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?

I was born in 1962. The only vegetables we had were endless boiled potatoes and tinned carrots and peas. I remember going to Butlins in 1966 and seeing mushrooms for the first time at breakfast. I asked my mother why they were giving us toadstools!

Never saw broccoli until the 80s.

No freezer so it was a big treat after church to bring home a cardboard wrapped block of ice cream for pudding.

Serial grannie heres some flowers as a prize 💐

Although I was born in 1966 Your post resonates with my upbringing
Irish immigrants from poor backgrounds

With the exception of the chips everything is very much true for us. You’ve also reminded me of that ribena treat and salad cram. Anyone that had mayonnaise was considered posh as it was so much more expensive.

Child of the 60s here, mum was a good cook and baker and everything was prepared from scratch. Mainly meat & 2 veg, so we did eat plenty of veg, some from Grandad's garden. Fruit mostly tinned, with evaporated milk, though apple pies & crumbles did appear when in season. I can't remember when we first acquired a fridge, but it was a big deal when my aunt got one in the mid 60s so don't think we had one then.

No pasta, rice other than pudding though, and no spices. Dad liked Chinese food and we sometimes went to the Chinese restaurant on special occasions. Otherwise the only takeaway was fish and chips, usually on a Saturday lunchtime.

Fizzy drinks were an occasional treat and not routinely available at home, nor were chocolate and sweets. I remember a Mars Bar being cut into slices and shared! Shame my teeth still fell to bits, but I blame 60s dentistry (drill baby, drill) for that 😆

Quite apart from that aspect, they were also hugely middle class in a manner that harked back to the inter-war period: the children‘s families would often have an in-house cook or housekeeper, and they mostly went to private boarding schools. So the kind of food ideals being propagated were a specific kind of colonial-era Britishness. Reading the ‘detective’ type stories in the 70s baffled me simply because it was an entirely different cultural lifestyle to my working-class life at the time - even though our food at the time was still largely pre-UPF. A group of wealthy kids going independently to a tearoom (invariably owned by one of the servant classes) and ordering macaroons was just beyond my comprehension. Fish and chips would have been widespread at the time, but not in EB’s books.

agree and fruits and veg not grown here in the uk so whilst they ate apples, blackberries and gooseberries for example they probably didn't eat many avocados, pineapples, kiwis or mangos. Enid Blyton is all about tuck boxes and spending a couple of pence on sweets and ribbon on a Saturday, so cake etc would be mentioned a lot.

I wonder how people would cope if rationing was ever brought back. ? and the freezers were empty of upfs

@itsthetea- not Blue Nun. Definitely red wine - think it was probably French. My uncle was a bit upwardly mobile!

DD has coeliac disease. I went to school with someone who had it in the 80s (undiagnosed) and he was just labelled with ‘failure to thrive’

They would have just had failure to thrive. Some would have seen sickly children and not grown well but others would have died.

We'd have to eat boring, bland food again. Mostly potatoes. Lots of jacket potatoes. Pasta and tomato sauce. Packets of things. Basically, my student diet.

Not at all. So many cheap AND healthy foods. We would turn naturally to a more vegetarian diet and grow our own .

According to today's standard we ate pretty unhealthy stodgy foods with loads of puddings. I can't remember any adults being obese nor did anyone exercise.

We try growing our own every year.... we're rubbish at it! And it's time consuming if you're not home from work until late. Not sure a few strawberries, cherries, tiny potatoes and manky tomatoes would go far. We'd definitely be back to the boring days of my youth. Our freezer is mainly used to store meat substitutes, bags of veg and chips.

I was born early 70’s and think we probably at more modern food than many. We defintely ate more meat and 2 veg than I do now and lamb chops were weekly dinners. We are spaghetti bolognaise and Chili con Carne always with rice and pita. We had lots of casseroles and salmon. I do recall meatballs too

By the early 80’s we were having chicken stir fry and always had macaroni cheese. Lots of quiche which I hated too

we drank ribena and I definitely had coke as a young child as a treat.

we had fruit every day and defintely had strawberries, raspberries, plums, cherries, kiwi and avocado. Vegetables were wide ranging and included peppers and broccoli and aubergine.

we ate a lot of pickled cucumber, roast weekly and had people over a lot for tea, as in afternoon tea. This was always bridge rolls with smoked salmon, cream cheese, egg mayo and pickled herring. Cakes were homemade and likely to be fruit cake and a chocolate cake made in a tin with a hole in the middle with icing sugar on top or a marble cake.

We defintely had McDonals before 1980 and went to Chinese restaurants a few times a year. I remember going to Italian restaurants in central London too as a small child. I don’t think we had Indian food probably until the early 90’s

Snacks were the smiths crisps with the packet of salt, we were allowed sweets if we had eaten fruit and we ate a lot of biscuits and malt loaf

I read Enid Blytons far away tree to my kids and the packed lunches the mum made always sounded delicious. I suspect it was done deliberately for the reader rather than a true representation of the times!

Why would it be bland? We'd still have access to herbs and spices. I sometimes think some British people eat so much spicy food, i.e. chilli hot, that they can no longer taste the more subtle flavourings that don't give that chilli kick.

Or lots of local fruit and veg
but
I think the main hit would be not so much a lack of variety but more the reduced quantity

Agree
with both health and environmental benefits

70s child

Breakfast - cereal, with added sugar (even if frosted), big bowls of it

Lunch - at school, generally repulsive stuff like liver, mince and potatoes with peas pudding or boiled fish and smash. Puddings only if you choked down the main course - but very stodgy, date slice, sponge and custard - and quite big portions for primary school children.

Dinner - called 'Tea' and depended on whether you'd had dinner at school - if so then sandwich or beans on toast (heinz) or soup (also heinz) with bread.

Snacks - home baked cakes,pies and tarts. I could bake fairy cakes at 8. Biscuits were generally shop bought - rich tea and digestives.

Weekend - roasts. Cake van came round as did the 'pop' van with returnable bottles.

Drinks - squash, milk or tea, so much tea (I really hate tea), coffee not really a thing in my tea focused household.

Processed food, especially frozen food was prized and seen as modern and time saving, so very positively - the downside was it was expensive.

Very little fruit in our house, mostly in tins and veg absolutely boiled to death.

Horrible mostly.

I used to go shopping with late DM.it was daily, the butchers, small amount of meat weighed out. They didn't touch money,there was a lady in a kiosk with just a hole in the glass and a scooped out area in the wooden counter,you laid the money in. The grocer "Mr Durant", tea, rice, sugar,all dry goods were at the back of the counter, he made up this blue manilla thick paper into a box shape. It was magical, I was fascinated, then the goods were put into the box, and he folded and closed the ends.. occasionally,there was broken biscuits weighed out as a treat.. There was no snacking,later in my teens, occasionally Smith's Crisps, with a little blue twisty pack of salt you could add. Meals were lovely,DM was a good cook. My late parents couldn't bring themselves to kill the chicken, local butcher did that. I can remember watching her plucking. My friends who had school meals, would have a sandwich in the late afternoon. Yes, I remember the ginger beer and lemonade bottles exploding in the cupboard..

If there was a hill I had to die on, it would be sandwich hill.

There's not one thing in the world that isn't improved by inserting it between floury carbs.

Every food culture has one.

Fuck your low-carb noise.

(5' 9" and 9 and a half stone in case anyone asks, always been thin and always loved a sandwich)

I was born in the late 50s to parents who grew up on rationing.
My diet was simple and repetitive, boring by todays standards but relatively healthy compared to many now.
We had cereal and milk or toast for breakfast. Main meal at lunchtime was meat and two veg. A Sunday roast was re-hashed twice first as cold meat and then minced to make a pie. Veg was entirely seasonal British grown and mostly grown in our garden. Similarly fruit although there were oranges and bananas there was no exotic imported fruit. Puddings were crumbles and pies. Evening meal was called tea and was a sandwich and fruit or a home made cake of some kind.
Portions were smaller and we had nothing in between meals.
We never drank fizzy drinks or squash, just water or milk.

I can only remember one child in my school days who was overweight. All the children were stick thin. Actually plenty were under nourished.

@Bjorkdidit interesting point about imported food by ship being greener. I'll think about that and re-consider my "imports bad" prejudice.

Ah and for the thread, early 70's child. We had a very varied diet, no processed food. We lived internationally for a few years when I was young.

My parents were both excellent cooks who were very interested in good food.

As am I.

I do remember being horrified by sandwich spread at a friend's house but also enthralled by Findus crispy pancakes at another's.

I can only speak with memory from early 80s onward and a working class British background.

I have no memory of ever eating what might be called meat and two veg. Meals I remember being common in my very early childhood were tandoori chicken, spaghetti carbonara, lamb tagine, lentil dhal, seafood paella, coq au vin, fajitas, potstickers, chow mein and roast dinners.

I remember making and eating our own prawn crackers and poppadoms, sesame toast, spice mixes, soups and jams. We had the giant glass jar for full length spaghetti, the pressure cooker which was terrifying, and dishes/pans that were called the wok, tandoori oven, the Dutch oven and the tagine. We had the butchers block for butchering the meat, a massive axe type knife we called the Chinese chopper and knives called the boning knife, paring knife, grapefruit knife, etc.

Very few memories of eating out or takeaways - maybe once or twice a year at absolute most.

Crikey. I take it that one or both of your parents were really interested in cooking?