Eating habits....then and now.

[bafta16]

I was born in 1957. I was never much a of a breakfast person. I liked cocoa pops and sometimes toast. Lunch was school dinners. Primary school was big helping of ghastly food which we more or less had to eat.
Dinner was 5pm. Something like shepherd's pie. I lb of meat for 4 people. Tinned fruit maybe. Supper a couple pf plain biscuits.
Moving to Secondary, less lunch, sometimes a bag of donuts or some chips. I wonder how many calories...maybe 1,500 or so? No alcohol in the house.

Now I am constantly grazing and/or stuffing my face. I do wonder what on earth has gone wrong. Somehow I need to re educate myself.

@Morepositivemum It's that constant grazing that I do. Blood sugar is probably all over the place.

@thenightsky one little portion of sweets per week, how times have changed.

60s born. My mum worked full time and was up for trying every new food that came along. My fondest memories are;
Heinz Toast toppers
Ski strawberry yogurts
Findus crispy pancakes
Vienetta
Arctic roll
Frozen beefburgers and chips
Golden Nuggets cereal
Ice pops (once we got a fridge with a tiny frozen compartment in 1969)

None of which especially healthy. But she did work in a greengrocers so we always had fresh fruit and veg (mostly potatoes and carrots tbh).

I remember being allowed a Chinese takeaway for my 18th birthday, that's how rare it was for us! I had no idea what to actually order as I'd only ever been once before.

60s childhood.
Breakfast was toast and eggs (I hated cereal) muesli came in in the mid/late 70s and I liked that but thought weetabix, shredded wheat, etc was like eating cardboard.

Lunch at my gran's was always the main meal (farmers), stews, braises, pies, and sometimes offal - liver and onions or sruffed braised hearts. Always two veg and potatoes. Tea was sandwiches, cake, scones, etc, and Supper at 8.30ish was cheese on toast, soup, sardines on toast, etc.

My mum was quite ahead of trends and we had boeuf bourgignon, spag bol, coq au vin, a follower of Elizabeth David. Also plainer food and lots of chops. Never, ever anything from a packet except M&S lasagne.

Always a pudding: fruit pies, stewed fruit, rice pudding, sponge, custard.

Occasional biscuit, sweets, yoghurt wasn't yet quite a thing. There was lemonade, cream soda and tizer, fruit juice was a starter at a restaurant.

I was quite strict with my two, 90s/00s. Cooked from scratch, and rhey had proper food, not beige food. 6 pack of crisps on a Friday and when they were gone, they were gone. No sugary cereals, coke at Christmas, no fizzy drinks. They had a sweetie jar and could chose 4 sweets after tea. Lots of fresh fruit and yoghurt for pudding.

I always thought that grazing, or 6 small meals, was better for blood sugar than 3 meals as it was less of a peak and trough situation but I may have made that up to support my own semi-constant grazing (which I try really hard to keep at fruit/veg (baby toms/sugar snap peas mostly)/nuts/the odd slice of dark choc)

Even in the 80s food wasn’t that different to what OP describes. We had a packed lunch at school usually (sandwich, fruit, crisps or a yogurt usually). The school dinner offering was actual proper food though, processed crap like Turkey twizzlers weren’t really around until the 90s.
Something like toast or a piece of cake when we got in from school.
Dinner usually home made, with dessert every day (tinned fruit, sponge & custard, angel delight etc).
Drinks were only ever squash or milk, sometimes fresh fruit juice, tea once I was about 10!
We did eat between meals, a morning snack in school and a teatime snack. Definitely no constant grazing though.
Sweets allowed once a week after school on Fridays. Had to be taken home and eaten there, not in the street. My mother didn’t let us eat in the street unless it was ice cream on holiday.
Maybe 2-3 “fat kids” in the whole school.

I think we possibly ate more sugar and fewer fresh fruits/vegetables than kids today but on the whole people were healthier.

I was born mid 70s.

Breakfast was always cereal on weekdays, crumpets on Saturday and a cooked breakfast on a Sunday.

Lunch - weekdays was usually cheese or meat paste sandwiches, an apple and a biscuit with a packet of crisps at the weekend or in school holidays. At the weekend it was often salad and tinned ham and boiled eggs.

Dinner - usually meat, potatoes and two veg. Very little variation - chicken, pork chops, lamb chops repeat. We didnt have cottage pie but we used to have a cottage pie filling meat with boiled potatoes and veg. Veg was always frozen peas and sweetcorn except for weekends and pudding ,if we had one, was fruit, Angel Delight or a set yoghurt from sainsburys!

We didn't snack between meals. We were allowed to have a biscuit with a glass of milk before bed and I my mind was blown the first time I was at a friend's house and we were allowed two biscuits! What madness was that! 😂

If we were ever hungry, there was always fruit. There was occasionally cake or flapjacks if my grandma made them.

My children were born late 90s and mid 2000s. I cooked from scratch with them and they had a greater variety of meals than I did growing up but everything else was fairly similar tbh. I've never gone in for lots of snacks in the house and my children never really asked for them. The main differences were we had shop bought yoghurts as children and I always gave mine natural plain/Greek youghut with fruit, my children didn't generally have cereals for breakfast and they had more interesting packed lunches!

The truth is that there has been a lot of contradictory advice over the years.

The whole snackijg is good for you was a bit of a myth invented by companies who, would you believe , made and sold snacks.

Just like brealfast being the most important meal of the say wasn't based on any scientific fact. It was a marketing campaign by Kellogg's that just entered common discourse and is now touted as fact!

I’ve been doing more pondering since my thoughts earlier. My parents didn’t drive. My Dad worked full time during the week and my mum worked on a Saturday. On a Saturday morning, my dad, brother and I would walk to the town’s supermarket (30 min walk), do the shopping for the week and walk back with it. We did this from
a really young age, so realistically the week’s shopping for a family of 4 was what 1 adult and 2 primary school age children could carry. There were no ‘top up’ shops during the week. No just ‘popping’ in to a shop on a Wednesday for some milk and coming out with 2 bags of shopping.

In the sixties and seventies our school dinners were great. Served up by local dinner ladies.
School dinners were very meat and two veg variety. And very nice they were too. Lovely chocolate puddings with chocolate sauce. Pink custard was nice with raspberry coconut slice. Cornflake tart and custard.
No pasta or pizza or curry. Few chips too. Scoop mash mainly.
And everyone ate it. From my memory very happily. We were perhaps lucky our dinner ladies were very good.
Weekends were a roast dinner. Chicken usually. And a flan for pudding.

Shopping mum went to Marks and Spencer for cheese and bacon ( it was a deli only). To the greengrocer for veg. The fishmonger for fish. Etc. Small supermarkets began to appear. We walked a good mile there and back uphill. I sort of jogged as she walked very fast. When I was not at school that is.

At home mum would cook savoury mince, her fish and chips were good. Every Friday. Liver, stuffed hearts. Her rabbit pie was really nice. Her casseroles not.
Dried curries and Chinese dishes by Vesta were sold. These were a novelty.

We used to have the odd treat of a penguin or small chocolate bar. Never many crisps really. No garlic bread. No naan. No ‘sides’. No dips, much less bread all round. No Pizzas. Never heard of nachos or tortillas and salsas. Ryvitas existed for those who were slimming.
We did have biscuits. And mum did make cakes sometimes.

I was cooking dinner by the age of 14 twice a week. I had proper cookery lessons. Where you cooked a dish. And had to scrub the wooden table down afterwards.
Chinese and Indian restaurants and takeaways opened up. And Macdonalds came to town. Cook chill ballooned. School cookery lessons as I knew them were dropped at precisely the same time. Supermarkets became huge.
People started to talk about obesity.

I am grateful I did not miss out of those lessons. Nor those dinners. I would hate to eat at a school dinner now. And I would hate the cookery lessons too.

People years ago ate more simply. But they were not fat either.

People years ago ate more simply. But they were not fat either

Exactly. A few posters have commented on my donut thing. This was maybe 2 or 3 times in a school year. A very big novelty. Buy the donuts, pocket the dinner money.

They were fat. On one side of my family all my great aunts, uncles and gran were overweight, my great aunt (born in 1924) was obese and chair bound as long as I knew her.

In general. There will always be those who were fat. And exceptions !
But comparative to today no, people were slimmer.

Interestingly, China did not have an obesity problem until Macdonalds moved there. And they noticed some families were no longer eating traditionally Chinese foods. The children were becoming fatter. They decided it was down to the introduction of American fast food.

I agree with this, there were approximately 100 children per year at my primary school and there was a maximum of one child per year who was obese despite living in a very deprived area. Now in such poorer areas the obesity rate is much higher.

Grazing, snacks or even 2 hot meals in a day weren’t a thing, eating out a rare treat. We also walked miles as little’uns as we only had one car and dad took it to work. There is no surprise that kids were leaner back then - we actually did eat daily pudding but tinned fruit and evaporated milk, bananas and custard etc were on offer. Even biscuits weren’t offered daily. I don’t remember being hungry, but no snacks after school etc

I do remember being hungry after school. If I complained I got told 'good, you'll eat up your tea without moaning then'.

I remember making myself a lot of lemon curd on toast after school from a very young age.

Looking back in it I don’t know how my DM managed to commute into London, work full time and still prepare a homemade meal and pudding by 6.30 pm.

If you look at old photos, people were smaller and thinner.

Not on any moral high ground here. I'm at least a stone overweight, probably more like 2.

I did an O level called Food and Nutrition, it was probably the best thing I ever studied. I could already cook as my DM taught me but we studied food poisoning, calories, hiw the body burns food, nutrition and how to cook more complex dishes and so on. It had quite a scientific base and has been so useful to me.

Ahhh happy memories! I had the same experience of the Saturday morning sweet jar choice. Lions midget gems were always my favourite! A quarter of those and a Beano made for a happy Saturday (I always scoffed my sweets on the Saturday!)

https://www.aquarterof.co.uk/collections/kilner-gift-jars

The Corona man came round and brought pop in glass bottles. You returned the empty bottles when he came again next week.
My friend's Mum had three children. They had a certain number of bottles of pop from the Corona man each week. When those were drunk there was no going to a shop to get some more. They drank water then until the Corona man came around next week.
However many cans and poly bottles are discarded every day in this country?

It's disgusting the bottles. I suppose a lot of people have just given up, sadly.

we only had pop bottles for Christmas. The milkman used to bring crates of Corona bottles which would be washed when empty and returned. What with electric milk floats and deposit back on bottles, it was ahead of its time in terms of eco sustainability

That's an interesting thought.

My Nanna (born 1920s) made absolutely amazing food — all British basics but full of butter and milk and all the good stuff. Corned beef stew and dumpling, proper Yorkshire puds.

My mother (born late 50s) has been overweight all her life and had loads of fillings as a kid because she ate so many sweets. No idea how this happened!

In our (northern, working class) house there were always loads of biscuits, cheese and snacks so I grew up snacking. Then I married into a non-snacking family and haven’t snacked for years. These days I can’t understand how my mother can manage to eat breakfast and then lunch and then a snack and then tea and then another snack…