Why was a glass of orange juice a starter?

[NutellaEllaElla]

I learned this recently. Is it true? What don't I know that might help me understand this?

Was Sara Lee chocolate gateaux more 80’s than 70’s? My favourite!

This thread is making my mouth water with some of the memories.

Fruit tasted much better in those days. It wasn’t messed about with and mutated, like it is now. Much of it is tasteless.

I don't know if my parents had a different attitude to other parents. Most of my friends seemed to have similar childhoods. I grew up in a rural, agricultural area.

I grew up rurally in the '70s & '80s.

My kitchen cupboard is still ready to cope with the winter of 1963 in rural West Dorset, despite my parents not having even met at that point, not living rurally and not having to cater for more than one...

We'd be OK even if the electricity failed. It would be dull eating for a while but we wouldn't run out of anything much. Inner London!

Oh wow, that's surreal that the two countries got in therre somewhere

It was here in the mid 90s as I remember mum coming back from shopping and my sister and I guzzling drinking it and it like heaven! That was around 1995 time, I suspect now it's rank!

@6pence . 1980s.

Fruit tasted much better in those days. It wasn’t messed about with and mutated, like it is now. Much of it is tasteless.
Veg seems to last a lot longer now but has almost no flavour. The home-grown stuff has so much more flavour.

I thought of mentioning the same on the recent thread about ‘the greatest waste you’ve ever seen’.
Waste of money and of plastic!

Biggest bottled water joke, to me, was some years ago, when Coca-Cola was about to launch a bottled water brand (Dasani) in the U.K. That is, before the Daily Mail or another tabloid, revealed that the water would be coming out of an ordinary tap in Sidcup!

The U.K. launch was hastily scrapped, but I’ve seen it on sale in other countries.

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER , but WHY do they buy it?

What do they do with it?
The bins here are full of (unsquashed) plastic bottles, and the local SM posts go on about the inadequate refuse collection.

Stop buying bottled water and things like takeways then neighbour.

Oh yes I remember a tiny, tiny little glass of orange or tomato juice was a starter in the 70s. Some more luxurious places even did grapefruit juice. Back then you didn't have big boxes of fruit juice like today. Instead, I remember a powdered 'fresh' orange that you diluted called 'rise and shine' (I think).😂

I don’t know - fashion? Or they’ve been persuaded that it’s ‘healthier’? Or they assume (it’s not at all uncommon) that anything you pay a lot more for must be better than something cheaper?

I do understand that in some countries tap water really doesn’t taste nice. I well remember it tasting strongly of chlorine when we were once stuck for several hours in Miami.

I might add that for a while dh worked in the water sector, and he worked out that your average bottle of e.g. Evian* cost IIRC around 10,000 times what you paid for the same amount out of the tap.
*obviously a major brand but even the cheap brands worked out very little different.

Hotels introduced so many things in the 70s, for instance sweetcorn in one place and cream of asparagus in another (strongly suspect that came from Knorr but it was very exotic at the time)!

We went somewhere tres posh and there were 5 courses including consomme and petit fours.

Life was very simple when I was a child 🤔

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER , it's a bit weird because I could understand if it was a few bottles but it's a trolleyful of the large bottles.
Up to them, I suppose but it's just drinkable water really.

There seems to be a correlation between the contents of the trolley and the BMI index of the shopper.

A Singaporean niece of dh attended a 6th form boarding school in the U.K., which attracted a lot of (mainland) Chinese pupils.

She told us that when once arriving at the beginning of term, the entrance was virtually blocked with literally dozens of cases of bottled water, that had been ordered from Amazon by a new Chinese pupil.

She apparently explained that she couldn’t possibly drink tap water - it made your hair fall out.
To be entirely fair, it was possible that in the area of China she was from, tap water was contaminated.
However the school staff hastily put her straight about U.K. tap water.

Living in Wales our water is gorgeous straight from the tap. Our sons when home would drink gallons. Also great for hair washing because it's soft water. Visiting family in other parts of the UK it really does vary. Then I prefer bottled water. Some countries we've visited we've been advised to even brush our teeth with bottled water, avoid ice. We're really very lucky

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER , . The water buyers look of Asian heritage, but not from a specific country or region AFAIK.

I realise that my pp might have been misleading. I meant shoppers with full trolleys, not trolleys full of bottled water.

Slim friends have different eating habits to non-slim friends.

When I was a child we lived in an area with Welsh water, so I well remember visiting GPs in London and finding the water tasting quite different, not nearly as nice!

We have good old London water now, though, and I find it perfectly all right.

It was here in the mid 90s as I remember mum coming back from shopping and my sister and I guzzling drinking it and it like heaven! That was around 1995 time, I suspect now it's rank!

It wasn’t. It was released in 1998.

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/sunny-delight-successful-launch-1990s/67107

Did you know that if you move to an area with different water it takes your gut a while to adjust. You can be as loose as a goose for a time

I have never heard of this before! Loving all of these comments, you learn something new everyday!

Or melon sometimes. And also tomato juice.

@Susuwatariandkodama , the mineral content in the water varies from one area to another.
If you drink a lot of bottled water, that can affect your digestive tract too.

Shampoo and soap don't lather as well in hard water areas.

I live in a very hard water area. My Mum lives in a very soft water area. We find it extremely difficult to adjust to the vast amounts of lather when we visit her!

Yeah Sunny Delight was definitely not around in the U.K. before the late 90s. My siblings went mad for it and it was disgusting!

I had taken the pp who posted about rationing to mean that the young adults of the 1970s, particularly the early 1970s, had grown up with menus and food that was shaped by rationing. My parents were working class young adults in the early 1970s and this was definitely true for them - they still talk about it. They had teeth ruined by National Dried Milk and sweetened rosehip syrup and blackcurrant concentrated juice (Ribena, for example, originated as a wartime solution to prevent scurvy in children during rationing). My paternal grandmother was still cooking with powdered egg and evaporated milk, and trying to give us spoonfuls of malt treacle well into the early 80s! The popularity of dried and packet foods in the 60s and 70s was partly influenced by habits derived from rationing (see also: cooking largely with margarine, drinking bouillon, Bovril and powdered milk drinks like Ovaltine, and so on).

Kids who were born in the late forties/early fifties definitely were impacted by the foods and cooking trends of the war years. My dad describes the whole of the Fifties as like living in black and white and still eating powdered mash and cabbage for most meals! British food was really really slow to improve and the 70s was when it first started to.

Someone mentioned Alpen upthread, which reminded me that late 70s food was really German and Swiss influenced! All that Black Forest gateau, Liebfraumilch, fondue, “health food”, bran, yoghurt and muesli! We had neighbours in the late 70s and early 80s who were “posh” and they had muesli and yoghurt, and were members of a tennis club, so they could be seen walking about the neighbourhood in tennis gear with the 70s headbands. They had an Alpine-style kitchen, a German car, and holidayed in West Germany. We were green with jealousy! West Germany was having a big economic revival at the time, and Britain was eyeing their success. It was the aspirational fashionable place to emulate, well before the French and Italian fashions of the 1980s really took off. In particular, it was notable that it looked like their lifestyle was healthier and wealthier, ironically much more so than Britain’s, partly because Britain took a long time economically to recover from the war.

By the late 80s it was super middle class and aspirational to go camping in France, and have French-style food for dinner parties, with Bordeaux, Perrier mineral water and Orangina for the kids. The nineties aspirational food culture was obsessed with Italy. But the 70s were all about West Germany!

NB National Dried Milk still formed a big percentage of milk sales through the 1960s and was only discontinued in the late 70s; wartime powdered egg products similar. Tinned meat and meat pastes which had been developed for rationing were still ubiquitous in the British diet well until the end of the seventies and beyond. (Anyone’s gran still into tinned salmon, Spam and tinned suet and meat pies?)

My paternal grandparents were quite literally eating Fray Bentos and Spam, powdered mash and boiled cabbage until they died in the late 2000s. Liver and onions was still one of their favourite meals! Very much the wartime-style diet that my boomer parents were desperate to escape in the late 70s and 1980s onwards. You can totally see why Ski yoghurt, Alpen, Spag Bol, Perrier water, garlic bread and curry would look like a whole new world of excitement after all of that….

Is it just my imagination and nostalgia, or were Wimpy's fries and sesame seed buns (and milkshakes) absolutely divine? We only had them on holiday in England and they were beautiful. I find most current fast food absolutely terrible by comparison, or perhaps it's just my tastebuds have evolved!.