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?

.My 2 eldest sisters are 67 & 68. i remember them going on diets when their weight went above 8 stone at 5'5. No breakfast, a boiled egg or apple for lunch & green salad & ryvita for dinner.

They used eat appetite suppressants unfortunately called Aids or Ayds.

Can I mention tinned vegetables? Ghastly things. Tinned peas, tinned carrots, tinned mushrooms.

Interesting. My parents were born in 40 and 41 and had great teeth considering poor dental checks at the time but neither had a sweet tooth in later life. My DM remembered her father bringing home a Mars bar one Friday in the 50s and slicing it 5 ways to share among her siblings. Imagine that now!

I'm 50 years old and a lot of my memories and food-based. I can still remember lost of food first times:

• Prawns
• A proper nice, thin pizza
• Garlic bread
• Houmous and warm flat bread
• Pesto pasta
• Indian takeaway
• Chinese takeaway
• First time in Waitrose

I am 75, I had ration books,bread in particular was still rationed till 1955.. everything was home cooked, mostly home grown. We had chicken, late DF went fishing. Neighbour shot, rabbit, pigeon. Things were shared.. my late parents made fresh ginger and lemonade, otherwise it was water, occasionally milk. Often a Sunday roast,beef,lamb minced the next day, the third day "cold cuts". Nothing was wasted..offal.. pudding on Sunday, home made.. In my teens, fish and chips on a Friday.. portion sizes were much smaller. No one was overweight, people were much smaller,tiny waists..we walked everywhere. No cars, only the GP and midwife had one,it phones, washing machines, fridges. Milk was delivered daily, put in a bucket of water in the larder in the summer. Shopping was done daily for fresh meat.

Late 50s here too.

All food cooked from scratch. We always had something different every day based on what was left in the fridge, no freezer until I was in my teens.

Mum could make a pie out of anything, she’s a good cook, and I still make many of those “old fashioned” recipes such as braising steak, stews, pies, fried fish, boiled then roast gammon.

the only exotic thing mum cooked once was out of a women’s weekly magazine and was curry made with curry powder, left over roast chicken, apple and sultanas. I thought it was wonderful.

I agree with others, bread and butter with every meal to fill you up, home made puddings or cakes, sweets were 2oz once a week as a treat, pop very occasionally from the pop man. Ice cream bought from the van very occasionally where you took your own bowl out for it to be filled.

I never saw anyone obese until I went to the US in my 20s, the average weight of the girls at my school was 7-8 stone.

I'll agree with that
One other thing smokers do is sit for a coffee n fag, non smokers is a coffee n biscuit.

I was a 70s child and the thing I most remember compared to my own children's meals (late 90's 00's) was the difference in quantity. Mum was a SAHM and we had our main meal at lunch when Dad came home from work so tea was, for example, a slice of bread and butter and two fish fingers. Or a boiled egg and bread and butter. Occasionally spaghetti with cheese sauce. And a tin of beans fed four of us! Mum used cheap cuts of meat to make stew and padded it out with split peas and lentils (which I still can't eat as an adult without gagging)

My own kids wouldn't have survived on that - although they were generally bigger than me and my siblings . All 10.5lbs at birth and now strapping 6ft 5 adults! But children were generally much thinner those days and way more active in general - it was normal to see a child's ribs whereas nowadays it would be tantamount to child neglect!

Rationing was designed around getting enough calories into people and a base level of nutrients. There were puddings every mealtime, and standard protein and two veg. No rice or pasta.

So yes there is a difference in what they ate, but the biggest difference is how they ate.

Firstly, there was absolutely no snacking - mum was in charge of the food, complete fasting between meals which were all eaten at the table, together. So lashings of ginger beer was a huge treat.

Secondly the portion sizes - easily less than half the size of a "moderate" portion today.

Yes my DM never learnt to drive- brought up in London. We lived in Essex and she walked miles daily to take us to school and collect us. She walked into town to shop etc. She was sahm for years and made our clothes and sometimes for neighbours as a sideline for ‘pin money’ as she called it. She had plenty of time to cook and clean and iron. We didn’t snack- we sat at the table and were encouraged to clean our plates as there would be nothing in between meals. Though I feel our portions were generous- she was Irish. But it was the potatoes and veg that was generous. I remember feeling g stuffed. She loved being a housewife had little stress.

@DeftGoldHedgehog I really relate to being born to be a middle class foodie!

I grew up up with hearty allotment fair, lots of fruit and veg, salads and stews plus meat and two veg, ham salads, jelly and blancmonge and weird 70s/80s convenience food.

I set off watching master chef and cooking exotic things like Chinese lemon chicken and chocolate mousse from about 11. I became a decent pastry chef and as I had no where to buy fancy stuff and if I did knew I couldn’t afford the cakes, patisserie and pudding that I wanted to eat.

I was going to say, you really needed a lot of carbs to keep warm in the seventies. I have never, ever, felt as cold as I did back then as a skinny child. We lived in a Victorian house with no central heating. There was ice on the inside of our bathroom window quite regularly throughout winter.

And walking to school for over half an hour every morning was quite normal. We wore ordinary Mary Jane leather shoes and socks even in the snow. I vividly remember walking through thick “pea souper” frozen fog. And just about thawing out in a drafty classroom by lunch time.

I was reading those books in the late 50’s and can clearly remember thinking that I didn’t eat like that!

I'm a similar age and I remember there was a question about McDonald's in our Trivial Pursuit game. We had never heard of them. I was a teenager the first time I went and it was years before I had takeaways or fast food more than once or twice a year.

I also remember a time when bought sandwiches were a huge luxury - we went on a coach trip and for some reason M&S had donated sandwiches and we talked about the time we had M&S sandwiches for years. Now a lot of people buy them every day without batting an eyelid.

I’m from the late Enid Blyton era.

My experience…

Water on its own was drunk a lot less frequently than today. Nobody carried water bottles. At school it was available from water fountains (two for the whole school) or in jugs at mealtimes. No drinking during lesson time.

We did drink diluted squash at home but fizzy drinks were treats.

Bacon and eggs for breakfast maybe once a week or if we had visitors staying.

There was a fair bit of home made cake available and a plate of bread and butter with virtually every meal at home, sometimes at school. Sandwiches were a meal in themselves. A boiled egg and soldiers was a meal in itself.

Virtually no snacking between meals. Maybe a biscuit if you were lucky.

Loads of fruit and veg. From the garden/allotment or bought. No freezer so it was mainly seasonal.

As somebody else pointed out, we did a huge amount of exercise every day. In the street I lived on, four families owned cars. Three had their own telephone. Luckily, we had both.

Diet and obesity are interesting when compared to the 50s/60s. I remember fat people then. My grandma and her friends were well padded and many of my schoolfriends at 11+ were lumpen and so were many work colleagues in the 80s. I think society has become more polarised and there are proportionately as many very thin people as there are very fat people.

I recall food, and good food, being plentiful. We never had bread and butter on the table as so often mentioned on this thread and my mother always said that was what poor people did when there wasn't enough meat. We had big dinners but didn't snack although coukd have. We also always had a jug of water on the table at mealtimes.

My parents were adventurous and were eating Italian and French food occasionally and curries. All home made. We rarely had convenience food, sometimes a lasagne from M&S. I recall my mother scoffing that many people would probably have just a small piece and serve it with meat and two veg.

Like others, sweets and squash were far more freely available and I recall Perrier Water being regarded as marketing genius - getting people to buy fizzy water from a green bottle.

My mother watched her weight and my grandma was always unsuccessfully dieting. My mother had a digestive biscuit for breakfast and two ryvita with cottage cheese or a piece of cheese for lunch and still does. She's hated the needle on the scales reaching 8 for her entire life.

The late 70s I think saw a switch to more wholemeal food with restaurants like Cranks and the influence of Rose Elliot. I have no recollection of Quiche before about 1975.

DH whose mother hated cooking was raised on cheap and convenience food and she was very stingy and counted everything. There was no need whatsoever for the meanness. FIL was rigid and they delighted in saying they would eat anything and in the next breath FIL didn't like: garlic, cauliflower, pasta, mushrooms, chicken or shellfish/fresh fish. MIL and FIL were exactly the same ages as my parents.

MIL now has tremendous trouble with her bowels which I am convinced relate to the decades of packet food. To this day, DH prefers white bread, likes a cheeky slice with his dinner and I sometimes find a Mars wrapper in his pockets because sweets were as rationed as the food.

A big difference is wine. It was drunk at meal times on special occasions and never gratuitously. My parents and grandparents had a G&T or Gin&It before a meal and possibly a nightcap, but wouldn't ordinarily have had wine open.

My parents and grandparents travelled which I think made a difference to their approach to food and my gf and father were European.

Perhaps because we were quite well off, I never recall either my mother or grandmother not having a fridge and both had freezers by the very early 70s, probably before. I also remember my mother having a Kenwood Chef as a tiny, and a liquidiser. She never, ever baked bread and made a cake once a flood. We had a good friend called Mr Kipling and usually had a box of cream cakes from the bakers once a week. I think that was unusual. Whenever my father went to London he always brought home baked (cakey) cheesecake from Kossoffs which had sultanas in it. I have never regarded the American disks with processed fruit on top to be cheesecakes!

When my dad visits I have to abandon half the food I normally eat. Dad is mid 80s.

No pasta, no rice, nothing 'foreign' unless it is ratatouille. Basically meat, potatoes and veg. I'm trying to expand his diet with limited success. The duck was fine the cous cous was not.

Someone upthread mentioned pasta being rare, the first pasta I ever ate was out of a tin.

On the subject of the FF, they seemed to always be camping in a farmer's field so they bought food from the farmer's wife (Never a mention of a female farmer).

School dinners were similar, meat, potatoes, veg followed by a pudding.

I'm probably 20 years younger than this poster so while I recognise a lot of this, my mum was beginning to modernise our diet, so there was more pasta and a few more snacks.

When I got together with DH in the 1990s (from a poorer area in the NE) I found his parents ate like my grandparents! Lots of carbs and they had done the veg from an allotment thing (my DP did a bit of hobby gardening but fruit and veg largely was bought in the supermarket).

It was fashionable to make ginger beer for a while in the 80s. It often exploded!

There was a show a few years ago presented by, Ibthink Chris Van Tulleken that showed a direct correlation between to increase in processed and ultra processed foods in the 1989s and increases in obesity. It also said that the amount of calories humans expend is more or less the same, whether we are from a nomadic tribe in the Sahara or sitting in an office. The 'just do more exercise' mantra is marketing from fast food companies to pass the blame of the damage UPF's do to the body from them onto individuals. The increae in weight related ill health is largely down to the quality and availability of ultra processed/ high sugar food.

Yeah I think it’s changed massively actually and usually not for the better.
I think of what my quite traditional grandparents ate and it was never water, hardly ever alcohol, home grown seasonal veg, hardly any processed food (just an occasional biscuit and boiled sweets), always white bread, always home made cakes and puddings, 3 meals and a small mid afternoon snack with nothing else in between, usually toast for breakfast but sometimes cooked breakfast or porridge but never cereal, real butter, full fat milk , meat was from the butcher, bread from the bakery, one sugar in tea although they stopped that when they were older.
Only cooked stuff like roast dinner, stews, sausage and mash, ham salad in summer.

They were quite set in their ways so never really varied from this diet with the changing times, and were still growing veg into their late 80s

My other set of grandparents did embrace the emergence of convenience foods in the 60s, got a microwave, started eating things like curry, liked trying new things

Even when I was a child in the 80s we didn’t drink much water (usually squash), and ate processed foods but I think our diet was healthier than a lot of kids these days. Mostly home cooked food, not much snacking. Vast majority of kids in school were a healthy weight, very different from my DDs school where at least 50% are overweight I would say.

I remember in the 90s my grandad being disgusted that foreign foods like pasta were becoming popular 😂

@Needlenardlenoo we had a stain on the kitchen ceiling for years following the explosion of one of my mum's ginger beer brewing experiments in the early 90s!

I was born in the late 50s and was a child in the 60s. I read most of Enid Blyton’s books - I didn’t see the food as realistic. It was what children would have liked. We didn’t get as much pop as the Famous Five! I drank mainly water and tea, and a gill of milk at school, as a child.

We didn’t have a fridge until I was two, and we probably got a freezer when I was about nine. My mother might have bought say half a sheep, jointed from a farmer.

We ate food, cooked from scratch, although my mother was more adventurous than most - curries, pasta, pizza, Chinese, goulash, etc. One of her best friends was Indian and taught her Southern Indian cookery. My Dad liked hot puddings, so we had one every day, after tea - sponges, pies, crumbles, rice pudding, sago, you name it! However yoghurt (as a dessert), orange juice, avocados, etc were unknown at home.

We were not well off, but had fish and chips regularly - we’d drive somewhere in the county for a walk at a weekend, and get chips on the way home. Every so often, we’d go to a steak house or Indian or Chinese restaurant for a meal out, especially with my aunt and uncle. There were plenty of excellent Indian restaurants, in the neighbouring cities, we both lived in.

My Dad always made his own wine, although my parents didn’t drink much, in the grand scheme of things.

I remember Vesta meals coming out - they were a novelty, even though we’d had homemade curries for years! The idea, you could get a meal in a box!

I grew up in the 1970s in a very meat and two veg household. We did have curry, which looking back now I'm quite surprised about! That would be on the Tuesday using up the last of the meat from Sunday lunch if we had chicken. If we'd had lamb the last little bits would be minced and we'd have shepherds pie.

We all drank squash full of sugar, but we weren't obese.

I think back then we probably didn't drink enough, but I suspect now a lot of people drink more than they actually need.

My mum doesn't drink enough and loathes cold drinks.

My parents are in their 80s and eat more adventurously than Northern PIL. But they are still slightly freaked out by foreign cuisines other than very adapted to UK tastes Chinese and Indian food.

There are lot of Turkish restaurants in our part of London and they don't know what to order.

To be fair, of the 4 of them, they will all try and enjoy new things although FIL tends to use the "foreign" word a lot and they are all confused that DH does most of the food shopping and cooking. They don't seem to have an issue with me doing all the finances though...