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?

Totally different in 70’s, it was meat, potatoes and veg nearly every day, only change was when one’s a stew. Spaghetti bolognaise was a rare treat and for some reason took ages. No bread and butter with meals and no cake but we did have pudding daily like angel delight.

these days we eat mostly rice, a lot of spices, but also couscous, lots of different pasta dishes, all kinds of potatoes too, not just mash, boiled or roasted

We eat pizza with a knife and fork

Drinking water does seem to be something a lot of older women avoid. My Mum (93) used to get a lot of UTIs, probably linked to not drinking enough water. I'm quite certain one of the reasons is that she didn't want to have to go to the loo when out of the house. She has next to no grasp of how the body works and refuses to accept tha the body needs a fair amount of fluid to function properly.

Diets have changed massively. There is a programme on Channel 5 called the 1970's diet. This will give you an idea of what was eaten many years ago.

I'm a late 50's child. We had three meals a day, no snacking at all. I don't remember ever being hungry so we obviously were eating enough. Everything was cooked from scratch. We had pudding only on Sunday's. Pasta and Chinese were exotic things that I didn't eat until the 80's. No fizzy drinks in our household.

Fish and chips were the only take away near us, which we had maybe twice a year.
There was a Corono van that used to come round once a week for people to buy things like lemonade.
Drinks in my house were milk or water, nothing else. And we didn't continually drink water like you do nowadays.

We walked everywhere. My parents didn't drive. My walk to school was 3 miles each way, and I did this with my sister on our own from when I was 9.

I should add that we did have bacon sandwiches yesterday (but with cafetière coffee), then chicken Caesar salad for lunch with sourdough croutons, then roasted duck with potatoes dauphinois, green beans and red cabbage, everything was made at home (obviously bacon bought but was nitrate free)

I mean something obviously changed when you compare obesity rates 70 years ago to now.

no water seems ever to be drunk- only lemonade or ginger beer

Let’s not start this again. Someone will be along in a min to tell you that you can survive on 6 glasses of the stuff a day!

I remember going to the cinema and sitting on the non-smoking side. Yes, super effective at keeping out of the great fug of smoke that rose up from the other side! It was absolutely everywhere, agreed. Even in the early 90s we had a GP who chain smoked through all his consultations, even the patients with asthma, pregnant women, babies ...

My mother is the same. The only liquids she drinks are instant coffee (black) and 0% beer. Absolutely nothing else. It fascinates me!

Yes this. My mum cooked all dinners from scratch. We never had takeaways, my mum made her own fish and chips, proper chips in a chip pan, oven chips weren't a thing back then. Also made her own batter for the fish. All desserts were home made, rice pudding, jam roll poly, lemon meringue pie.

Fruit and veg only eaten in season. Fizzy drinks only at Christmas and Easter.

The ginger beer and lemonade weren’t “pop”, though. They would be home made, usually. But still a treat.

Baked beans aren't UPF, surely? Processed foods aren't automatically ultra-processed. The U bit refers to adding chemicals that an ordinary home cook would never have.

Mine has, yes. I grew up with essentially a 1950s diet with added 1980s processed food. I didn't drink water regularly until my 20s. I taught myself to cook as a teenager and mostly cook from scratch now. Veg features heavily, and I eat a Mediterranean diet.

I remember going to buy olive oil in the late 1980s and having to go to a deli instead of a local supermarket to get it. I remember not knowing, when I was 11, that you could get spaghetti in a packet and not just in a tin. For my parents, olive oil was something you got from the chemists and put in your ears. As a kid, dried pulses were something you used at nursery to make an improvised percussion instrument, I made no connection with actually eating them. The Peter Kay sketch about garlic bread was so funny because it felt personal. I had almost that same conversation with my dad, word for word, when I had been to a proper Italian restaurant for the first time for a friend's birthday party when I was 11. I didn't like beef until I was about 21, due to having it not cooked until it resembled leather, in France. Veg was also always stewed to bits at home.

I think there has been a food revolution in my lifetime both in terms of cooking from scratch and the availability of ingredients, and at the other end of the scale, convenience food. And I've had a huge food revolution myself, being somehow born a wannabe middle class foodie in a Northern working class town.

Hmmm. I would say it has. My mum in-law is aghast that I don’t make my children eggs for breakfast everyday and that they have cereal. She also eats every meal with bread like it’s cutlery and she doesn’t like you drinking whilst you’re eating.

I am definitely more relaxed and have a strong childhood memory of being thirsty or getting indigestion from not having something to wash food down with. I especially dislike chip shop chips as we would have that for dinner sometimes and it would give me back ache indigestion.

My mum never forced us to finish our plate which was rare back then but she had bad memories of being in care and if you didn’t eat your food it would keep on being reserved to you for every meal until you ate it.

What else? My dad has a very limited diet. He only ate a bell pepper in his 20’s and even now he will mention food that he has never had which feels like day to day food for me.

The exercise levels of most kids has changed radically. They would have needed a lot of carbs to be running about all day. We do live in a very rural area where kids are free range all day (apart from this there are many downsides to the area, so not a boast at all). Even here it changes when kids get screens.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g it must have been awful to be a non smoker then. There was around 20 of us who were really social and one person did not smoke. Now I cannot think of any of my friends who smoke.

An amazing turn around really.

The Famous Five treat picnics were probably no more typical of the average British diet at the time than your description of the clichéd MN 'protein and veg, avoidance of carbs and UPF' way of eating is representative of the UK population as a whole is today.

If you go out in public and look at what people are buying in supermarkets and the range of constantly busy fast food chains that people are eating in, you'll see that most people don't eat like most Mumsnetters claim. Stats show that the majority of the population don't eat their five a day for example.

I was born in the 1960's. I had my first Mc donalds aged 18 . I still remember it .

They weren't unknown. My aunt smoked like a chimney all her life but none of my other female relatives did. My Grandpa didn't smoke.

Yes!

Also central heating, much better bathroom facilities and non-manual work. People needed filling up because they did back breaking work. And the ones who didn't ate very little and smoked like chimneys.

Rationing affected people hugely too. My parents were young children in WW2 and hardly had sweet things until adolescence. They had massive sweet tooths all their lives after that.

I remember being shocked as a young teen when I compared weekly meals with my great aunt. She had never tried pasta or rice which was a regular food for me and something I saw as normal. They had the meat and 2 veg style food at lunch then cold ham and salad at tea. Probably a very healthy diet but I would find it beyond boring. No spices or herbs in sight!

It was comforting and idealised, written at a time of deprivation. It always made me hungry reading it in the 1980s. Pop biscuits and google buns in the Faraway Tree sounded so lush. And I stand by food tasting better outside, as they were always saying in the Adventure series!

Pop biscuits!!! Loved those books; thanks for the memory revival

My MIL only drank cold black coffee which she never finished. She was on water pills where you have to drink quite a bit of water with them, she refused and went downhill. She was very upset I drank water with meals like I was drinking something bad.
She hate huge amounts of sliced white bread with every meal, she could almost get through half a loaf a day. Just empty calories. I understand they did that growing up to pad out meals. It’s something I had to stop DH doing.