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?

"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."

My Nan used to make that exact dish! it was absolutely delicious, I loved it.

Tesco and M&S/Ocado now do a Fruity Chicken Curry which is similar enough to my Nan's version to please me.

I think a lot of liquid in the past came from tea and all the veg.

80s child here.
Cereal for breakfast. More sugary shit in the 90s. Although by 15, I wasn't eating breakfast.
Bread, bread and more bread.
Sandwich paste, tinned hot dogs
Potatoes or pasta were the staple of pretty much every meal. Boiled veg.
Cakes or biscuits after every meal.
Didn't drink water unless we ran out of cordial or macaw fizzy pop.
Occasionally a fry up at the weekend.
Driven to school

My kids 2010s
Porridge for bfast, then cereal- Although now they're teens and don't have any.
Wraps or flatbed more common than bread. We have about 1 loaf per week. Fish finger butty is always a favourite.

Rice, couscous, pasta are more common than potatoes.
Fish, lots of quorn type stuff.
Wide range of veg cooked in various ways.
Cakes and biscuits available.
Main drink is water.

I feel we eat a more interesting, less stodgy diet.

Yes, everyone smoked at work. We had a huge ashtray on our desks in the office that needed to be emptied often as everyone was lighting up and chain smoking. I remember smoking on flights in the days that they would serve you small bottles of wine or a couple of cocktails free, smoking in the cinema, etc. Smoking at work went on until the mid/late 90s.

Luckily, I quit smoking at 40 (I'm 58 now). I smoked Dunhill menthols, a pack a day (two at weekends) for about twenty years. Menthols were great as people wouldn't cadge cigarettes off you because they wanted a 'real cigarette'. Drinking was cheaper and far more prevalent. On some jobs you were taken out for lunch and allowed to consume a couple of glasses of wine at lunchtime - your boss or the client would pay, and at the end of the work day everyone would head for the pub, and then afterwards to find a restaurant (Central London) for supper. I don't recall eating out or drinking being as hugely expensive as it is today as it was a daily occurrence. There was always some new restaurant to try out.

I remember the 'ladettes' in the 90s, where there was a big cultural shift for women and it was now socially acceptable, even fashionable to drink pints like the men (I stayed with my wine or spirits as I found that pints meant more trips to the toilet). Some of the women I knew could actually outdrink the men, if they were with lightweights.

Men were forever buying you drinks. It was the standard social opener if they wanted to chat with you. Sometimes you might have 3 glasses on wine lined up on the table because some guy had bought you a drink without even asking. For a couple of decades, glasses of white wine & cigarettes were as constant in my life as lipstick.

My grandfather had served abroad in the army and had a taste for foreign food.

We were lucky in some respects because my parents were also fairly well travelled. We went all over Europe by car in the 1960s. Curries with rice were fairly frequent meals and my mother did occasionally attempt spaghetti with sauce (not the Heinz tinned stuff) and chicken fried rice etc.

We live in - very - rural France and the diet is similar to what we had as children in the 60s. Local meat, home grown or locally grown fruit and veg, plenty of bread, butter, eggs and cheese. Fish probably once a week. It's like stepping back in time.

The other interesting thing is that food is likely to be seasonal, as it used to be in the UK. Also far less imported foods. No asparagus or green beans imported from Africa, strawberries from Morocco etc. That's terrible for the future of our planet. We need to get back to local, seasonal eating.

Wow, thanks everyone for so many fascinating responses! I have to say that I was more reflecting on whether the modern diet is actually as carb-light, fruit, veg and water-heavy as we would like to think it is- but all these responses about typical diets in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s are really interesting!

I'm not old enough to remember 70 years ago, but my diet has changed massively in my 50 odd years.

My Mam wasn't much of a cook. When I was a child, we ate a lot of meat and two veg. dinners. Or things like stew and tripe. When fast food hit the shops, Mam was more than happy to abandon trying to please five moaning kids and would serve up fish fingers or those Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies or Findus crispy pancakes etc. Usually served up with mashed potatoes and baked beans or tinned peas.

We always had a roast on Sundays, but I think that was mainly to keep my Dad happy (he ate his Monday - Friday dinners in the canteen at his workplace).

Portions were definitely smaller. A standard roast chicken would do eight of us for dinner and there would be leftovers for chicken sandwiches for tea. The Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie alluded to earlier would be cut into six or seven portions.

We had Weetabix for breakfast (our friends would have had Cornflakes or Rice Krispies), but money was tight and Mam reckoned Weetabix was better value. When I got to around 12 or so, I stopped eating Weetabix and switched to toast. On Sunday mornings we had a fry up - sausages, rashers, eggs etc.

I'm not sure if eggs were very expensive back then, or if Mam just had the impression that they were. But the way she went on about eggs, you'd think they were made of gold. Dad would get a boiled egg for his tea and we five kids would fight for who would get the top of the egg. We visited my great-aunt one day and she made us scrambled eggs on toast. I can't remember how many eggs she used, but Mam was shocked at the extravagance.

If we were hungry we were told, "There's plenty of bread in the press". We ate a lot of sandwiches - mostly cheese or jam. Sometimes we had tinned salmon sandwiches. We rarely had fruit. Occasionally apples or bananas.

Unlike a lot of kids here, we never had squash to drink. It was always tap water or milk. One of the reasons I loved Christmas so much was that Mam and Dad would buy bottles of Coke and Club Orange and 7Up for the Christmas. Such a treat.

We only had dessert on Sundays and it would be a home made apple tart or Victoria sponge cake (usually made by one of my older sisters).

We never had pasta based dishes like lasagne or spaghetti bolognese. The only rice dish I ever encountered was something called savoury rice which was served up at buffets at 21st birthday parties. It was yellow rice (cooked in turmeric, I presume) with tiny bits of peppers and peas and sultanas. I remember thinking it was quite tasty.

Take aways were very rare, due to the cost. If we did get a take away, it would be fish and chips.

It was only in the mid to late '80s that I encountered things like pizzas and pasta dishes. I thought they were divine. A friend's Mam was partial to a Chinese take away on a Saturday night, so I discovered Chinese food for the first time at their house. It would be another few years before I would encounter Indian food.

In lots of ways, my childhood diet was very unhealthy - lots of processed food, lots of bread, using lard for frying etc. We were a lot more active though. My parents never had a car, so we walked everywhere or took a bus (which entailed walking to the bus stop and walking from the bus stop to our final destination). We walked to and from school every day, in all weathers. We kids were out playing all day every day in the summer holidays. Most of our games involved exercise (skipping, chasing, playing tennis etc.). If we weren't playing games, we were cycling our bikes.

I had the same thought recently. We'd no central heating here either. We mostly huddled around the open fire in winter. The other rooms must have been baltic. On exceptionally cold nights, we'd try to dress and undress under the covers. Obviously the covers were blankets. We'd no duvets back then.

A good point about cigarettes also. My Mam was tiny. Food was rationed when she was a child and I know she grew up in a very poor family. But I think smoking also played a part. She started smoking in her mid-teens and I do think it suppressed her appetite. Like you, I remember former smokers complaining that they put on weight when they stopped smoking.

To be fair that is a very middle class diet and while it sounds delicious there will be lots of people in the UK now who wouldn’t recognise it.

Our diet isn’t quiet a healthy as yours but I was thinking some thing similar when my 6 year old was having proper Greek yoghurt with passion fruit for supper the other night.

@Taytocrisps, I bet it was Batchelor's savoury rice. Came in packets. I suppose you just added water. I don't think we ever had it because my Mum would have thought it was too exotic and by the 1980s I'd left home and learned to cook rice myself, which was much cheaper and produced rice that didn't taste like cardboard.

Virtually everything mentioned in that diet has to be imported from distant shores too. Good for the individual, very poor for the planet.

Reminds me of the “Modern Parents” in Viz from years ago.

I go with the general rule of "if your great grandma wouldn't know what it was, don't eat it."
We're NOT a upf home by any stretch of the imagination, but that phrase helps us filter out some of the most extreme stuff.

Really? In that case I'd be eliminating all spices from my diet except the ones commonly used for baking, lots of herbs, all pasta except macaroni, all rice except pudding rice, all pulses and nuts not produced in this country, yoghourt and many vegetables and fruits (not all imported). I'd be sorry to go back to the very restricted diet my great-granny ate. She was born in the 1880s.

Might depend on the age and social class of the great grandma

with a great grandma born around 1920 and living to 2000 that’s covering a lot of time

My children have restricted eating. If we went back 70s years there is a chance my oldest wouldn’t be alive. I have a choice of feed them imported food or fitting of a feeding tube.

What did they do for those chn back then?

May I take the prize for the oldest poster? I was born in 1948 to a working class family. Absolutely no-one was obese. My mum was a good plain cook. We had porridge for breakfast in winter. Boiled eggs and soldiers or cornflakes for breakfast- sometimes egg and bacon at weekends. Always with toast. We always had roast on Sunday- portions were much smaller than today. Mum made Yorkshire puddings but only ever with beef. Vegetables were always fresh and seasonal. The roast was eaten cold with mashed potatoes the following day. It was such a treat to have the first strawberries from the garden in summer. Most people had gardens and grew some vegetables and fruit. We had milk delivered every day. We usually had fish delivered from the fishmonger on Friday, either cod haddock or plaice. I remember being envious of my friend who had the Corona man deliver 2 bottles of lemonade to their family every week. Sometimes my mum bought a bottle of Ribena as a treat but it was expensive and we had to make it last. There was no snacking between meals and no processed food other than tinned. Tinned fruit and Ideal milk was a common pudding. I can’t remember anyone having a fridge. Chips were made from fresh potatoes (which were stored in a sack in the shed) and cooked in a chip pan filled with beef dripping. Absolutely delicious and nothing like the frozen ones cooked in an oven. Fried egg and chips with bread and butter was a frequent midweek meal. Meat or fish with fresh vegetables was the norm. New potatoes in late spring and summer- fresh from the garden. Tea was a sandwich or something on toast. Salad was only eaten in summer and had lettuce tomato cucumber and spring onions with tinned salmon or a slice of ham. With salad cream. My mum baked a cake and usually made a rice pudding or an apple tart on Sunday so as to make full use of the oven. No-one ever ate out. The only take aways were fish and chip shops which we had very occasionally as a treat for Saturday lunch. No-one had allergies and most people seemed to eat everything - I don’t remember people being fussy about food. Off now to prepare our dinner of beef and vegetable casserole which we shall have with a jacket potato. Oh and the other thing I remember is seeing a bottle of wine for the first time at my uncles house at Christmas. We thought it was terribly posh!

I don’t think my great grandma would even have known what pasta was. Or avocados. Or Parmesan.

Yes coffee and cigarettes was how models survived.

The wine bottle at Christmas- Blue nun by any chance?

I expect they "failed to thrive" and some died.

Sorry to be blunt.

Although my DSis ate only bread and jam for about a year in the 70s, my parents didn't make a fuss and there've been no lasting ill effects.

I'm gluten intolerant so presumably would have felt awful on my great granny's diet, as it presumably involved a lot of bread.

Hmmm the lack of allergies too. One theory is they increased due to mass production and cross contamination exposing our bodies to so many different food stuffs.

It probably depends where 'Grandma' or her older relatives were brought up.

The experiences of my Yorkshire grandparents would be very different from those whose families originated overseas. We had asparagus growing in our garden in 1980s Yorkshire but we didn't eat it because we had no experience of it being food.

But the point still stands, if you want to eat what's healthy and sustainable, it should be mostly unprocessed and seasonal. Wherever it originates from. I used to be a bit of a 'imported food is bad' person, but I don't think that's always the case. For example I recently listened to a podcast talking about food that was grown in Senegal and shipped to Europe by sea - so no air freighting, no heated greenhouses that would be required further north, and it also provided good quality employment for local people, as well as increasing their access to good food.

Like Michael Pollan said, 'eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants'. That's all we need to remember.