also quite varied - we didn't have set meals on set days for example. We rarely ate out or got takeaways. I'd say I cook for my family in the same way - I try to be as varied and adventurous as fussy DD2 will allow!

80s kid. My mum cooked all our meals. I remember homemade burgers and rice, cheese soufflé and veal escalopes in Arab bread. We had yoghurt and fruit for afters, sometimes ice cream which was ALWAYS either tutti frutti or raspberry ripple. We almost never had ‘treats’ like a bar of chocolate or shop bought cake or donut. I don’t remember crisps being a big thing but I did snack on Bombay mix with my dad when he got back from work. As an adult we eat almost entirely home cooked and healthy food but there’s a lot more snacking and treats!

a. quite good
b. quite good but more of it (hence weight gain)