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?

Is this in the UK? Apart from central London, I can’t recall any Chinese restaurants until the early 1980s.

That made me laugh about the spices 😅 So suspicious!

really interesting thread

@BarbaraVineFan not sure if you're saying the books are relevant, maybe in the sense of people wanting to read about food? My mum still talks about how long rationing went on. the food depicted is not realistic.

I was born in 76 and we didn't have fizzy drinks except as a very rare treat. I presume they were too expensive. Cake, sweets or for Sundays or special treats.

This thread got me wondering how many calories we eat versus in the 1970s. I'm surprised to find they were eating quite a lot of calories in the 1970s but certainly moving a lot more I guess.

i'm wondering how much of this is due to people underestimating how many calories they eat now. I find it really hard to believe that the average person is eating the same or fewer calories than in the 1970s. Even just with portion sizes, I thought we'd be eating more.

We used to share a mars bar too, I was born in the 70s. Always cut into portions. I like it like that.

My OH born in the 80s didn’t have any of this stuff growing up sweets cakes chips anything he wanted. He has no idea what I’m on about plus doesn’t understand about portion sizes and that he’s eating too much.

I grew up in a small town and we had a Chinese restaurant before I started work in 1971. I treated my sisters to a meal there with one of my first pay packets.

God, that's my mother. She will never drink a glass of water, even when she's in Cyprus and it's 28c. She had a funny turn and went dizzy, I handed her a glass of water but she only took a sip 😵

Tinned fruit and carnations milk after tea on Sundays in 60s I liked mandarin oranges best. We didn’t drink a lot of water on its own either but it came through lead pipes then so maybe didn’t taste as nice

We always had very plain food as my dad refused to eat anything new fangled so no pasta or anything remotely spicy.

My sister did HE and brought home meatballs in tomato sauce with spaghetti. He had to have his with tatties and gravy.

Born 1960's Liverpool
Breakfast - Weetabix or toast; water
Dinner - either a tin of soup, ham sandwich, sugar sandwich, or jam sandwich; water
Tea - scouse with beetroot (not red cabbage); stewing steak, boiled potatoes, carrots; lamb chop, mash, tinned peas; egg and chips; beans and chips; corned beef hash; ham and pea soup; water
Friday - chip shop, bottle of limeade, chocolate
Very little fruit - jelly with sliced banana; banana in milk with sugar; tinned pineapple; stewed rhubarb
Chinese restaurant once a month - lots of Chinese restaurants and chip shops in Liverpool. Best chip shops were either Chinese or Greek.

It’s massively different op!

In the early 70s, I remember my father coming back from a rare trip to London clutching a packet of spaghetti and a block of Parmesan cheese! We had heard of them but had never eaten them before! That meal was such a novelty.

Up to that point, we bought olive oil in tiny bottles from the chemist to treat earache!

I think the lemonade that the Famous Five drank might not even have been carbonated, but basically homemade lemon squash/lemon barley water (as American 'lemonade' is).Ginger beer would have fizzed but again, it was probably made in a big bucket at home!

I am 68, my parents were non-rich middle class and trendy and my Mum did all the cooking.

No freezer, when we had ice cream after Sunday lunch Dad went down to the Co-Op ‘beer off’ with a polystyrene hollow brick to bring back the block of Walls Neopolitan. Later Mint Chic Chip was invented. V exotic.

No garlic used. No pasta (except macaroni for macaroni cheese and pudding). I didn’t have spag bol til I was a student.
No pizza, I first had pizza when I was about 10
No frozen food until it became more common to have a freezer and then I had Findus Crispy Cod balls at my friends house.
Lots of steamed puddings. Either steak and kidney or sponge with syrup, jam or ginger.
Jam roly poly, spotted dick
Steak and kidney stew / casserole with dumplings and potatoes
Far more offal. Liver. Kidneys
Oxtail stew or soup (home made)
Home made fish cakes and rissoles (remains of the joint put through the mincer)
Lots of veg but cabbage and broccoli had to be checked for grubs - there were always grubs. Swede, turnip, fresh spinach, carrots, peas in pods, fresh broad beans in pods, runner beans. Seasonal.
Crisps were not bought routinely, Golden Wonder or Smiths. Later, Walkers were introduced and considered sophisticated .
A salad was big floppy lettuce leaves, radishes, cucumber, slices of beetroot, pickled onion, slice of ham or hard boiled egg, tinned salmon on special occasions and salad cream
Cream cheese in muslin
Always pudding, homemade. Treacle tart, apple crumble, fruit in jelly, pineapple upside down cake, ‘table cream’. With custard or evaporated milk or tinned cream on special occasions.

I was born in the 60s but most of my childhood memories are of the 70s. I was the youngest in the family and my parents were in their 40s when I was born, so much older than most of my friends' parents. I think that made my diet a bit old fashioned even by 70 standards. We did have some tinned things like baked beans, Heinz soups etc but nothing frozen until the late 70s when we got our first fridge with a little freezer compartment. We didn't have an actual separate freezer until I was in my late teens. So my Mum went shopping every day, and as she couldn't drive most of our food was bought from the small local shops and was fresh. Mum was a very good cook and the food was always tasty but we didn't have a very varied menu. I would say that I still eat more or less everything that we had then - cottage pie, casseroles, roast dinners and so on - but there is a lot extra that I have now that we'd never heard of. Like many others have said, there was nothing "foreign" on the menu! I'd never had a pizza or pasta til I went to University. We did have a pudding most days, usually things like steamed sponge puddings or fruit pie or crumble, all home made from scratch. That seems like a lot now and I wonder how we wwre so skinny, but portion sizes were much smaller and I think we were a lot more active in day to day life. We walked or cycled virtually everywhere and with far fewer labour saving devices there was a lot more physical work to do in the house.
There must have been a Chinese takeaway in our small town as one of my school friends was from Hong Kong and I remember her family ran a takeaway. I don't recall ever getting anything from there though. The only takeaway we ever had was fish and chips, or more often chips and peas as fish was too expensive. Sometimes in my teens I'd buy myself a bag of chips on the way home from Guides on a Friday night, but more often I got a "scallop" (nothing to do with shellfish, they were battered slices of potato) or a bag of "scraps" which the shop owner sometimes gave us for free. Eating out was restricted to occasional visits to cafes on holiday. Stopping at the Little Chef was a big treat!
I went to University in the early 80s and had a whole world of different cuisines opened up to me, both because of the availability of different takeaways/restaurants and from meeting students from different backgrounds. In the holidays I sometimes cooked recipes I'd learned for my parents and they did get more adventurous in their later years, but traditional British food was always the mainstay of their diet.

This post has brought back so many memories! I absolutely loved cod balls and chips as a child! And oxtail soup! 1970s salad made me shudder though.

I'm 75 and I recall eating my first pepper when I was in my mid 20s. Other stuff like garlic, aubergine, courgette ceraliac were unknown to my working class 20 year old.

I thought curry always came with currents in it until I was in my 20s too.

so i I'd say my diet has changed beyond recognition since I was 5.

and in the last 10 years, it's changed again. I cannot remember the last time I ate a ready meal, or bread that was mass produced. Because I'm lucky that my adult child is an enthusiastic cook and baker. So they turn their nose up at UPF food of any kind.

Enid Blyton books are not terribly realistic - for one thing nobody ever goes to the bathroom, brushes their teeth, washes any clothes, or has a bath.

Calorie-wise: portions were smaller. Plates were smaller, I think. Food was relatively more expensive and meat and cheese were used sparely , hence the bread and butter on the table.

And we didn’t snack. At all. We only ever had bought chocolate bars at Christmas or on our Devon beach holidays when a Mars Bar would be cut into 4 slices. Multi packs of crisps and sharing bags didn’t exist. People might take an apple out as a snack.

No UPF.

Adults I knew didn’t drink alcohol at home. Not wine. My parents would share a can of Mackeson if we got fish and chips (rare). No one was necking Prosecco or Baileys

Other stuff like garlic, aubergine, courgette ceraliac were unknown

My Mum got quite adventurous, and I remember her introducing mange tout, and my Dad looking highly suspicious and saying “is this one of these new vegetables from Sainsbury’s’”

What my parents fed us in the 90’s would give you nightmares.

People complain about UPFs nowadays but we are practically in an age of food enlightenment in comparison.

Same with school dinners. I just accepted it at the time but I’d love to know who was benefiting from all our secondary schools having soda fountains. Our junior school had recycling bins for coke cans, which was considered progressive. But can you imagine the outcry if 7-11 year olds were given cans of pop for lunch nowadays!

On holidays my parents would be down the pub. I can remember being so off my tits on sugar from half pints of coke that we were dancing in the fountains.

On route to the beach in the morning my parents would stop in at the local spar for a 2L bottle for us to drink during the day. (All swigging hot flat pop from the same bottle 🫣) This all seemed normal at the time.

My grandparents, who were the War generation, would order glass bottles of fizzy orange, lime, cherry, and cream soda with the milk delivery off the milk float. It was offered to any child that was visiting.

My two front teach are veneers as my original ones had eroded in an odd shape where I drank pop through a straw.

My own child basically drinks water, milk and the occasional fruit shoot.

People need more calories because they moved more, they climbed enchanted trees and slid down these slippery slip etc

Our diet and eating habits were very similar in the north in the 70s.

We were really skinny despite a diet of shepherd’s pie, treacle tart, hearty stews and steamed puddings.

As you say, our portions were quite small and we were very active, but the main difference I remember was no snacking between meals.

My mother kept a packet of digestives in a tin and they were meant to last! We weren’t allowed to help ourselves. And we only had sweets once a week on a Sunday afternoon; and that was a couple of toffees from a brown paper bag.

Later on in the seventies, I remember my sister bringing home a whole Fry’s chocolate cream bar from a party, which seemed outrageously extravagant, and my mother occasionally cutting up a Mars Bars very carefully and sharing it all between us; a family of seven! 😆 But these were very rare treats!

My dad said they’d get a bottle lemonade on their birthday.

I lived on the midlands. Our income never “rocketed” and, thank goodness, we didn’t revert to processed food like that. Frozen food was limited to a small compartment at the.top of the fridge (peas?) and mom, skint, continued to cook from scratch like she always had.

I loved what she cooked. I was amazed when she attempted anything “foreign” and I still, to this day, think she was an amazing cook. Eccles cakes, faggots, scotch eggs, apple pies, baked Alaska. She was and is a great cook. I challenge you to eat a better mince pie!

You've answered my question, did kids really drink that much lemonade and ginger beer?
Something made me doubt it.

I was thinking about the cost being prohibitive to many families, but your comment about rationing makes perfect sense, sugar was one of the last things to stop being rationed, around 1952.

We were five children with a SAHM. Dad had a professional job but we had very little money to spare and when young people complain about boomers etc I do wonder if they really understand the difficulties each generation has faced.
My packed lunch was a jam or marmite or bovril sandwich and a scraped carrot. Sometimes a boiled egg with a twist of salt in a bit of tin foil.
NEVER ate out or got take away. Drank milk and tea.
Mum would make curry from curry powder and onions and water and it was served with desiccated coconut and sliced banana and sultanas.
Chips were our favourite. We didn’t have a car so would get potatoes delivered in big hessian sacks and they were thick with mud. Mum would cook them in the chip pan which was full of lard which was left to harden back up after and probably months old.
We ate a lot of bread. With margarine. Cheap meat. Boiled veg. Rice pudding and crumbles.
Mum went to cookery classes and then used to make ‘tuna and rice. My absolute favourite. It was one can of tuna between our family of 7 mixed into boiled rice with chopped eggs and sultanas.
I remember McDonald’s opening in London and on our annual train journey though London to visit my Nan my Dad bought a milkshake for us to try. One between 5!
I think the diets associated with low income families then and now are vastly different. Poorer areas seem stuffed with take away and convenience stores full of snack food and ready made soft drinks.