Has the typical diet really changed so much in the last 70 years or so?

[BarbaraVineFan]

My DD (6) enjoys listening to audiobooks of Enid Blyton and she often comments on the foods eaten (or not) in the books- for example:

no water seems ever to be drunk- only lemonade or ginger beer
bacon and eggs seems to be de rigueur for breakfast
there is so much bread and cake! Sandwiches, bread and butter or cake at every meal, sometimes all three
lots of fruit but barely any vegetables

Now I know that this doesn’t really count as data, but it has got me thinking. Are people’s diets really so different now as it would seem from MN, with lots of fruit and veg, 2l water every day and avoiding carbs at all costs? Or is our diet in the UK in fact still quite similar to the 1950s with most people basing their meals round a carb/meat and two veg?

You must know that wasn't typical though?

That in no way describes a 1980's working class diet.

Wouldn’t the roast dinners be meat and two veg style@SheSpeaks ?
The selection of meals at your house sounded fabulous btw.

It would if it was true. Fajitas didn't exist in the 80s...

They are just a shitty Tex-Mex thing that originated some time around the millennium...

My DMiL is a woman of very modest taste, albeit plentiful means, and still cooks what she learnt growing up in the 1950, and as plainly as possible. White fish. Boiled potatoes. Overcooked (by modern standards) veg. Minimal onion. No garkic. Pasta is foreign. Rice is pudding. Protein is expensive, fill up on white carby stodgy. Spice only is Christmas cakes. When in doubt, boil some mince. There is rarely doubt, as she makes the same meals on the same days of the week as she has for the 55 years she’s been married.Roast on Sunday, cold meat Monday, shepherd’s pie Tuesday etc,Egg and chips on Friday - no meat. Makes her own bread (bread machine).

DM is a year older. Not technically as good a cook, but much more diverse in her tastes, and significantly more chaotic - probably helped that she married a foreigner and lived in London. My 1970s-80s childhood was full of carbonara, avocado, Chinese takeaways, chilli, tacos, stir fries, trips to the Caribbean stalls at Brixton and Notting Hill markets, haggis & neeps, as well as hotpots, roasts and trifle! I remember one school friend refusing to come to tea anymore, because she didn’t ever know if she was going to be able to eat the food.

My own DC drug between cuisines as it is the most normal thing in the world.

DMiL had only been abroad once, but didn’t like the food (Denmark of all places, the cloudy apple juice put her off).

At easy I wasn't as bad as some of my friends who had the same meals every week on the same days. Usually roast dinner, leftovers the next day, mince and tatties, pork chops, fish, liver etc with rice pudding, tapioca, semolina afterwards. The monotony.

Our biggest treat was dad making homemade chips.

Growing up in the North in the 60s (and certainly not posh), we had a fairly mixed diet. I remember fizzy pop from the Corona lorry. Fish at least once a week. My mother's amazing chicken stew with barley. Tripe! Vesta prawn or beef curries or paella. My parents had Chinese and Indian friends so we had their home cooking and went occasionally to restaurants.

Maybe not 80’s but earlier than millennium.

2 for 1 “Fajita night” was a really big thing in restaurants and wine bars in the south east during the early 90’s. Everywhere did one.
Before the yuppies of the 80’s eating out was Beefeater type places or proper restaurants. Then more pubs and bars starting doing nice food.

Diet has changed hugely in my lifetime and I'm 58. As a young child we had breakfast (always toast), dinner at midday which was the main cooked meal of the day and usually meat, potatoes and veg followed by pudding (often stewed fruit and custard), and tea early evening which was bread, butter, jam, cake (at weekends) and biscuits. We often had a piece of fruit for supper, usually apple, orange or banana. No rice, pasta, few spices, hardly any fish, but my DM was a good cook and we ate quite well. There was generally a roast on Sunday, then left over cold meat with mash and veg on Monday, perhaps a shepherd's pie / chops / liver and bacon / sausages and mash/ stew the next few days, we often bought fish and chips for Saturday lunch.

Apparently they originate from the 1930's.

I assumed it was a joke. Either that or peak MN

I’m 60 and disagree that we ate few UPFs back in the 1970s. What about breakfast cereal, white sliced bread (apparently have contained UPFs since the 1960s), squash, spam and other processed meats for a start? Fish fingers, burgers from Bejams, biscuits, Dairylea cheese triangles. I probably eat less now. I would be interested to know if the actual UPFs added have changed over time.

70 yrs ago is 1956, when my parents were California teenagers. Refridgerators, drinking lots of milk, (California style) Mexican cuisine, avocados, oranges, bananas would all have been ordinary & familiar to them. My grandfather said he "lived on" avocados when in the US Navy in South Pacific in 1940s (rest of Navy food was awful, he said).

Most my parents' calories would have come from white bread, meats and milk. They also ate lots of fresh salads and both had lifetime dislike of all the brassicas.

I recognised the diet that Frank McCourt describes in rural Ireland in 1930s, btw. Sugar sandwiches on white bread, especially.

Like many Californians, I find TexMex horrible and never heard of fajitas until the 1990s. About as irritating and non-helpful as the word "wrap", I suppose.

I thought it might be a fan of "It's Grim Up North London" from Private Eye!

I must admit that I wasn’t sure, but you never know on here.

By mid 1950s my parents probably had plenty of transFats in their diet. Fats were probably big source of calories in their diet.

I was a sixties child. We drank milk and water with occasionally tea. Pop was a rare treat bought with pocket money, along with other crisps and sweets. I rarely had them.
my parents didn’t have a fridge until quite late on so shopping was done daily from the local corner shop. My mother was a terrible cook so eggs featured a lot, as did bread . Sausages, mince etc. she used a pressure cooker but veg was still tasteless and over cooked.
We never had puddings unless it was jelly with carnation or condensed milk, or tinned fruit. We ate yogurt and breakfast was weetabix and top of the milk from the milkman. We never had snacks and portions were small.
Bread was sliced whole meal as my mother was quite forward thinking and even then wouldn’t have white processed flour products or white sugar in the house.
We had fish and chips as an occasional treat, never ate out. I didn’t eat curry or Chinese food until I was in my teens and had a Saturday job. We never ate pasta ever. Never had roasts ever, as I recall. I remember being forced to eat liver which I hated.

Possibly depends on where you were brought up as well as when. I grew up in a small northern mining town where I am sure the vast majority of people wouldn't have even known what most of the meals that @SheSpeaks mentions were, never mind how to cook them. And if they had wanted to try they definitely wouldn't have found many of the ingredients in the local shops.
Before I went to University I had never been abroad and literally the only people I had ever met who were not white, working class British much like myself were the family that ran the one Chinese takeaway in town and the local GP who was Indian. The only thing I knew about other cuisines is what I'd seen on tv or learned at school. I'd say that was very much the norm for youngsters of my background, though there was one better off girl at school who went on holiday to France every year and a few who had been on package holidays to Spain. But foreign holidays were still not common where I lived and the area was almost entirely monocultural. The diet reflected that.
Then I went to University in a big multicultural city and it could have been a different world. There were specialist shops selling foods that I didn't recognise - I'd never seen okra or a mango before for instance - but even the regular supermarkets carried a much bigger range of foods than the equivalent shops at home. At University I met people from all over the world, shared their food, bought books and learned how to cook for myself. I think my diet now is still quite similar to my student diet but it's very different to my childhood one, even though they are only separated by a few years. Not that the food I ate as a child was bad, far from it, and I do still use plenty of my Mum's recipes - it's just that I cook lots of other things too.

Enid Blyton children were upper middle class weren't they, so would have had more treats like pop and cakes than poorer children.

I’m mid fifties and from a mining village and we always had our main meal as tea(dinner ) at 6pm.
Toast or weetabix for breakfast with a banana. Light lunch. 6 pack of crisps lasted our family of 5 one week. We had a rota for the spare packet and same for 6 packet of penguins etc.
Lots and lots vegetables. My DF had allotment so we always had meat and potatoes and lots of different veggies.
But lots a cups of tea.

I had an Irish Dad and a German Jewish secular mother so the diet was a mix - Eastern European dishes like pickled herring, chicken schnitzel, stuffed peppers, ghoulash and macaroni, and liver and bacon, stewing pork, stewing lamb and gammon, cabbage and spuds for Sunday lunch. Plus plenty of fruit and home baked cakes.

i was born in the south in the 60’s and this was spot on for me too. i had my first Chinese takeout at 16 and i blew my mind- loved it

I lived in Texas in the 1980s. They were definitely a thing.

That diet and the amount of calories would have been fine back then (especially if you’re one of the Famous Five and spent all your time on outdoor adventures).

Most people’s jobs were more physical so the calories were needed and burned off every day.

For most people now, the amount of calories isn’t required.

Snacks didn’t exist when I was a child in the 70’s. Maybe a piece of cake occasionally. And we always had pudding after dinner. We were hardly ever indoors, especially in good weather.

I was a child in the 50s and my family were very poor . We hardly ever had chocolate or ice cream . We ate a small amount of meat with potatoes and veg for most meals . We also didn’t have lemonade or juice , water was the drink we were given . A picnic consisted of jam butties and a bottle of water . I used to read the famous five books and considered the children to be VERY posh .

I’ve never been called peak MN before. Over the history of fajitas of all things. We had table warmers that we used to out in the middle of the table which were lit from below by candles. We ate spicy meat, onions and peppers from these, with rolled breads, and rice from a bamboo steamer thing that we had.

Sure, the roast dinners are the most meat and two veg type dinners. I love a roast.

We lived in a city. In a council house. We shopped by going on the bus to the large city indoor and outdoor market. We would also go to what we called the Chinese supermarket the Indian shop, the health food shop, and the Jewish deli (I am sorry for the terms, these are what we called them then). I remember reading cookbooks by Madhur Jaffery, Keith Floyd, a book called E for additives - as well as Mrs Beeton. I remember when they started selling baguettes in the bakery and they were called “French sticks”. All kinds of experiences exist. I’m just adding mine.