Meat and Two Veg?

[theclassroom]

Completely random thing to post I know, so I hope it’s in the right place. Who, in 2025, still eats ‘meat and two veg’? It’s something I haven’t heard of in a very long time and when I did hear it growing up it was always from elderly people (or a joke about men’s private parts…)

I know it was a traditional way to eat in the past but I can’t imagine ever choosing to making it. I don’t love traditionally British food of any kind, besides fish and chips and maybe mashed potatoes, so I’m probably not the target audience but I’m hearing it around again.

I don’t like a Sunday roast either but it seems much better than a dinner of meat and two veg. I don’t know, the name and the food itself depresses me. 😩

So if you still eat it, what makes you choose it over the many cuisines and dishes available I guess?

I have meat (although more likely chicken or fish) and four veg just about every day. And yes, the veg are boiled/steamed. It's just the type of food I like best, and I like to be able to taste the actual food rather than have things smothered in sauces or highly seasoned. Most of my friends eat similar.

Incidentally, I'm in NZ and it was always meat and three veg here, not two.

Can't beat a Sunday roast, even on a Tuesday!

I think it’s a decent balanced meal. Tends to be eaten by slimmer/healthier people. Not all the time but it’s often so. Often older people but it’s one of life’s pleasures.

I do when my dad visits because that is food I know he likes and will eat.

I think the meat, potatoes and 2 veg has morphed in to a protein, a carb and 2 veg.

I must admit that now I'm in my 60s I am rolling back my diet to when I was younger.
Pasta bloats me, onions and garlic give me cramps, spices repeat on me, creamy sauces set off the runs.... keep going...

Small bit of meat/fish, potatoes, 2 or 3 veg - especially root veg make a meal that my gut tolerates the best.
Your dad may have similar issues.

It was probably more the ratios of the wartime ration diet - more veg, less meat - than the particular components, that was healthier, and then my grandparents generation (born in the 1910s) would have kept that mindset, which to an extent then was passed down to the children of the 1940s and 1950s. But then, especially from the 1970s onwards more and more convenience stuff started to arrive.

However, the older diet would probably have been saltier than home cooked stuff tends to be now, and vegetables would have been boiled to within an inch of their lives, so the way we cook veg now I think keeps more of the nutrients.