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, plus lots of (really quite good) curries, inauthentic but not bad stir fries and bloody awful stew with "textured vegetable protein"

Nowadays I have started eating fish (don't tell my mum!). I usually cook but do have ready meals maybe once a week. And I've discovered fish fingers! Omg they're lovely!

My dad's food is still the best though

The vast majority of my childhood meals came from a book published in the 1970's called "Everyday Reform Cooking"
Supplimented by whatever else was wholesome and cheap.
Sample meals:
Thick bean stew poured over a Baked Potato
Bell peppers stuffed with rice
Fried Sprats with bread and butter
Roast chicken, Yorkshires and roast potato's on Sundays.
Pudding was things like: baked apples or apple and blackberry pie.
My Mum also knew some fancy French recipes. She would do a cheese soufflé for very special occasions.
My Dad had a fried green lentil and sausage thing which was delicious.
And he used to do chips in an old fashioned chip pan. I remember him calling me in from the street to demonstrate how to put out a chip pan fire
Convienence food was just coming in but it was expensive. We began to eat a little of it, very rarely, after my Dad found a better job.
Of course, now I love the stuff!
My kids eat oven chips, chicken nuggets, beans on toast, frozen pizza
DS has ASD and likes food to have a completely uniform texture which is hard to achieve with home cooking so that's my excuse!
I can cook a bit, but not as well as Mum!

My dad had aspirations from the 1970s sitcom The good life I think.
Kept chickens, so an egg for breakfast most mornings or porridge in the winter ( real porridge )
He wasn't squeamish , so are then as well. He also had 2 allotments so lots of vegetables .
Mum cooked all meals from scratch, which was mostly the traditional meat, potatoes and veg. Had a pudding most days , she also worked in a school part time as well .
I felt I was brought up in the old traditional way as my dad was quite strict and liked things to run smoothly ie. we'd eat at the same time ,always at the table etc.

I grew up in the 80s/90s and we ate pretty well. Plenty of fresh vegetables and fruits even if nothing exciting was done with them. Not much in the way of convenience foods like oven chips or pizza.

The thing I remember, though, is how cooking wasn't fashionable until the late 90s. When sun dried tomatoes were suddenly on everything

Before that, you cooked to fuel your family, not for fun or as a slightly showy off/cool thing to do. Now it's all hand knitted wheat from Mongolia, trekked to the UK on the back of a donkey to save on fuel grin].

I was discussing this thread with the GreenTeaParents today and it inspired them to re-visit my mother's standard dinner party dish that she would cook.

Prawns in avocado with a marie rose sauce

Steak on mustard crouton

Chocolate cheesecake with a jelly layer on top.

Yum!

Crap really. My DM doesn't enjoy cooking and so very little was fresh. Lots of crispy pancakes, fishfingers, oven chips, smash etc. Roast dinner would be cremated meat, veg that was boiled until it turned to mush and watery bisto gravy. We did have pasta and spag bol but it was always out of a jar.

There are lots of things I didn't think I liked until I grew up and realised my DM was just reall shit at cooking. Like roast potatos for examoke. My DM's were usually burned with no seasoning. But now I realise that crispy golden roasties are delicious.

Dinners EVER SINGLE FUCKING WEEK:
Monday: left over roast dinner
Tuesday: parents had stew, I hate stew, so usually had fish fingers and salad
Wednesday: Spaghetti Bolognaise
Thursday: Steak/pork Chops/Lamb Chops and chips w/Salad
Friday: Fish and Chips
Saturday: Sweet and Sour Pork
Sunday: Sunday Roast

Every.Single.Week without fail. My parents still eat the same things every week and get very snippy if forced to deviate. My DH doesn't eat fish and that sends them into a right flap if we visit.

I've rebelled. Gone the opposite way. I wander round the supermarket every week and buy whatever takes my fancy and work from there. I can't even bear to really meal-prep because I hate eating the same stuff all the time.

Seven of us on free school meals. Money was tight so cheaper cuts of meat, heaps of home grown veg and plenty of carbs to fill us up. My mum used to cook vast pies & stews.
We had fish and chips about once a year. The closest we came to convenience food was jelly. . I had my first Big Mac the first week at university.

Now I love eating out but still cook from scratch when at home. I don’t really do convenience foods. Sausages & burgers from the butcher is the closest. Shop cakes and biscuits are too sickly.

If anything I eat more veg than as a child and will try any kind of cuisine. I’m not a picky eater.

It was mostly bland, unseasoned as she didn't like salt, as cheap as possible with no interest in quality and prepared with oodles of barely suppressed rage and resentment. I was that 'faddy eater' who didn't like

Sausages (always the cheapest, gristly and burned)
Fish fingers (as above, so dry you couldn't tell there was fish inside)
Burgers (Bird's Eye cheapest, greasy as hell and shrunk to the size of a chocolate coin by the time she'd done with them)
Chips (because the oil had been in there for at least 3 months and probably nearer 9)
Bacon (Unsmoked, soaked in milk overnight to remove the salt and then slapped on the grill until it was sweaty, flabby and cold)
Pies (Pastry impenetrable at best, inedible at all other times)
Jam Sandwiches, Jam Tarts, Cakes, Sweets, Biscuits or chocolate. Sweet stuff was yucky.

What I did like, however, was

Vegetables. All of them. Haven't met a vegetable that I didn't like.
Bread rolls. Especially with poppy seeds.
Tomato soup.
Tomatoes on toast.
Mackerel in tomato sauce on toast.
Sandwiches without margarine but with lots of salad.
Eggs.
Cheese. All cheese. Except Edam and the blocks of yellow plastic labelled as Mild Cheddar.
Potatoes.
Chicken.
Peanut Butter.
Marmite on toast.
Crackers.
Yoghurt.
Fruit.
Crusty bread.
Liver or braised hearts stuffed with sage and onion.
Chip shop Chinese/curry rolls, saveloys, steak and kidney puddings and chips.
Pickles.
Chocolate ready brek.
Chicken 'drumsticks' from Bernard Matthews.
Crispy Pancakes.
French Bread Pizza.
Stuff with prepackaged sauces.

and pretty much anything that contained salt. She didn't believe in salt. Or spices. The only herb permitted was mint sauce twice a year when she bought a leg of lamb.

So I pretty much lived on snacks, things on toast and lunches until I was old enough to start buying and cooking for myself.

Thanks to my best mate, who cooked for her extended family daily, the first things I learned to make were dahls and various spiced foods, using vegetables, herbs and spices that weren't available in Sainsbury's. I watched cooking programmes back when they used to explain how to cook. I read cookery books back in the times when they contained recipes, rather than poetry and pretty pictures. I bought butter for the first time when I was in my twenties and wondered what it tasted like. And maple syrup. And lemon curd. And then I was off, trying and tasting loads of different things.

Diet now - very varied. Loads of vegetables, tons of herbs, spices, layering of flavours, presented as attractively as possible. I buy the best quality I possibly can and would rather spend £300 on good ingredients than £40 and not actually enjoy any of it but have some crappy new electrical gadget to look at.

Because money has always been an issue, I used the techniques and theories I learned in order to make the best of what I could stretch to afford - so whilst high end cuisine wasn't possible, I could make essentially what is deemed poor people's food. And it tasted good.

Turns out that I had a good reason for wanting things that contained salt, too. I've got POTS. Whilst she has diabetes and fatty liver disease from her preferences