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?

Actually that’s not quite what I meant. I grew up in the suburbs of London (zone3) and there were no Chinese restaurants until 1979.
I was commenting on a poster who had a Chinese takeaway every week or so in the 1960s… I think this would have been unusual for most families in 1965.

I was born in the 1940s and my diet was very different from my GCs. Nothing remotely “foreign” that meant no spices, herbs or imported food. The exception was tinned fruit which we had every day. Our diet was meat, potatoes and veg.

We were better off than our neighbours because my mum worked full time from when we were babies. My Gran lived with us and did most of the cooking. I never had a big appetite and used to envy my friends who had bread and jam for their tea.

Chicken was very expensive in the 1970s - possibly battery farming only got under way in the 80s? For a long time it was what we had for our Christmas lunch. Beef must have been cheaper because we had stewed beef and mince very regularly and roast beef most weekends, but my Mum effectively pot roasted it, so maybe it was a cheaper joint. My Mum hates liver so we never had that at all. She doesn't like rare meat so that was something we never had either. For some reason we hardly ever had lamb in any form at home, and pork only in the form of occasional pork chops or gammon steaks, never roast.We did have bacon and eggs for breakfast every Sunday.

Grilled steak was a rare treat if we went to a Berni Inn or similar for a birthday meal. From the mid 70s. though, our most usual restaurant for such occasions was either a pizzeria (amazing new-fangled place) or an Italian restaurant. Lovely food. I'm sure in our city there were Indian and Chinese restaurants but those didn't appeal to my parents so we never went there. We did sometimes eat at a fish and chip restaurant, and for some reason my parents fixed on Thursdays as a good night to have fish and chips for our evening meal. My Dad picked them up on the way home from work.

Can anyone verify the following.
DH born late 40’s. One of 4 boys. Mother a widow.
Bread and jam for breakfast. Soup for dinner.
Free school lunches. NE England.
All free lunch pupils told to go to the back of the queue and only got food if there was anything left after paying pupils got served.
is this correct or just a bad memory of being hungry all the time.
His mother was lovely.

But Parkin is the BEST!

I don't know about that far back @Afoolandtheirmoney but I remember how free school meals worked in my school in the 70s and it was definitely discriminatory. We paid for school dinners on a Monday morning and got a strip of dinner tickets, much like raffle tickets. Each day you handed one in, and if you were off or didn't have dinner for some reason one day you could use the tickets the following week. A simple system that worked fairly well, but kids who got free meals got a different coloured ticket. I think the official reasoning was that it was to prevent them selling their free meals or to protect them from any bullies who tried to get them off them. Both those reasons seem a bit ridiculous to me - the bullies took tickets off people who had paid too and nobody cared about that, and I don't think the black market in dinner tickets was a huge problem. What it actually did was single out those on free meals and embarrass them. I had a couple of friends who barely ever ate because they didn't want to be seen using the free tickets. A few of us would declare ourselves "not hungry" periodically and give our friends our regular tickets to make sure they got something. I thought it was an awful thing to do and I am glad to see that kind system has become a thing of the past. So I don't know for sure if your DH is remembering correctly, but it wouldn't surprise me if things were even worse in the 50s/early 60s.

My dm was born in 1921 and the meals she prepared for us were:

• Soups and salads
• Grilled meat or fish with veg
• Casseroles flavoured with herbs, with mash
• Roasts
• Pies and veg

Take aways (a holiday treat) were from the fish & chip shop, or a Cornish pasty on the seafront if in Cornwall.

Puddings were stewed fruit, fruit pies or crumbles with custard or cream. Home grown fruit or tinned pineapple or peaches. Occasionally a fruit cake or Victoria sponge.

She never cooked rice, pasta, couscous or starchy beans (kidney, cannellini etc). Savoury dishess did not have nuts, sugar, maple syrup, sweet glazes or cream added. Cheese was a separate source of protein, not added to a meat dish. Food was plain. A lot of veg & fruit were home grown so lots of flavour..

There were no snack foods. If we were hungry after school, there was bread and homemade jam. No crisps or biscuits. Sweets were a Saturday treat, something like a 2-finger kitkat. We drank water. No fruit juices, smoothies, milk shakes or fizzy drinks.

If dm drank alcohol, it was a small sherry at Christmas.

DM never went to a gym or owned trainers, but she walked into town and carried home shopping most days, and she raised 6 children without a washing machine. She was never still and lasted into her 90s. We walked everywhere.

Obviously books are fiction and often full of things that children would desire.

i am sure diets in first half off the 20th century were

• more repetitive/ limited in variety
• plainer
• lots of,carbs esp if poorer
• full fat dairy/ real butter rather than the range of lower fat alternatives
• very rarely vegetarian
• more influenced by income than now

@AgeingDoc, yes, I remember the different colours. I used to swap my paid for blue one for my friend's green one. I didn't care.

I am sure that tastes have changed dramatically since the 60s, but I have to admit that I actually prefer that type of food. I dislike pasta, curry, Chinese food, anything spicy or stuff like lentils or chickpeas. I like to have meat, potatoes and vegetables. Potatoes are my absolute favourite food, in any shape or form! My mother was an extremely good cook and everything she cooked was very tasty without the need for spices. We always had pudding and I still serve a pudding every evening now. We are all different!

Yes at my Comprehensive school even up to the late 1980’s those on free school meals were given different coloured tickets. I really don’t understand why adults couldn’t see how bad this stuff was. But I suppose we were just moving on from a time when children were put in entirely different quality of school based on results of one exam at 11.

So not really moved on at all then

I recognise this. I know so many women who lived till their nineties who were brought up in this sort of diet. Didn’t go to the gym but walked a lot and did manual housework. Kept slim all their lives too.

So do l.

When l was a young adult in the 80’s, l did it all. Stir fries, pastas, rice.

Now l just don’t like them much. Prefer spuds and pie, or sausage or Shepherds pie. I don’t like tomato based sauce or spicey stuff.

I guess our tastebuds are developed in childhood.

My secondary in the 80s was all the FSM kids had to queue up in a corridor in the next building to be handed a plastic token whilst everybody else went in at their allotted time. It meant that after you'd waited 20 minutes for the older kids to eat, you'd wait another fifteen minutes to get through the Poor Kids' Queue (with obligatory 'ahhhh, you're poor - shame!' from the ones walking past because they had money and you didn't), followed by 10 minutes waiting outside the dinner hall to find you had a ten minute queue to get to the front, realise there was nothing left other than a few scraps, a yoghurt and an apple and have five minutes in which to eat the yoghurt and walk across the site for the start of afternoon formtime.

That was abandoned once the school realised almost nobody took their FSM - not because it was embarrassing, but because the level of food theft from the local shops went skywards and the bakers (there were three) and supermarket realised they were being raided by hungry children, as it wasn't sweets or junk, it was bread and things that could be eaten whilst running.

Sad but I spent 30 mins checking Hummus labels in Tesco last weekend my conclusion was the own brand was closest to being upf free. I understand that it is easy to make but I tried and it was nothing like it!

Born late 1960s.
Scrambled eggs for breakfast or a bacon sandwich

Breaktime: crisps or a bar of chocolate

school lunches which were inedible spam and grey mash

Hone from school-tea or squash and biscuits

Dinner - either braised steak/sausages/liver/pork or lamb chops/mince with boiled potatoes and veg

However my friend’s mum used to do coq au vin and spaghetti bolognese and by the late 70s there were tins of curry sauce-rogan Josh/madras etc which my mother used to add to meat, onions and peppers and they were delicious.

Cakes from the bakery… delicious doughnuts and danish pastries.

Our portions were huge so I was never hungry.

Agreed. I love hummus and home-made does taste good but I never get it as smooth as the bought version.

Maybe but in the 70’s these were not the norm - mainly because you got tiny amounts.
Cereals came in big boxes with a free toy!

There was a huge jump between 70’s food and 80’s.
Then shop opening hours changed and we all got fat.