The 70s and diet - what were we eating?

[Alicay]

Watched a programme about The Cure last night. There was footage of the group from '81 (I think) and they were all like pipe cleaners - that really slight, skinny look. Not an inch on them. Growing up I can remember the majority (of young people at least) having that kind of physique. Also, recently saw Gregory's Girl and was struck by the school scenes - kids all like whippets. Now im fat and in my fifties I'm trying to remember what I/people ate. think for me it was cornflakes with sugar for breakfast, orange juice then modest packed lunch (I never got crisps, but some kids got a packet of walkers) or a disgusting school dinner of meat pie and veg that I barely touched) dinner was always vegetable soup then say pasta (fancy, but Italian roots) then stewed fruit. I'd be raging hungry on that diet now. Thinking about it maybe food was just less appealing/quantities smaller? Is it all just down to the extra snacks we have now?
Any 70's/earlier people remember better than me?

We had no car, and buses were an unnecessary expense unless you had a lot of shopping to carry. So lots of exercise, despite being the least sporty girl in the neighbourhood. My mother was a great cook, without very much to cook with by modern standards. Snacks during the day would be a cup of tea with a plain biscuit if a visitor called round. Surreptitious snacking was absolutely not allowed. We were quite used to having to wait until mealtimes to eat. As others have mentioned, portions were small, with two fish fingers being the standard issue, with a few chips and a spoonful of peas. Great chips, though.

Unsurprising that we were skinny. My mother thought she was fat, and was always on some kind of unsuccessful diet. Looking back at photos, although she was certainly less thin than the rest of us, she'd be considered a normal weight nowadays.

People used to worry about ruining their appetite. You were supposed to be hungry before dinner. Now we get a snack 'to keep us going' like we are going to keel over and die.

Been for a day out in London today. On the train now and it's snacking central.
Been trying to eat like I'm in the 70s. Stopped for a coffee first thing. I had an americano with milk (so a coffee with milk in old money). DH and DD had a latte/hot choc - served in a vat sized cup, plus a big pastry plus the free mini pastry with drinks. Had lunch at Spoons in the City. Usually I'd go for a healthy meal. Today had a small plate of scampi, chips and peas. Still not hungry - 10/10 would have faceplanted a cake by now as would have been starving. Am going to see how I do with a v light meal later. I will be skinny in no time.

Will also have scurvy. Been a relief not to think about macros/microbiomes and all that stuff.

Did anyone else's family celebrate you being 'good eaters'? It seemed to be seen as a mark of good parenting. Come to think of it, my grandmother's house was always full of cakes. And snacks.

Yes! I wasn't a "good eater", I was "fussy" (when I had my own children and some of them had textural issues with some foods, it all fell into place) and was compared unfavourably with my plumpish older cousin, with schoolfriends, with my mother's friends' children, and, later, with my younger sisters. I experienced some feeding behaviour that would be termed "coercive" now.

It wasn't just school milk (blech!), children drank quite a lot of milk generally. Cold from the fridge, it was OK. From the doorstep in winter with ice crystals in it, it was better than OK.

Ate cereal for breakfast, sandwiches or soup for lunch, home cooked meal for dinner. Dessert was fruit. Once dinner was over it was over - no late night snacking. Rarely went out for a meal and never had takeaways. Mother never kept junk food in the house. No crisps or sweets. If we were hungry between meals it was fruit.

I was born in 1962. I think money was tight. The food cupboard was never full with different choices. We weren’t asked what we wanted to eat for meals. A meal was cooked take it or leave it. Nothing like biscuits, cakes, chocolates, crisps in the cupboard to help yourself to. I don’t remember top up shops - a certain amount was bought and when it was gone that was it. Didn’t have a freezer only the small one at the top of the fridge. Mostly water from the tap to drink
we walked everywhere, went to the park on our bikes, played out. We were slim (not so much now)
one thing that does stand out is that there were certain foods that we only had at Christmas or other occasions which made us look forward to and enjoy them more. Now I think we’re spoilt for choice and overeat

There was a lot of ratatouille and goulash, as I recall.

Bollocks! That is just not true. It was a time of economic strife and there weren't as many snack foods available cheaply. Processed foods were everywhere, wholemeal bread was not really a thing. Lots of foods were unknown in the UK or very new.

A few supermarkets didn't have a stranglehold on food production and prices in their shops like they do now.

God it was grim apart from breakfast. Breakfast was bacon and egg or tomato or beans. Packed lunch. Sandwich (ham or cheese or paste) and apple. Friend had cake.
Tea was grim apart from Friday when it was chips. Or if it was Rabbit stew.

Walked to and from school. Played out a lot. Rode bikes up and down the road as few cars.

I was a child in the 1970s and I am pretty certain that we ate just as much junk food as children do today - orange squash, Angel Delight, packet soup, Nesquick, Green's cheesecake mix etc. Club biscuits and crisps with our white bread Dairylea or ham sandwiches at lunch time. Breakfast was Readybrek or Frosties, dinner quite often something like sausages and mash or fishfingers and beans, with a Ski yoghurt to follow. It was all about processed convenience foods for lots of people - the Findus Crispy pancake being a prime example.

I do agree with pp that we were more active. Even as a fairly bookish type I spent hours of my childhood playing outside and roaming around on my bike unsupervised in a way that doesn't really seem possible now - and very different from even my own dcs' experiences in London the early 2000s.

Generally I do think there was less snacking. As children we ate plenty of sweets but I don't remember adults doing that - although they tended to smoke instead I think. It was harder to find anywhere that sold takeaway hot drinks. There were local bakeries that might do tea in a polystyrene cup, and you might get a wodge of bread pudding or a sausage roll or something with it, but most people did not walk around with a vat milky coffee and an enormous muffin the way people seem to now. I don't think you could even get a 'proper' coffee where I was brought up until the 90s!

SwordToFlamethrower · Today 09:19
Full fats, whole milk, no ultra processed foods, meat on the bone, veggies and whole grains.

That’s my experience too.

We ate a balanced old fashioned diet, but had plenty of exercise. Very few take-aways around then, so little snacking. 🙂

How many fish fingers would you have now?? Two is a portion!

We also never ever ate out - we took
basic packed lunches on days out and went to a cafe for tea and cake as a treat once during the week when on holiday at the seaside. I remember being really impressed that my first boyfriend's family occasionally went to a pub for a meal (that was the height of extravagance according to DM).

I was a child/teen in the 70’s and 80’s and remember having my food tightly controlled.

a hangover from the 60’s when our mums grew up with the “twiggy” body type and fenfen and smoking to less weight perhaps.

i simply wasn’t allowed food unless it was mealtimes or a treat for a special occasion. I was considered “big”- and was often told to not be greedy when I wanted seconds or a treat. I remember being hungry a lot and being made to wait for dinner, hanging round in the kitchen desperate for it to be ready.

a treat was a ginger biscuit- just one.

irony was I was a competitive athlete- trained 20 hours a week at 12, GB squad, was muscly but no fat on me. I was made to give up swimming in favour of athletics in case I got big shoulders.

my diet was a small bowl of cornflakes, plain sandwich and a penguin for lunch, meat and two veg or stew/bolognese etc for dinner. Small portions.

definitely disordered eating rather than any sort of idealistic “healthier” way of life. I has deep in the throes of my own ED by 18.

Until I left home at 18 my diet was pretty much Edam, chicken, potatoes, eggs and spaghetti hoops.

My mum was a reluctant, angry cook who didn't believe in flavour. When the Wimpy opened in our town she made her own burgers, unseasoned lumps of mince with a square of plastic cheese. I don't think I ever had a takeaway until the mid eighties.

I think the quality of meat has improved, I remember not being able to tell the difference between beef, pork and lamb.

Strangely, we did have huge amounts of fizzy drinks.

We walked everywhere or cycled and swam regularly.

I was very slim until I moved abroad and discovered lovely food.

Addlestone in Surrey - or Rickmansworth? Both have great Wimpys!

Robert Carrier cookbook by any chance?

Fry up breakfast every morning. Scone or chocolate at work tea break. Pie and chips for dinner. Lots of different things for tea but home made chips with nearly every meal. Rarely any snack in the house. Also portions were much smaller and I walked for literally miles to get anywhere. No takeaways apart from fish and chips a few times a year. Never ate out in restaurants. Didn't drink pints. I was really underweight and people used to comment on how skinny I was. Didn't put on weight until I learned to drive in my twenties (in the 80's) and discovered a thing called a Chinese takeaway. Downhill all the way since then.

I was born in 1963. I was an only child and my mum always did a dessert. Everything was homemade. Cakes lemon meringue. We did buy broken biscuits and chocolate biscuits.

Perhaps I was one of the lucky ones but there was lots of variety. I also enjoyed wholemeal bread from the age of 11.

I definitely was skinny though.

I grew up in the 80s (1980 baby) and food was definitely NOT healthier than today. I grew up outside the UK so perhaps a but different. We ate a lot of stodge - meat and potatoes, very little veg - and sugary cereal. I was drinking huge amounts of full fat coke (had all my baby teeth pulled at one point due to tooth decay). Lunch at school was like burger or pizza with chocolate milk. Lots of processed snacks. We ate out or got takeaway probably 4 nights a week. My wider family was/is quite obese.

We eat far healthier now in my family than I did growing up. And are far more active. My mum was obsessed with dieting, despite what we ate, but it wasn’t healthy. People on tv and movies and in music are still quite thin though today, though there is more acceptance of different body types.

We ate processed foods but nowhere near to the same level we do now, and the portions were much smaller. One of mum’s go-to convenience meals was shop bought quiche, chips and peas - the quiche was split 4 ways and there was a small amount of chips. We might have had an Angel Delight for pudding with tinned fruit but again it was a pack of AD between 4 and 2 or 3 slices of peaches each. We had a biscuit tin and there would have been a couple of small packets of biscuits bought each week and that was to last the 4 of us that week. Crisps were a rarity, we just didn’t snack between meals, and although we had a car we didn’t use it for short trips - we walked or got the bus, a car was for the necessary journeys. We lived in a tiny village with a 2 hourly bus service so we used the small shop we had for top-ups, or waited till the weekend and did the food shop.

We weren’t poor at all - there was just far less food on the go, takeaways and fast food outlets were as rare as hen’s teeth, and far fewer restaurants. Eating out was a luxury. It was a different era, food-wise. I knew one overweight adult and 2 overweight children in the village - one was the daughter of the overweight adult and the other had an illness which caused tge weight gain. That was it.