to think our children have far superior diets than we did?

[oldendaysending]

I had reasonably well-educated parents. Both worked full time however and our diets did suffer because their childcare arrangements were not great.

Breakfast, if we had it - frosties with semi-skimmed milk. Lunch was a sandwich on white bread filled with some sort of paste. Packet of crisps, chocolate biscuit. One piece of fruit (apple.) Drinks - coke/Ribena. Weekends was always a pie and cake

Evening meal - something my mother had cooked; these were usually OK. We'd snack on crisps/yoghurt/biscuit before tea. Might have a banana before bed.

Most children I know now have wholegrain cereal for breakfast. Sandwiches or pasta salad on wholemeal brea. Raw veg, yoghurt, oatcake. Water to drink. Snacks are fruit/more raw veg. kids should be very fit and healthy!

ItsNotAHoover, did I have an invisible twin sister? You've spookily described my childhood meals. It's cold roast meat and chips so it must be Monday! It's lamb chops, roast potatoes, carrots and cauliflower so it must be Wednesday!

I had the typical 60s/70s upbringing with home made dinners followed by rice pudding, apple pie or semolina, and white bread sandwiches, a packet of crisps, a biscuit bar and a piece of fruit for packed lunch.

My children haven't had a wildly different upbringing. I could never bring myself to inflict rice cakes upon them as I wouldn't eat them myself. My kids seem to have come out ok, with no issues or ill health.

forevergreek you say children now eat more processed food. Is this true? Yes, more than in the 50s. But more than the 70s / 80s?

I used to have frosties / white bread sandwiches / crisps etc too

My mum was a health loon.

We used to have quite a lot of vegetarian meals (fine) but instead of cooking something delicious, it was all beans and brown rice, because that was complete protein. It was like a scientific experiment to include all the amino acids.

For a while, she made a kind of milk shake for us called (IIRC) pep-up. It contained dried milk powder, fruit and lecithin. Possibly also wheat germ. It was horrid, but it was good for us.

Of six children, three are now obese.

I spend a lot of effort trying to work out foods that my DC will eat, that are both nutritious and that they like.

I think a lot depends on wealthy/ social class/ level of education of parents. My parents bought high quality food, but there was less variety. The fruit or veg eaten was dicated by what was in season. They also grew their own fruit and froze quite a lot of it. Our diet was low in sugar, high in fibre and vitamens. We only got to eat salad in summer and in winter we ate a lot of root vegetables and frozen green veg.

They shopped from the local shops and we walked everywhere.

My children certainly have a better diet then I did at the same age.

We were pretty broke and this meant either nothing/not very much to eat or lots of packaged sugar. Though we did live on a sheep station so plenty of lamb!

My boys eat lots of protein, veg, fruit, fat, slow burn carbs and the occasional treat.

It shows.

My dd complained there was no broccoli with dinner. Oh the irony.

At 13 she has hollow legs which she fills with haribo and chocolate

My children eat better than I did, but we used to be given lots of things that don't feature greatly in my household - a salad was ham, cheese, a cut up tomato and pickled beetroot with bread and butter. I had syrup sandwiches, drinks of Oxo, milk with sugar in to drink, bananas dipped in brown sugar. Lots of Findus crispy pancakes, dream topping, angel delight etc. usual late 70s/early 80's shite, I'm the same age as the OP.

And lots of stew/braised beef with sausages/chicken casserole type stuff too.

We have more bars of chocolate though. When I was little, a bar of chocolate was often an evening treat that involved someone making a trip to an off licence and bringing back a bar of chocolate to share. Nowadays I buy multipacks of Wispas or whatever is on offer and they just get eaten rather than being a big treat.

As others have said, it varies. I had an ok diet as a child in the 70s and 80s. No processed food but probably not enough veg. As a teen I went on a massive health quick.

My dd has a very healthy diet. We have treats, but everything is home cooked (even though I work) because what we eat is important to me. But I know lots of children who eat very processed food at every meal.

I grew up in the 60s/70s. I think our diet then wouldn't be dramatically out of place with some families today but it seems very different from my family's meals now. My parents (though it was actually always my mum who cooked) were probably the first generation to have convenience foods available like packet mashed potato, packet gravy, packet cake mix, packet cheesecake mix, Angel Delight, and we had quite a lot of those. Every main meal included potatoes - mostly meat or fish with boiled or mashed potatoes and peas or green beans from frozen. Rice was a sweet dish like rice pudding. I think every main meal was followed by dessert. We never had takeaways and never ate out, not even on holiday (caravan). I think we probably ate less than a lot of people now. A packed school lunch would be a sandwich and nothing else. Most main meals included gravy, and drinks weren't usual with a main meal. We had white bread. I don't think I drank much water as a child, only in fruit squash and tea. Salt tended to be on the table and added to meals. The only frozen food we used was peas, beans and fish fingers. Lots of fresh meat (vom) from a butcher's. I'm not sure if we ever had pizza or jacket potatoes and we didn't have a microwave. I remember oven chips being invented (late 70s)! Before that they were fried.

Now, we're vegetarian and eat rice with lots of meals, always have a drink with meals, drink lots of water, don't eat white bread. I almost never do boiled potatoes and I only do mashed potato as part of a dish, such as the topping on a vegi shepherd's pie. I leave out the salt in recipes. I use more frozen food than when I was a child. Dessert is usually a yoghurt and/or fruit and we only occasionally cook or buy a hot dessert. We don't do a special meal on Sundays. We often eat out for birthdays and on holiday. Overall I think our meals are much better than my childhood meals.

My dad was a veggie farmer and we had a huge traditional kitchen garden. Loads of home grown veggies pheasant, partridge, rabbit, hare along with offal were the meats of my childhood. Rarely ever had anything ready made, my mum still makes amazing bread.

In 2013, My kids can truthfully say this about me:
"We have well-educated parents. Both work full time and our diets suffer because childcare arrangements don't cover dinner, and mom is too tired/lazy to make big effort for dinner on weekday nights..." (i.e. not from scratch unless previously cooked & frozen)

My mother's evening meals were more nutritious than what I serve. But my girls get a better breakfast.

OP - you are really just looking at your own family situation. It doesn't necessarily translate to the general population.

I found getting a big freezer is the key to good food when you work.

I do a MAMMOTH pot of bologneise every two weeks or so and some other casserole on the other week. Any time I am cooking a curry or a soup or whatever I cook twice as much and freeze.

It also means I can keep a stock of prechopped and frozen fruit and veg. Bags of Salad mean can pull a steak out of the freezer open a bag of salad and within 20 minutes dinner is ready.

I don't really 'cook' at all on my work days, just reheat previously frozen stuff.

What Morloth says.

I spend one Saturday in every three or four cooking casseroles, stews etc and freezing them in meal portions. I defrost something the night before. When I get home from work (I work FT) I get the veg on, and being a ninja with the knife I can do this quite quickly. It is bloody hard work though, and I don't blame parents who end up sticking ready meals in the microwave, notwithstanding all the dodgy ingredients they contain.

I serve my children more or less what I was given, toad in the hole (of course) spag bog, curries and casseroles, fish cakes, but I don't boil veg, and (unlike me) the children eat fruit like a troop of monkeys. They probably eat a bit better than me because I was fussier, and also because we don't keep sweets / biscuits in the house.

On a completely tangental point, one of my elder siblings suffers from psychosis. His medication makes him the only one amongst my family who is overweight, and I've often wondered whether increased use of medication contributes substantially to the obesity epidemic.

My kids don't have free access to the fruit bowl, and have to ask for a snack. Tbh I thought this was the norm; it's similar to how I was brought up. Mine have a relatively good diet, but then so did I. They have more fruit, as it's so much cheaper now. They certainly have healthier drinks - I lived on squash and am now literally paying for it at the dentists! They have more sweets, as they live closer to their grandparents than I did, and they are the main source of sweeties. DH and I are both naturally slim though, and both kids appear to have inherited this, which is a relief.

No, you can only say that of the children you have direct experience of.
Mine have a better diet than I had.

Also where I live (NZ) fresh fruit and veg is becoming very expensive. Non-processed meat starts at $12 a kg (that's about 7 pounds) and fish twice that. $250 (that's about 140 pounds) is our weekly spend. Poor families really are obliged to feed their children junk unless they have access to a garden and know how to raise veg, both things are very much on the decline.

We all like liver (and kidneys), but even that is expensive now.

To be fair, because we were from California, we ate a lot of fresh fruit & veg growing up. In WWII my grandfather was on a US navy boat & hated all the food they offered except avocados which the Navy liked since they could source them cheaply all around the South Pacific, hardly anyone else would eat the avos, found them too exotic; he reckons avocado was the mainstay of his diet for 4 years.

I was born in the 80s.

I think my kids diet is better - although mine wasn't that bad, comparatively, because we ate huge amounts of ready meals for dinner - and Fuck knows what was in them then. We also ate more crisps/ice cream/chocolate snacks than is okay.

We did eat a lot of fruit though.

My mother stopped cooking family meals when I was 8 so after that most of our meals at home were bowls of cereal, canned soup or sandwiches. I grew up thinking of meat+spuds+2 veg as a very unhealthy combo.

Child of the seventies. Findus crispy pancakes, tinned fruit, angel delight, spam fritters, loads and loads of sweets.

Fantastic days.

Does anyone remember those luminous orange "breadcrumbs" that we're around in the 70s? Don't think they were too healthy - they looked practically radioactive. And Instant Whip, the poor man's version of Angel Delight.