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!

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.

This sounds very like my childhood diet. I had forgotten about Hedgehog crisps! Did your parents have a Cranks cookbook?

My diet was awful growing up in the 80s. No breakfast, and I only remember having happy meals, beans on toast or boil in the bag beef as a Sunday "roast".
Teen years weren't any better, no breakfast, grabbed a jam donut on the way to school, chippy at lunchtime and a microwave meal for tea.
Didn't have fruit or veg till I was about 20!
I'm not too bad now, I cook a a lot and have a fair bit of veg.

Do like chips though and I'm a bit overweight but I like wine and pizza too!
My dd has shreddies, toast, eggs for breakfast with fruit.
Sandwich for lunch, ham, egg, tuna or cheese, fruit, yogurt and s few crisps or homemade soup.
Dinner is usually homemade she likes spaghetti with meatballs, Omelette,
Shepherds pie etc.
She does have sausage and fish fingers but very high quality ones and I serve broccoli, carrots and sweet corn with every evening meal which doesn't always get eaten.
Not perfect but a damn sight better than I got.

When I was younger I had a very restricted diet and most of it not terribly healthy (ARFID).

Now I eat a wider range but still restricted compared to people with "normal" diets. I'd love to be able to eat a wider variety but I just can't manage it.

My mum was very much a meat, potato, veg kind of cook. Never had pizza, pasta etc and very rarely any convenience food. However, we had the same 7 or 8 meals on rotation, so Sunday roast, meat and potato pie, beef stew, toad in the hole, fish, chips and mushy peas, liver and onions (boak), lamb/pork chops and mash, gammon, egg and chips. All served with very well boiled carrots, peas, cabbage etc.

Now, we eat quite a bit of pasta, fajitas or nacho type things probably once a week, Chinese and Indian fairly regularly, pizza sometimes. Still have a Sunday roast most weeks though.

My daily sort of menu now (today was fairly typical in lockdown although we usually have less tinned foods)

Yogurt with honey, banana and almonds

Lunch was leftover homemade chicken pie with sweetcorn and bread and butter. Uuslaly we would have soup or toasties.

Dinner- was steak with spinach, sweet potato, mushroom gravy, baked cherry tomatoes followed by tinned mandarins and tinned custard.

Oh, and can I just say that tinned mandarins with tinned custard and a hot cocoa is actually the food of the gods. None of this caviar and lobster bullshit.

80s kid here. My mum worked full time so I ate most of my meals at my grandma's house. It was always high-quality, home-cooked food - made from scratch, with the best ingredients she could afford, and lots of veg.

We eat very similarly now. A freezer tea (fish fingers and chips, for example) is something we'd have no more than once a week - similarly how how my grandma would make egg and chips once a week. The main difference is some of our family meals my grandma would consider exotic and not suitable for kids (such as curry or chilli), and some she made it wouldn't occur to me to make - such as steak and kidney pudding, or a mixed grill.

Like her, I buy the best quality food, and after our mortgage, food is our biggest expense. I suppose the biggest difference is she always made a pudding as well - apple pie, rice pudding, trifle, etc - whereas if we have a pudding it's shop-bought, such as yoghurt or ice cream.

Dreadful (1960s)
Pretty good now.

80s kid, although not in the UK.

Everything was homecooked and quite seasonal. My parents and grandparents grew lots of veg, apples, berries and lots and lots of potatoes, and foraged for berries and mushrooms, which were all stored in various ways for the winter. There were imported goods in shops, but not in the quantities and qualities as these days.

DM was very health-conscious, and avoided using fat and sugar in a lot of her home-cooking. She is a decent cook, always up for trying new things, but a lot of meals I remember were kind of ... bland:

• Brown rice, overbaked chicken (because bacteria), watery salad
• Oven-baked fish, boiled potatoes, watery salad
• Neverending giant marrow cooked with chopped tomates and dried herbs, with boiled potatoes

We weren't allowed sweets or treats apart from birthdays, holidays or guests being over. DM had really good intentions. She really just wanted us to grow up with healthy habits. She was also very concerned with her own looks and weight, so was never shy of sharing that weight gain would be a Very Bad Thing.

I went completely the other way around to what DM intended, tbh. I l sneaked any treats I could get find, bought some and ate alone, started hiding my eating etc from primary school age onwards. Ended up with bulimia as a teenager. When I moved to university, I gained a lot of weight just because suddenly I felt I could eat whatever I wanted without anyone judging.

Now it's a balancing act. My normal meals are healthy and homecooked, for the most, but I still struggle with food shame and binge cravings. We do have the odd take away, and many more treats than we did in my childhood. I've failed in all my attempts to grow anything more than herbs for our table. My weight's fluctuated a lot in my adulthood. Still my go-to dinners aren't that different from my DM's. Just more spices and less dryness.

We tended to eat simple foods - roast chicken, shepherds pie, ham egg and chips (my mum makes the most amazing chips, which I can't do), omelettes, chicken pie, sausage and mash. Now my kids have similar tastes, even though we really tried to get them to eat what we like - lots of pulses, salads, curries. So we're back to nursery food mostly but we try to mix and match a bit - eg roast chicken with dal and salad, etc (they don't touch the salad because It Is Poisonous).

90s kid.
Mam always made sure i had breakfast even if it was just toast.
Alot of home cooked meals for tea
Casseroles, hotpots, roast dinners, chops, pies, quiches, soup, broth things that would feed us all as money was tight.
Crisps were a treat & fizzy pop was a no go, obv loaded of sugar back then.

As I've grown and moved out I've pretty much kept to the whole home cooked meals as they do go further & obviously taste nicer 😂

Child of the 70s/80s, poor family.

Sausages and mash
Tinned mince with boiled potatoes
Fray Bentos pie with boiled potatoes
Findus Crispy Pancakes with super noodles
Boil in the bag fish with sauce
Individual little round frozen pizzas
Roast dinner
Tinned meatballs and chips
Vesta curry from a box
Corned beef hash
Salad would be a couple of lettuce leaves, slice of ham, hard boiled egg, half a tomato and a few slices of cucumber with salad cream.

Veg would be mostly tinned or frozen, tinned beans or spaghetti hoops would also serve as the vegetable side.

The only thing we'd eat that was remotely 'foreign' was the vesta curry.

I'd like to think my own children eat a lot better.

Grew up in the 60s and 70s. Pretty well all home-cooked, usually my dad cooking. Boiled spuds or mash (home-made) a lot of the time, lots of fish, including cod's roe (which was cheap), meatballs, kidney, liver, bacon, chicken was a treat. My parents had studied in Italy/Greece so we did sometimes have things like pizza and pasta, not that common at the time. Don't think we ever had crisps at home, chocolate occasionally, home-made biscuits and cakes.

Otoh dh who is a few years older than me was brought up on Spam and Smash: his mum had been evacuated during the war and never learnt to cook and his older brother was fussy.

We eat similar types of meals to my childhood but more vegetables (cheaper than they were when I was a child) and less fish (not so cheap), and we do cook Indian and Middle Eastern, which they didn't. Dh quite often makes bread, which my dad did occasionally.

@DippyAvocado yes they did!! And one called Good Food Healthy Children which I now have on my bookshelf and refer to often

My diet was pretty good -- my maternal grandmother was a truly dire cook and so my mum had taught herself to cook very young. In the 80s she made everything from scratch, and was really into whole foods and grains, low salt etc. when it wasn't yet very fashionable. We did still have the odd fish finger dinner, but she cooked a good range of things, including Italian, Indian, Chinese from scratch and so on, but all very healthy and no junk or processed foods. She made homemade puddings, but I was only allowed one treat a week, usually a small milky way on Saturdays, until I was about 13. My dentist thanks her

When my mum went back to work in the 90s there was a brief interlude of crispy pancakes while my dad worked out how to cook. His repertoire is a bit more limited than my mum's even today, but they're both good cooks and it's absolutely fatal to any kind of diet to stay with them as they cook so well. My mum was always against processed fats and so on and when everyone switched to margarine and things with sweeteners in, she stuck to her belief that a small amount of proper butter was better than anything made with chemicals. These days she probably bakes even more than she did when we were young, and they make their own jam, bread and grow a lot of their veg.

I don't really enjoy cooking, so most of it is done by DH who does enjoy cooking and almost always does it from scratch. We eat pretty healthily -- probably even more so than when I grew up. My mum was always very keen on veg, but I eat more veg and fewer carbs now than I used to. We cook vegan recipes a few times a week and are careful with what meat we get. None of us has much of a sweet tooth, so we don't really eat much sugar, even DD, who is usually not fussed about pudding. I think that's probably the main difference from when I was young. There was always some kind of pudding, even if it was just fruit with cream, or homemade rock cakes. These days I don't think I've regularly eaten pudding with an everyday meal since I was about 20. However, I think we probably drink a lot more wine than they used to. It was much more expensive in the 80s.

No treats, no fizzy drinks, no takeaways. I now consume all in copious amounts (though I'm a healthy BMI). Which is why I let my kids have a balanced diet.

Jacket potatoes, beans on toast, pasta etc and roast dinner on Sundays. Nothing "forrin" bar the pasta for dinners.

Born in 60's so a primary school kid in 70's . Proper meat and potatoes and veg meal. Weekend tea was always salad with cold meats and boiled eggs.
We were a healthy bunch!

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.

OMG yes, I'd forgotten about the hedgehog crisps! Wholemeal bread with hummus. Dried apricots in a little bag. Carob. And endless Jordan's cereal bars. HOW much did I envy the people with the cartons of Um Bongo and white bread jam sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

Our meals were quite traditional meat, potato and vegetables for dinner, and always three meals a day. As an adult, I eat when I'm hungry (and when I remember - I'm working on remembering more frequently) and I eat a lot of rice. I think how my mum did it was better.

My mum doesn't value food (she will still buy clothes or plants for the garden over providing herself with enough stuff to make meals) and to ensure I was fed I chose the cheapest meals so I didn't cost her anything. I pretended I didn't like things so I could guarantee I would eat. Every day I would have cornflakes for breakfast, primula cheese sandwiches and super noodles for dinner. That is literally it. Nothing else. I'm surprised I didn't get ill!

Now, I spend loads of money on food, I cook from scratch every day, only the best ingredients, and always have stuff in the cupboards (we don't waste anything though as I menu plan). My kids love all foods and I make sure that they get variety in abundance. I look at the healthy fruit salads I give them for dessert sometimes and think how I would've loved to eat a piece of fruit as a child, never mind a bowl of 7 or 8 different kinds of fruits. Now however, I kind of have to force myself to eat said fruit, I think if you don't get into the habit of having it when you are a child it doesn't become something you ever really desire. I also put on weight when I left home and could choose my own food (and was allowed to eat real cheese). I love food a bit too much but for me it's all about providing it and preparing it with love, for my family and for myself.

I was born in 87. My home diet was VERY similar to yours along with endless chicken tonight, which I could not stand. Just awful. My mum was useless though. I loved going to friends houses where they did home cooked dinners rather than packet food.

Nowadays I'm kind of a similar cook to you in lockdown. Because increased time and trying to diet which means so much more fresh veg. But usually in the normal rat race we rely on more carbs. Still relatively healthy but I do buy jar pesto even though it would be so much nicer to make my own, I just never have the right stuff in.

my parents are decent cooks so there was a lot of homemade food, meat/ something veggie and 2 veg, stews, pasta dishes, jacket potatoes, bbqs in summer, curry, homemade chips now and again, a lot of salad.

The main readymade foods were pizzas say once a week and my dad got really into frozen wedges and veggie nugget type things at one bit. I still make the stews and things myself sometimes but I love cooking and like to use the 'new' ingredients more readily available now.

The big thing noticeable was how huge our portion sizes were! This is something I am moving away from using my fitness pal but the temptation to have seconds is there!

80s/90s kid. Busy working parents plus vegetarian me when vegetarianism was much less understood meant I mostly lived on cheese findus crispy pancakes, microchips, spaghetti hoops etc. But we did have home made cawl (Welsh stew), sides of veg alongside the oven food and cracking Sunday dinners. The amount of junk food my brother and I ate was phenomenal though. He used to eat 3 or 4 poptarts for a snack. We'd both eat 4 or 5 chocolate biscuits (like penguins) in one go. Drank tons and tons of chocolate milkshake etc. We were both skinny as hell though!

Posted too soon. Now, I eat mostly everything homemade, except for the odd frozen pizza. My mum and dad now cook like pros and make amazing dishes! Not sure what changed. The times, and having time probably!

This post has made me laugh! I grew up I. The 80s/90s and our household diet was AWFUL. Both patents worked and were very career oriented. My dad wouldn't have dreamt of cooking and my mum hated. However, to avoid us all starving my mum tried, mistake we had some meat product (sausage, dry chicken breast, burger) with boiled potatoes. About 9 we got carrots andbroccoli. A bit later we hit the really processed stuff... pasta n sauce, super noodles, really horrible stir fry sauce. We dreamt litres of fizzy drinks and the only fruit we had was bananas. My parents got a bit wealthier when we were teenagers and we did start to get a few things from m and s which was a saviour, but very little actual cooking got done. The only thing my mum did was soup and it was amazing.

I had to teach myself to cook. I try to mix it up a lot and have a good basic rotation of 5/6 dishes.