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?

There's a scene in Malory Towers, it's on their first day in the Fifth, I think, when Gwen has lost weight after a summer of enforced exercise following her 'weak heart' scam - Gwen is criticised for eating three tomatoes, and told she'll soon be fat again!

Surely the lemonade is part of making the story more exciting? Be a bit boring if it mentioned every time they had a sip of plain water

DM lived through WW2 when food was rationed. Her family were probably better off than some because they lived rurally and DGPs foraged fir mushrooms and berries and also kept rabbits bred for the pot.
My DGM cooked things like meat pies and chops. Always with potatoes (they had an allotment and whatever veg was in season or stored well ). Desserts were things like apple pie or jam roly poly.
Food rationing didn't actually fully end until the mid 1950s.

In the 80s we ate stuff like lasagne (described by DGF as lino!), roast dinners, casseroles. The occasional findus crispy pancake and chips.

The water thing is definitely generational. I grew up in the 1980s and we drank squash at home. As we got older, we all progressed to water and carrying bottles but my parents (baby boomer generation) still drink a pretty minimal amount of water. We would be offered a choice between a drink and an ice cream on days out and the water/squash always ran out (not neglect, just a different perception of what was needed and how important it is to be well hydrated). My DM will say she’s thirsty and needs a cup of tea, rather than have water! At least one of my grandparents never drank water as she “didn’t like the taste”.

The fruit/veg observation is interesting. My grandparents generally ate more veg than fruit, whether in stews or as a meat and two veg type meal. Fruit tended to be apples/bananas/sometimes oranges and then what was in season (strawberries only in summer, often sprinkled with sugar).

I do think that generation ate more bread than we would consider now- toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, bread and butter on the side at dinner. I remember quite a few childhood meals with a plate of sliced bread and butter in the middle of the table.

Don't forget the hard boiled eggs in the Enid Blyton picnics!!
I was born early 60s. Weetabix or shredded wheat for breakfast. Came home from school at lunchtimes for a full cooked dinner. My Dad was a milkman up at 4am so main meal always at lunchtime. Teatime was soup, boiled eggs and toast or beans on toast. My dad grew potatoes and veg in the garden. Never had shop bought cakes, always home made. We weren't allowed to snack between meals, no fizzy pop, just cordial. Very few families had a car so we walked or biked everywhere. Obesity was virtually unheard of

I was born early 70's and my diet is vastly different to when I was a child. Very much meat and boiled potatoes & veg. Sandwiches with a slice of meat or cheese with bread from bakery, not supermarket. I can remember a friend having a bought sandwich from m&s and we found it really funny.

The only time that we saw rice or pasta (macaroni) was in milk and sugar for pudding.

My mother worried when I fed 'spices' to my kids - I tried to explain that it was only dried plants ....

I’m 70, and we were a poor-ish working class family of 7. I laugh a lot when I read snide remarks about the Mumsnet chicken - we had chicken every Sunday (except Easter) and leftovers on Monday, so 14 servings from a medium chicken.

Cereal for breakfast, except on Sunday when we had streaky bacon and eggs.

Lunch was a hot meal; I would walk a mile and a half from school, bolt down something like liver and bacon, potatoes and cabbage, or a stewing steak stew with carrots, and then walk a mile and a half back to school, all in an hour. My dad would cycle about 3 miles each way.

Tea was bread and jam, except on Sunday when it was ham or tinned salmon and salad (lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes) followed by something sweet - sponge cake, or fruit crumble, or tinned fruit and cream.

We drank squash or tea, and only with meals. There were no snacks except an apple (often half an apple) if we were lucky.

At 18, I weighed 7 stone (and was a size 10) and that wasn’t remotely unusual.

70 years ago people rarely ate out. No fast food, except fish and chips. Fruit wasn't mandatory. Just about everything cooked from scratch. Portions were small. No one drank water, unless it has orange squash in it. Sugar sandwiches were not unknown.

I'm 64 and as usual when this subject comes up I find that my family ate very differently from many others on MN. We are Scottish, which may be a factor. We had lots and lots of sugary foods and food was plentiful. Portions might perhaps have been smaller than nowadays, but they certainly weren't small or stingy. My parents' reaction to growing up with rationing was to make up for lost time. My father especially had a very sweet tooth. We always had biscuits, cake and sweets in the house and my mother always had sweets in her bag, so every bus journey and every night in front of the TV was punctuated by the offer of a boiled sweet or a mint imperial or some chocolate. Every high tea included bread, butter, jam and cake or biscuits after a cooked course. We didn't have much fruit because it was seen as expensive. This has made me a lifelong fan of fruit. I'm not that interested in sweets and generally prefer savoury foods.

My mother worked full-time as a teacher and although she was a very good cook her priority in term-time was keeping on top of the housework and laundry, not cooking. She bought quite a lot of convenience food and although nobody talked about ultra-processed food there were any number of additives in food and drink. It was seen as modern and scientific and a sign of progress. It was also a big help to businesses and consumers because it massively increased the shelf life of processed food. It was some time later that people started agitating about E numbers.

There was a growing interest in wholefoods in the 1970s, but not in our house. We did eat lentils, beans, peas and barley, because they were traditional Scottish foods in broth and soup. Unlike many Scots, we did eat vegetables, but we didn't grow them ourselves. We didn't have wholemeal bread and my mother never baked bread. I don't think many people did.

I’m 58. I grew up very working class, reading Enid Blyton.

my diet has changed immeasurably

i don’t drink ginger beer - pop was far too expensive.

I ate meat and two veg. Mom someone’s made puddings. Sunday roast always. I know that sometimes mom didn’t eat so that we could. Mondays were wash day dinners - chips and egg usually. My diet was healthy, by today’s standards meagre and certainly not as varied as today.

today I eat food from Thailand, India , China, Italy, France, everywhere. Food that in 1983 as a teenager I simply wouldn’t have recognised.

Brocolli was posh in 1986. Avocado unheard of. Diet has changed so much it’s unbelievable

😂😂😂

My mother (French) cooked everything from scratch and even made her own mayonnaise in a mixer which would curdle if not done right - she'd often blame me for distracting her. It was a bit of an art but more often than not an ordeal - lots of oil, eggs yolks and lemon juice. Nobody would bother to make it these days...

I remember her cooking rabbit, which she would have got from the butchers. You rarely see rabbit sold anywhere today.

She refused to make kippers for my father (English) which he loved because of the smell.

Bottled water and this culture of drinking water didn't come about until the 1990s, I think. I drank Fanta, Coke, and Lemonade in the 1970s. Sometimes my parents let me have wine with lemonade.

Haven’t read the whole thread but I feel like even the diet I grew up with is outdated compared to now:

• takeaway every other week was always Chinese, no other option aside from fish and chips was really available where I lived
• i remember when my mum started buying hummus in a pot from the supermarket, I was about 12 and was like wtf is this…
• did not taste an avocado until I was 23 lol!! I was born in 1984 so this would have been in about 2007/8. We had a lot of salad and veg in our house as well so it wasn’t because of that
• strawberries and other soft berries were rare treats. I ate myself sick staying with my aunt on her strawberry farm one summer in 1990, it felt very special having them on breakfast cereal and for snacks. Fruit in our house was rarely anything except an apple, orange or banana
• things like corned beef, cheap liver pate, primula spread, Heinz sandwich filler, spaghetti hoops, tiny microwaveable pizzas, were all staples in our house but I have not seen people eat them for years and would never buy them myself!
• while you could buy frozen food, I don’t remember there being fresh-section ready made dishes like there is now

My mom (English) also made everything from scratch. Because, quite simply, there was no other way to do it.

This diet sounds bloody fantastic!!

Im late 50s.
When l was at primary we used to have ceral or toast for breakfast , school lunches and probably meat, pot and veg for dinner.
We had milk at school break and water with school lunch. I honestly dont remember any snacks or other drinks but we must have had them.
Fridays we were allowed 10p to spend on sweets as a treat.

Also we were only allowed fizzy drinks and crisps on a Sunday once we had got back from church 😂. Me and my brother would crack open a 2 litre bottle and a big sharing bag of something like salt and vinegar chipsticks or those fake onion rings and we would be on a high for the rest of the day.

I don't know where you lived, BOOP, but if you had the money you could buy plenty of tinned, dried and frozen food in the 1970s. Once my Mum started teaching again after a break to have my brother and me, our household income rocketed and a good deal of it was spent on convenience foods. There just wasn't time for her to shop every day, never mind cook.

almost exactly this, I was born late 1960s. I didn’t have a take away until I was about 14 when I had an Indian meal at my uncles as a treat. Lunch every day was a sandwich of some sort, cereal and/or toast for breakfast. No snacks at all, biscuits only as a treat after lunch. We would have been in huge trouble at school if we’d taken water or snacks in! Hardly anyone at school was overweight and most adults were fairly slim by today’s standards.

Child of the 60s, yes diets are very different, but we had access to a good range / variety in London, alongside having a Dad who loved to experiment with food, so being creative with ingredients available, including having great wet fish shops and butchers locally, plus delicatessens. We've gone back to that diet as much as possible and find we prefer it, as well as benefitting from huge reduction in UPFs.

I was born in the late 60s; my parents were born in the 1920s. My mum was great at pies, cakes, and stews. We ate those a lot, but the idea of eating foreign food was unthinkable. I had left home before I ate pasta, proper curry (not Vesta), Chinese food, avocado, broccoli, chilli, and a whole range of other things. Our takeaway food was strictly fish and chips only, and not often. We had puddings after every meal (which I generally disliked) and roasts every Sunday (when I was allowed wine and lemonade). I remember mum giving us yoghurt, but it was plain and acidic, not creamy and delicious.

I don’t remember drinking much water, but we had very dilute squash. I was drinking tea and coffee (instant) while still at primary school. I never drank milk as it made me feel sick.

My Mum cooked breakfast for my dad every morning. I ate a lot of bacon as a child. We also had cereals.

I was just over 7 stone at 18, and a size 10. I found one of my size 10 skirts from university in a box last week, and it was TINY. It makes you realise how much vanity sizing has shaped our views of normal sizes.

But did you do your teeth after your bedtime snack? I know a lot of people who’ve carried this tradition into their adult lives. And their teeth are a funny grey colour…

I grew up in the 60s/70s. Never, ever drank water.
Breakfast - cereals or porridge
Dinn - meat and 2 veg, milk pudding
Tea - fry up, macaroni or liver

Goodness knows how we weren't fat eating all that lot but we were always playing outside, not sitting on screens.

Yes I was only given small pieces too. I think mum thought it was good for my iron levels! And I will only have my steak well done now! I’m glad it wasn’t just me!

Yes, we did too. I remember waking up on a Saturday and Sunday morning (and all during the holidays) grabbing a quick breakfast then dashing out for the day. We were lucky and lived semi rurally so spent time getting up to all sorts, often a bit dangerous in hindsight! We'd pop back in to grab a snack perhaps but otherwise wouldn't be seen until dinner time. At other times we'd go on long bike rides or get dragged up mountains etc. we were so involved in whatever activity we were doing that we didn't really seem to have time to think about food.