What happened to very fussy eaters in the olden days?

[houseydnc]

Inspired by another thread where the DC Would only eat the following:
Chicken nuggets
Chips
Toast
Chocolate spread sandwiches

What happened to children like this before chicken nuggets, chips and Nutella existed?

I know fussy eating is different to conditions like ARFID and other sensory disorders. I'm not passing judgement, I'm just interested to know.

I wonder what their diet was restricted to? Toast? Or were they forced to eat a wider variety of foods?

Honestly, having had a fussy eater myself, I’m pretty sure they’d have succumbed to illness and died really young. Mine wouldn’t even drink when dehydrated and ill and needed many stays in hospital. Your basic Tiny Tim.

They had buttered toasted bread, tea cake or salami, home made
The poor had even less
My grandmother was given to eat the rye bread with pig fat and her brother who was a very fussy eater was given white toasted bread with butter

my grandma has 3 siblings who made it and 5 more who died

They got battered at home and at school, and developed a lifelong toxic relationship with food, along with other psychological problems.

Or they got ill a lot and were described as "sickly" , with associated lifelong health problems.

They got sneaky and relied on siblings and friends to disappear food they couldn't eat and supply scraps of what they could eat.

Many of them were ND, so getting brutalised by adults and other kids was their reality in any case, as was growing up with physical and mental health problems.

Children with ARFID died. Failure to thrive.

My brother was given the foods he ate regularly and encouraged to try other things over the years. He needed help with poor fibre and lack of veg. He was hospitalised several times with constipation. He's 30 now, runs his own business, married with a son, is vegetarian and has a normal and wide ranging diet. Much of it was sensory - he hates the texture of meats.

My favourite was when we sat down to a meal at home once and we both cut round the yolk of the fried egg on our plates. I gave him the white and he gave me the yolk. Parents just stared and I explained we didn't like the bit we'd given away. 😂

I think you can safely assume that in the days before chicken nuggets and Nutella existed, there was less variety of food. You can’t only eat chicken nuggets if they’ve never existed. Options were probably narrower and kids ND kids struggled more and were more often accused of being naughty or difficult.

I'm 60. When I was a kid you ate what was put in front of you or went without. Obviously allergies etc were catered for.

My parents left me with my grandparents who subscribed to the "she's just not hungry enough" philosophy. 4 days later and I still hadn't eaten any food.

I also suspect there would have been much less expectation that you ate a wide variety of foods, unless you were pretty wealthy. They'd have settled on a few familiar foods (my brother's preference was plain brown bread, mine probably would have been mashed potato (no idea when that was invented!), I imagine porridge might be another one) and would have happily eaten that day in, day out.

Actually someone in her 40s from continental Europe told me her father gave them to eat only toasted bread with pig's fat and onions. She is around mid 40s but very very skinny and she and her husband are obsessed with healthy cooking to a bit abnormal extent

There was far less variety and also I think a bit less stress over feeding kids. I went through a phase of existing on lettuce sandwiches in Mighty White bread and no one seemed to mind. These days you’d be surrounded by helpful “advice” about how to sneak veg in.

For the majority of the last couple of thousand years the staple foods have been very plain, unvarying things like bread, porridge, potatoes, pottage/soup, with the odd bit of fairly plain meat. So there wasn’t a huge amount to be fussy about, and it would have been very similar every time.

My dad won’t eat veg (apart from potatoes) and his brother didn’t eat meat so they swapped and with 5dc their mum never noticed. Both healthy men in their 70s with the same eating habits. Food was more meat and veg with less sauces so you could separate easier.

If you read Lark Rise to Candleford, the diet of poor people in recent history was very limited and similar day to day. So if those children survived babyhood and childhood illnesses, they wouldn’t be confronted with much variety.

My sister ate rusks until she was 4 and not much else. Now she's vegan and still very fussy!!!

A lot of children died of a combination of illness and malnutrition.

Friends of my brother who is 63 had young children in the early 90s. They had 6 under 6 at one point (twins and triplets). One of their children only ate potatoes for about four years. She just got given potatoes, as they didn't really have time to worry about it.

Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean;
And so betwixt them both,
They lick'd the platter clean

You have just unlocked that memory for me @Papillon23 the HV advised my Mum not to feed me, she cracked on day 4 and I hadn't eaten.

Personally as a child of the 70s, if I didn't eat at lunch time in school then I went hungry. Being screamed at to eat by dinner ladies left me feeling sick every time a meal was put in front of me. In fact I cannot stand pink gingham because of this. They agreed I could take a packed lunch and I believe I had a jam butty every day.

My Dad was the cook and tried really hard to adapt meals for me. I was underweight (not now) and put on the equivalent of Complan so like a nutrient rich milk shake thing by the GP. I am 5'4" and at uni I weighed 7 stone and at one point I was ill (scarlet fever with tonsillitis) and dropped to 6 1/2 stone which really worried the GP. I have photos and I still cannot believe I was that thin.

Today I eat a wide variety of foods, fish, meat, chicken, just not what my parents would give me like a dry gammon steak or veg wise so they would have butterbeans, peas, tinned carrots, boiled potatoes whereas I eat peppers, tenderstem broccoli, courgettes so more mediterranean style meals.

Yeah I do agree some kids were described as sickly and failure to thrive . Some people would like to suggest kids like this never existed , but they did ,for a while . Some were relegated to institutions .

If it’s ARFID, sensory, neurodivergent related etc then the child probably died young. If the child was being fussy as a control thing, they probably didn’t have much food in general and hunger would have been more of a deciding factor about what they ate.

For people who think that fussy eating is always a choice, they should spend some time in paediatric feeding clinics and look at the number of children fed via a PEG.

1950s to 1980s - rule by fear. Eat or starve/be smacked.

I was born mid 80s and even still in the mid 90s I'd be left at the dinner table alone til I'd cleared my plate (of a arbitrary quanity of food my parents played up for me).

I definetly grew up in the 90s with kids who only ate nuggets and ketchup etc.

They ate or went hungry (so they ate)

We would eat what was put in front of us and didn't dare not.

My parents often went without food so we all could eat in the late 1960's early 1970's.

We would secretly swap food, eat the bits we could then put leftovers in pockets and in drawers as we weren't allowed to leave anything.

Post war parents and every scrap was precious.

If we didn't eat it we didn't eat.

I recall sitting at the table from lunchtime until teatime trying to eat cold congealed meat as it was a luxury. I got so much abuse for not being able to eat it but just couldn't stomach it.

They meant well but I now have a poor relationship with food.

My grandfather was a fussy eater, as is my uncle and so are cousins and my brother. It was normal for our family for boys, and it was always the boys, to have bread and butter or a plain potato rather than dinner.

There were no snacks, I suspect, so people were hungry and ate meals whether they liked them or not. There was also the more draconian approach to parenting so you cleared your plate from fear.

I know dh (fussy eater) lived on potatoes and bread