To ask what you ate growing up?

[Bature]

And how it compares to what you and your family eat now? Particularly interested in people who aren’t in or originally from the U.K.

I grew up in a west African country and grew up on home cooked everything, lots of fresh veg, minimal animal protein (it was a garnish or flavouring, not the ‘main event’), pretty elaborate meals and lots of spices. Almost no sweets (we ate fruit), limited processed food and very occasional fizzy drinks.

I now live in the U.K. and I’m trying to feed my family similarly. On the upside, my diet is incredibly varied (everything from Vietnamese curries to Swedish meatballs). On the downside, there’s probably more processed food than is ideal, I take the occasional shortcut, and I eat rather a lot of chocolate.

How about you all?

1980s/1990s, England, but one parent from India.

Mostly home cooked from scratch food, obviously lots of curries, rice, lentils, raita etc.
A bit of plain English cooking on the days mum worked, mash, sausages, pies, fish fingers, the occasional roast etc.

We ate well, and DM loved cooking so we ate a large variety of other food too - so Chinese, French, Mexican dishes also made regular appearances.

And to add: I find the fascination with 'cooking from scratch', and talking about it endlessly on Mumsnet as it's some badge of honour and class signifier amusing; most people around the world cook from scratch. It's the only way to get fed in many places

I grew up in the UK in the 1960s. Every meal at home was cooked from scratch and was usually a balance of meat/fish, vegetables and potatoes. Chips were rare. My parents were quite adventurous for the time and rice or spaghetti might make an appearance if the main meal was curry or something Italian inspired. My mother did also attempt southeast Asian food too.

School food was standard British. Meat and two overcooked veg. There was no choice and chips were served maybe once a month, if that.

Lithuanian/English
Lots of stews, meat and two veg, occasionally a fish finger, soups, baked potato, stuffed marrows/tomatoes, . When a bit older pasta became a thing.
Almost no processed food apart from ham and sausages.

I try and feed my kids no processed food other than an occasional sausage. We eat a lot more varied food, curries, Thai food, french, but lots of stews and pasta still!

70s child, raised in the UK by Mediterranean parents so our meals mostly mirrored what my parents ate growing up. Mum would grow peppers, courgettes, tomatoes, Swiss chard, runner beans, potatoes. Plus we had apple trees, plums, pears, strawberries and lots of herbs.

My mum was a fantastic cook and would make many varied dishes. I remember a lot of dried pulses being soaked overnight for dishes. A neighbour and friend of my mum’s was Indian and taught her several different dishes. It was a healthy and varied diet.

My mum worked full time but shift work, starting at 7am - until 3.30pm. my dad would get us up and ready for school and then head off to work himself and not be home until 6.30pm.

I cook many of these same dishes but it can take a couple of hours to make. I often look back and wonder how my mum did it all. I rarely remember her sitting down of an evening.

I was an 80s UK kid.

Frozen lasagne and chips.
Waffles and crispy pancakes.
Angel delight.
Sausage egg and chips.
Fish finger sandwiches.
Kiev's and chips.

The only thing you could say was cooked from scratch was the Sunday dinner of chicken, mash and veg.

Weirdly though, even though everyone I knew ate pretty much the same beige crap, it seemed like very few people were overweight. These days there's gyms everywhere and obesity is huge problem, I don't get it tbh.

Born in Poland.

Under Soviet rule we’ve had food rationing until 1989 (when communism collapsed). As a child under 13 I was allocated 1kg of meat per month(that’s if you could get it in the shop haha- meat allowance was for both cooked meat and raw meat)

Potatoes,root veg and cabbage were staples of diet(sauerkraut anyone?) with carbs (bread,flour added everywhere) throughout most of the year.
Summer and autumn were a feast of seasonal veg.
Lots of preserves were made in almost every house.

There was no food waste and hardly any processed foods

late 60s and 70s child in the UK, very English food, meat and veg and gravy, stews, pies, lots of fresh veg as we had an allotment, though mostly cabbage, brussels, peas and all the root veggies, a bit of fruit (too expensive), no fish apart from the fish & chip shop for an occasional treat (mum didn't know how to cook fish), cakes and biscuits. Fresh salad from the allotment in the summer only - lettuce, tomato, baby carrots, radish and spring onions. All home made and nicely cooked. Didn't eat out or get takeaways. First had pasta, rice, fish and more adventurous veg at uni. I'd never eaten curry, pasta, risotto, courgette, aubergine, avocado. One fun thing, my dad was knowledgeable about mushrooms and we went mushroom picking and had loads of them! Also blackberry and various nuts picking.

As a child I longed for convenience food! Home badly cooked stews, curries and casseroles put me off wet savoury food for a long time.

About the worst thing DM came up with was chestnut soup made with the brine that a bacon joint had been cooked in. Salty sludge!

70's and 80's. Mum cooked from scratch every day except Friday, that was her night off so we got an easy meal that night, like frozen pizza (I still have a no cook Friday but we have takeaway)
We had very traditional British diet, meat veg and potato most nights, homemade soup, baked potato and filling, occasional pasta or lasagne, cottage pie, lots of vegetables.
Mum was a great cook and loved throwing a dinner party or hosting the wider family.

They mention it because in the UK, cooking from scratch has become a lot less common than it once was.

If everybody cooked from scratch in the UK, as most people do around the world do, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.

I'm not from the UK and all our meals were 100 % home cooked from scratch.
Meat was included with most main meals and we'd often have home made deserts once a day. Incredibly rare that we'd have chocolate or shop bought sweets apart from some icecream in the summer but not on a regular basis. Sometimes we'd have cakes from a cake shop (made in the shop on the same day) but usually for a celebration or special occasion. For something sweet' we'd have seasonal fruit.
All fresh ingredients would have been originated from the same country.

My DH grew up in the UK and all their meals were home cooked, typical British food. Biggest difference is the addition of available shop bought biscuits and chocolate in the house. He'd have consumed less fresh fruit than me.

With my own family, I cook from scratch 85-90% of the time. The rest of the time would be takeaways or eating out.
We always have biscuits, chocolate and crisps in the house because of DH - I don't eat much if these but our childhood do (alongside a variety of fresh fruit which is, probably, mostly, imported)

Born in mid 80s. Mum was a single mum with 4 kids from about 1990 onwards, and stayed home on income support.

We had free school meals, so a hot dinner every lunchtime at school, and would go home to a hot dinner too. On heavy rotation I remember spag bol, lasagne, shepherd's/cottage pie, fish fingers and mash with parsley sauce, chilli etc. All home made and yum, there would be fruit and always homemade scones and stuff. I don't think we did too badly really under the circumstances (we had NO money).

Now I'm an adult, my DH and I are keen cooks and our kids have been brought up with a fairly varied diet of home cooked foods from around the world, depending what phase we're going through - currently it's Indian food!

80s/90s North America

Mixed race
Had a variety of foods from European to Caribbean
Everything fresh
Lots of beef (steak), roasts, chicken, fish, shell fish
Dinner would usually be meat 2 veg, starch/cards, and always a side salad grean and leafy in summer and homemade slaw in the winter months
Summer would be bbqs and outdoor cooking
Desserts were for the holidays and birthdays
Big cooked breakfasts, the usual eggs, bacon, Pancakes and French toast on the weekends
Lots of fresh fruit from all over the world

Where my parents weren't the greatest (thought they were when I was kid though) week day breakfasts and lunches

Super super processed foods. Hot pockets, pizza pockets, toaster Waffles, pop tarts, super sugary Cereal, lunch box snacks would be fruit by the foot, drunkeraoos, cheese strings, cookies, crisps, sugary yogurts and whatever the latest drink trend would be from juice boxes to squeezey juice bottles in the shape of super heros I remember one drink being electric blue

Oh, I forgot what we do.
Very different lots of rice and pasta meals, rarely potatoes. More salad but probably less veg overall.
Very few processed foods, no jars or packets.
My teen boy does eat a lot of fast food when out with his friends DH and I very rarely.
We eat what my Dad would have considered "foreign food" herbs and spices, things like paprika, turmeric, tamarind, etc. would not have been in our spice rack as a child.

Grew up in the 90s UK and we always had fresh meals cooked from scratch, lots of meat, veg - typical British. Food I now see as a bit bland, but nice enough I guess - shepherds pie, roasts, pork chops mash and veg etc.

Nowadays I also (mostly) cook from scratch, but the type of food I cook is a lot different - I tend to cook more Mediterranean, African and Asian foods. Cook from scratch probably 4 or 5 times a week but there is definitely more quick rubbish 'frozen' food for my kids at times than I ever had as a kid i.e. chicken nuggets, pizza etc - mostly due to the fact my mum was SAHM and had a lot more time and both DH and I work full time. I do try my best to give the kids a healthy home cooked meal most days though and they certainly have a more varied and interesting diet than most kids these days!

70s child

no freezer, vey poor, mostly grim food

we had set food for set days:

Sunday - roast, a cheap cut of meat
Monday - leftovers of meat, boiled potatoes, veg
Tuesday - macaroni cheese or salad
Wednesday - spam fritters or a nasty ready made pie
Thursday - pork chops and boiled potatoes
Friday - fish and chips
Saturday - stuffed peppers and rice

I grew up on a farm and had relatives who were fruit and veg farmers. We also grew up on the coast. We ate a lot of fish, fruit and veg and pretty much every meal was home cooked. My mum made her own bread, cakes, pastry and even yoghurt. The freezer was full of home picked fruit and vegetables (we had blackcurrent trees in the garden - to this day I miss cheap plentiful blackcurrents).

My mum was mainly a British style cook - lots of pies, stews, roasts, soups and flans, cold meats and salads in summer. She and my dad were adventurous eaters and we had as much "foreign" food as you could access in rural England in the eighties and nineties. We would go out for Indian and Chinese food as a treat as well as fish and chips and pub meals. A trip to London was an excuse to find more exotic places - I remember a Russian restaurant in West London once.

We did have shop bought stuff - fish fingers, biscuits, oven chips etc... but not a lot. We were only allowed fizzy drinks on a Sunday lunchtime and then only lemonade. I recall we were desperate to go to McDonalds and when we were eventually allowed on a trip to London to see my grandad in hospital, it was deeply disappointing.

@CoreopsisEverywhere

Thursday - pork chops and boiled potatoes

You've just sparked a memory I'd rather not have remembered...
my dad would buy pork chops and proudly announce it like he'd hunted them down on the plains of Milton Keynes.. '
mum would cook them and serve them up with a jar of cheap apple sauce and instant Smash.
Dad would bang on about how nice a treat they were, mum would nod and asspat the idiot for a job well done.

They were like eating bits of roadkill. Barely cuttable, barely chewable and tasted like house bricks. I've never ever bought pork chops as an adult ever.
Makes me shudder just thinking of them.
(I learned later he bought them off Dodgy Dave in the pub...)

I was born in 84. My mum is a very good cook so I don't remember having many freezer type meals.

We were quite poor but I remember her buying meat on the cheap and we would stand in the kitchen like a production line making multiple steak pies for the freezer. She made big hearty casseroles filled out with tons of root veg. She taught me well and I could make a full roast chicken dinner by the time I was 10.

I think it was just how things were at the time but we rarely ate "foreign food" (her words not mine).

She worked in a chippy for a couple of years and always came home with a bag of what was left at the end of her shift!

Both my parents worked as teachers and this was pre convenience food. In the 60s and 70’s So in the evening something cooked but quick, home made chips and a meat like a chop, or gammon or fried egg. No pudding or sweets, supper before bed would be milk and cereal. Weekends with more time, meat and two veg, and cream cakes from the shop on Saturday, roast dinner and home made steam pudding on Sunday. Occasionally fish and chips on Friday night,it was very plain food. We drank water or tea And we were all very slim, biscuits were only bought if we had a special occasion.

@PurpleMonkeys They were like eating bits of roadkill. Barely cuttable, barely chewable and tasted like house bricks.

The mental picture you've given me with your post is just hilarious!

Oh and I forgot about her salad plates in summer! I think I was probably the only kid in school who loved salad. If we ever went out to eat with my GPs I would order a salad or a ploughman's and the server would be like "are you sure??"

Mums salad was iceberg lettuce, tomatoes cut in zig zags, spring onions with the tops sliced and then put in cold water so they fanned out, pickled onions and beetroot, a slice of ham, cheese and a hard boiled egg.

I know what I'm having for dinner tonight now 😂

My Mum took great pride in being a very traditional housewife. She cooked us scrambled eggs on toast every morning for breakfast. Every lunchtime we had a home cooked meal cooked from scratch. She roasted twice a week, once on Sunday and again Wednesday. Monday was often Shepherds Pie made with leftover beef she mined up with a hand mincer. She always cooked 2 or 3 vegetables every day which either Dad or Grandad grew in the garden. Tuesday was usually told in the hole, and 2 veg. Thursday often a stew in winter or salad and cold meat in the summer with beetroot lettuce and tomatoes from the garden. Friday was always fish she got from fish monger and made her own batter, chips and peas. Friday evening we went swimming and she made us pancakes for tea. Saturday was potluck so sometimes sausages and mash with baked beans or boiled ham and mash with veg. My Grad kept chickens so Mum got all her eggs free. She.baked every Tuesday and Friday and she made 2 dozen little cakes, an apple pie or rhubarb crumble, she made sausage rolls or pasties with home made pastry every week and ginger biscuits. Sometimes she'd make a steak and kidney pie for dinner. She made the lightest short rust pastry. She never used a ready role in her life. She cleaned the house from top to bottom every week and ironed everything. She was a. wonderful Mum and made cakes for our friends too. On Friday me and my sister would bring friends home after school and she always sent them away with a bag of cakes and ginger biscuits she'd baked. Sometimes she made scones or lemon drizzle cake with her own lemon curd. She made homemade jams and marmalade too. She loved being a housewife and Mother.

Meat was mostly goat or chicken because we raised those, there'd be a boiled ham for special occasions.
We ate a lot of vegetables, bread, buckwheat, TVP, pasta. Lentils and beans. All homemade things. There wasn't much money.
We were the kids who got mocked for having weird food when everyone else was eating pizza and chips.