Younger gen X and millennials didn't stand much of a chance with healthy eating growing up did we!

[CandleInTheStorm]

I've been doing a lot of research for work (and no, I'm not a journal, nor am I trying to find research here for my work) and it's got me thinking about my own experience of food growing up.

I was born in the mid 80s, and my school experience food wise in the 90s was pizza/chips/doughnuts and those turkey twizzlers (which weren't a personal choice.) We had vending machines full of chocolate/crisps/fizzy drinks around school too. From my research, I learned that compulsory school meals were abolished in 1980 along with nutrition standards for schools, and many private catering contracts could bid for tender from then on, who put cost and profit above health.

Alongside this, there was the rise of takeaways/fast food outlets and 'the ready meal', all full of salt, sugar, and fat.

Younger gen X and millennials didn't stand much chance did they because kids/young people will mostly always choose 'junk' foods over 'healthy' foods especially after the 'traditional ' meals of years gone by, and parents back then mostly chose cheaper food that their kids would actually eat! There's always exceptions, of course, where kids would choose the healthy option or parents gave no choice but to eat the traditional 'healthy' foods, and I'm not saying that 'junk' was their "whole" diet. But between school/fast food outlets and major advertising aimed at kids, my goodness it wasn't made easy for us to choose/want healthy!

The 'junk' foods high in fat, sugar and salt were banned from being sold in schools, including vending machines, in 2006 with the help of Jamie Olivers campaign and the School Food Standards were bought in to action in 2015, so kids at least stand a small chance of getting healthier choices. Plus, people are more health conscious these days with the rise in plant based/vegan diets, etc.

But us in previous couple of generations had unhealthy foods and their advertising thrown at us all ways!

In secondary school in 2002-2007 at break it was 20p for a big cookie or 50p for fruit.
chips were 70p, nuggets like 40p bottle of tango 30p - perfect when a free school meal ticket was £1.40 to start off. Salad pots were £1.10 but if you wanted one you had to be sweet with a lunch lady to save you one because they only made about 20 for a school of 500.
then jamie oliver came along and they swapped chips for wedges 😂
the healthier choice was the more expensive choice and harder to get!

Ladette culture in the 90s was pretty horrific too. Booze and Malborough lights.

Drink diet coke to fill up rather than food.

Add in the competitive anorexia of a girls school, and heroin chic to aspire too.

I was born in 61 andy school dinners were amazing. Two course. Proper meals. I never saw a chip at school.
I grew up in Bath. I don't think McDonald's reached there until the 70s.

I went to school in the 80s/90s. I think it's also very relevant that more women were working outside the home. My parents both worked full time and had 3 DCs to feed.
Dad was a GP so worked long hours, and mum was a teacher. We ate a lot of crispy pancakes, frozen burgers, microchips.
My mum was actually a good traditional cook but didn't have a lot of time. She would still knock up mince and tatties and spag Bol.

Single parent family here, primary in 80s, secondary in 90s.

Free school meals, I used to use my voucher for a burger or slice of pizza plus some takeaway snacks, crisps etc to take on the field for my lunchtime smoke 😆

Strange stuff as I keep hearing millennials and younger are all growing much taller due to better nutrition! Which is it!!??

I'm 42 and remember healthy (for school) dinners at primary age, but secondary school was exactly as you describe. The canteen was full of pizza, sausages, etc. and the 'healthy option' (notable that it had to be flagged as the exception) was not that healthy, usually a jacket potato and cheese. Freely available vending machines with Coke, chocolate bars, etc. There used to be a documentary on Netflix called Fed Up that was made in the US but covered some really interesting stuff about legislation around junk food and sugar. I can't remember the details but basically there was some legislative change in the 80s (driven by the food industry) that meant governments started to really push this stuff.

I was born in 1981. At home we ate Bernard Matthews turkey drummers, kia ora, sugary yogurts, dream topping and Angel delight. Even fruit was served with a sprinkle of sugar. Butter and sugar sandwiches as a wartime relic snack. Cream cakes and meat pies on a Sunday afternoon.

School dinners at primary were at least made in a kitchen and were some combination of meat, 'roasties' or mash with a token veg and water to drink. No school milk thanks Maggie.

Secondary school was a sausage roll and a sugar donut or squidgy pizza. Sometimes I'd go to the local shop and buy a bread roll, a slice of Billy Bear and 15p worth of coleslaw in a tub. 10 regal of I could afford them. Mars milkshakes or full sugar coke. I never had a filling til I was 38 and am a healthy weight.

I was never sporty, but used to walk everywhere to save my bus money for ciggies. I think the environment was less obesogenic even though the food was often poor quality and we just ate less.

I was born in the seventies.

I was brought up on healthy food.

Wasn’t allowed sweets unless at a birthday party, had packed lunches at school, a snack was an apple or cheese and crackers, etc etc.

Never eaten in McDonalds etc.

Had the very occasional high quality ice cream.

Depends on your parents’ approach. I agree that school dinners were ridiculously unhealthy but I have no idea what they tasted like as I wasn’t allowed them, I got packed lunch which was homemade bread with salad and an apple.

Yes but the kids still weren’t as fat as they are today, honestly the size of the some of the children coming out of the primary down the road is shocking. The parents take them straight into the newsagent over the road to buy pop and chocolate bars.

Less children were obese then though so something has obviously gotten worse since then. I guess it could be that this generation is feeling their children the food they grew up on, although I remember at school most of us had packed lunches.

My Mum was exactly the same - we were only allowed brown bread and wholemeal pasta, we were only allowed sweets/chocolate once a week... BUT we ate Frosties and Coco Pops for breakfast daily (were breakfast cereals just considered to be healthy, so no consideration made of the ingredients?!). We were also regularly allowed Panda liquorice bars and those sesame seed crackers that are full of sugar... I suppose Mum thought they were fine because she bought them from the health food shop...

People also seem to think that just because someone isn't overweight that they are healthy? 🤔 All sorts of research has suggested the concentration levels in school and how much a child is able to take in learning and education can be linked to their diet. I wouldn't imagine a diet that leads to all of those up and down sugar levels from all that junk food would be doing great things for your brain!

I was born in 1960. Typical school lunches:

Spam fritters, soggy chips, beans

Beef cobbler - stewed gristle swimming in fat with scone things on top served with mash and stewed cabbage

Meat pie - stewed gristle topped with orange pastry, served with mash and a watery veg of some description

Grey pigs liver in greasy gravy with, you may have guessed - mash and watery veg

Soggy fish with soggy chips and soggy peas- served with watery ketchup.

The piece de resistance was salad: one leaf of lettuce containing a slice of tomato, a slice of cucumber, a slice of egg - sometimes a slice of beetroot - usually with a side of grated mousetrap or sliced cold sausage. And - a scoop of mash

Let us turn to the mash. It was not a nice consistency, contained lumps and usually dark bits, where the eyes hadn't been cut out.

We were often told by our headmistress that children in India would be grateful.

I think turkey twizzlers and decent chips would have aided learning by staving off starvation.

Oh and pud. If you were in the first sitting, steamed cake/pud of various delightful varieties usually served with packet pink, yellow or brown custard. If you were 2nd sitting it was usually thin apple pie that wasn't nice or sticky welded dead fly pie. If the custard had run out we got little rounds of very cheap ice cream wrapped in paper.

It was just awful.

My dc, born in the 90s, fared much better but it was beige, often spicey and still not very nice. They usually had a packed lunch and I swore a healthy packed lunch was more expensive than a school lunch. At least we paid in those days and when you pay, it is easy to polite make constructive suggestions for improvement.

Yes and then parents getting us to finish our plates as they didn't get fed much when they were young. And my mum spoiling me with treats as she never got any.

I'm an older Gen X and my school meals in the 70s were basically disgusting - pies and stews made from poor quality meat combined with overboiled vegetables and mashed potato that made Smash look sumptuous.

Puddings were stuff like semolina, tapioca and prunes and custard

On the other side my home cooked meals were great - takeaways were the odd fish and chips. Sweets, crisps and fizzy drinks were an occasional treat - my usual drinks were generally water or orange squash.

Not just the younger ones - I was brought up by a mother who prided herslef on her home cooking skills but tool lots of short cuts with chemical food such as Smash, made me packed lunches that consisted only of liver pate sandwiches with an apple if I was lucky and if she gave me cash it was only enough to buy a portion of chips at the ridiculous prices the school charged for lunch. I lost quite a bit of weight in my first term at uni as the food was much better for me.

The school meals in my primary school were great. Lots of vegetables and fruit, stuff like pizza, burgers etc was limited.

Secondary was another story. The healthier hot options were more expensive and absolutely disgusting so no wonder we would go for hot dogs, chips or rubbish from the vending machines.

Plantagenette Ha! This might explain why my brother and I are particularly short.

I wasn't overweight. We ate rubbish but small portions as we really didn't have a lot of money. I can remember feeling hungry nearly all the time.

Gosh you've really sold those meals to me! 🤢😆

I had one pound a day dinner money, would keep it and buy two 10p ice pops on the way home to keep my going until dinner. I swear, I have no idea how I didn't keel over! But lunchtime was when all the fun and drama happened in my school and I wasn't going to miss that for a musty old sandwich.

I was born in the 60s, those meals pretty much mirror what I remember at school. We rarely ate them, even if on free meals (its a myth that hungry kids will eat anything). If you had any dietary needs - vegetarian, kosher or food allergies - tough luck, you went hungry. Schools quite often wouldn't allow food to be taken in although some kids would go home to grandma or similar for lunch (we all took ourselves to and from school - no chauffeuring).

The range and variety of food was tiny compared to now, unless you were very well off. The basic diet for most people was seasonal bulk grown veg, potatoes and cheap cuts of meat and the cheaper ranges of fish.

All those fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, from around the world - nada. Olive oil came from the chemist, not the supermarket, some . If you wanted any kind of pulses (other than split peas)/spices/grains or unusual veg you had to find specialist suppliers.

My DC were also all born in the 90s and I remember the beige school meals which kids did actually eat and that providing packed lunches was a a lot more expensive. Their diet was a lot better than mine, not because I ate a lot of junk but because food was proportionately much more expensive when I was a child, especially anything imported and the diet was much less varied.

Being late 40s I remember the change, it happened around the time I went from primary to secondary school. Primary school were all healthy meals and there was no choice or a choice between 2 things, never any junk food, lots of (boiled) veg. Secondary school all pizza, burgers, chips, hotdogs. There was even an ice cream van that came onsite every day at lunchtime!

When I was in high school (early 2000s) my typical food whilst at school would be a roll with sausage/bacon and a cookie at morning break, a burger & chips or pizza at lunch and choc bars/crisps in between.

There was also no education about diet at school.

I don't think things are much better now. There's Fast food everywhere & deliveroo. It's just different.