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?

We rarely ate chicken. It was very expensive.

Grew up in late 70s and 80s and had a mix of mostly home cooked with some convenience foods. So shepherd's pie, roast dinner, chops, spag bol, cheese & onion pie, fish in parsley sauce etc. and the weekly 'salad' which was basically a deconstructed salmon or tuna salad sandwich! Veg was peas, sweetcorn, carrots and sometimes cabbage, not much else. Oh! Apart from cauliflower cheese which was a regular with a jacket potato. Then maybe once a week, or if kids eating early and parents going out, then it might be fish fingers or burgers etc. Something like Chinese food was either takeaway or a whole afternoon of carefully prepping for 3 specific recipes from a book. There was no quick stir fry.

When I was about 11ish the supermarkets started doing recipe cards and I think it encouraged my Mum to venture out a bit and try things that became staples, so pesto and harissa and fresh herbs started to feature, along with different veggies, so mange tout and baby sweetcorn and, peppers cooked rather than in salad, and courgettes and many other things.

'Pudding' was almost always just a chocolate biscuit. I remain disappointed if a meal doesn't end with some kind of chocolate.

Mum and Dad both worked, I grew up in the 90s. I remember my dad occasionally cooking from scratch - lasagne or bolognese. It was a real treat to have one of his homemade dinners! My Gran made us a lovely Sunday roast every Sunday, and that was the only fresh food I ate.

We had pasta with a jar of sauce, frozen pizza, frozen kievs, instant noodles, sandwiches, fish fingers, veg was always frozen peas and sweetcorn. It was a different time, and these meals weren’t seen as neglectful, but by today’s standards I wouldn’t feed these kinds of things to my family, and I definitely wouldn’t eat this myself nowadays. I don’t know how I wasn’t ill, I tried a frozen pizza the other day, it was vile, I couldn’t get through one bite. And fish fingers are mostly mushy garbage these days too.

It started to change in the teenage years, I think with Jamie Oliver telling us Turkey twirlers were bad news. The peak of my mum’s culinary skills was frying some chicken and chucking in a jar of curry, and eventually putting salmon in an ‘so juicy’ oven bag.

Great up in a village in South wales in the 70/80/early 90s. We are near or fish, some type of potatoes and two veg for pretty much every meal.

We didn’t have pizza or pasta until I was well into my teens. Never had anything that wasn’t British until my teens, and then it was pizza/pasta. I do remember a moussaka once.

My mum cooked (my dad genuinely couldn’t boil an egg, he did other rhubarb round the house and garden but absolutely no cooking) and she used no spice, garlic or anything like that for flavour. Just salt and pepper.

Contrast with how I cook for my family now which is pretty much everything cooked from scratch with lots of Thai, Indian, Spanish, Italian etc food. Which my mum sort of likes when she comes to eat, but my dad really can’t stomach.

70's
Meat, some sort of potato and vegetables every night apart from Fridays when we had hake and chips.
So chops, joints of meat, stew, home made pies and pasties.
Saturday my dad didn't think mum should cook so we had steak and chips or a cooked breakfast (!). Sometimes he took us to a motorway services.
Home cooked pudding every night - lemon meringue pie, fruit pies, bread and butter pudding or occasionally tinned fruit and cream

My friends had potato waffles, findus crispy pancakes, baked beans with sausages in etc but mum refused to entertain the fact dea saying it's not proper food. I was so envious of them.

Sweets once a week on Sunday night

No fizzy drinks

Crisps only at Xmas and so was fruit juice

Snacks were fruit or cheese and crackers

I grew up in the 60s & 70s in England. We had plain homemade food like stews, braised steak, liver and bacon, breast of lamb and fresh fish at least once a week on Friday. A roast joint on Sunday. We grew some veg and fruit so always had plenty of that. There was an appreciation of fresh seasonal food, so the first jersey royals with fresh peas or beans from the garden was a thing, likewise the strawberries and raspberries coming into season. When I was in my teens my mother went back to work and we started having things which were slightly quicker to make and maybe a bit more expensive, so she’d maybe get gammon steaks on her way home or lamb chops. She was good at baking but that was limited to a fruit pie after Sunday lunch or cakes or a tray of jam tarts for tea if friends came round.

Mostly very traditional meat, veg and potato meals - 70s baby, Irish mother, no spare money. Didn't have a choice, had to clear my plate 😂

Forgot to say how it changed. My kids got a healthy balanced diet including some old fashioned favourites from my childhood, a wider range of tastes due to more adventurous cooking and availability of ingredients, plus some takeaway and a lot more restaurant food. The pinnacle of eating out in my childhood was a Berni once a year when Granny came to visit.

I don't think my diet is enormously different now

I eat more fish, I ate virtually none as a child, just tinned tuna or cod from the chippy, reason being my mum didn't like it. She does now though!

I make a lot of meals from scratch, when I was a child we did use jars of sauce and Coleman's spice packets.

Didn't eat a lot of sweets, virtually no fizzy drinks. I always ate my vegetables and had fruit.

What I find really interesting is the way my mother ate as a child, they didn't have rice/pasta/noodles, they ate potatoes with everything. They ate a lot of chips (homemade) and had very traditional English food. My mum was born in the 60s

I ate what was put in front of me. My Mother said that I didn’t have to eat it but that is all there is.

I grew up in the 90’s and I’ve got to admit I don’t remember my mum cooking much other then spaghetti bolognaise, scouse ( beef stew) or roast dinners, most of the time it was nuggets and chips and beans definitely nothing “adventurous” and three out of four of us are overweight, so I try to avoid feeding my children easy meals and cook from scratch a lot, make my own pasta sauces, curries etc. all with lots of veggies in.

As a child, we were very lucky, always home cooked meals from scratch, occasional fish fingers and chips and chippy tea. Mum worked on a market fruit and veg stall and her wages included however much fruit and veg she could carry home. Lunch would sometimes be a piece of bread and butter, with a piece of fruit and a yoghurt, or soup and bread

I grew up in Ireland in the 80s. Dinner was usually a form of roast meat, 2 types of potatoes (usually boiled and mash) and seasonal veg. My mum made stews occasionally and Friday was always fish day despite us not being reared as Catholic. Fish would be whole fish roasted or stew, never fried or battered.
Lunch was always homemade soup and sandwiches. And home made cake or ice cream on Sundays as a treat.
Fruit was seasonal and expensive so we didn't get much unless we grew it ourselves.
Almost identical to how my grandparents fed my parents, expect they had their main meal at mid day and soup for dinner.

A lot of meat and 2 veg, stews, savoury mince, some convenience food (findus crispy pankakes/turkey drummers), spag bol. My mum isn't the best cook but it was OK.

I grew up in the UK in the nineties but my parents are from Australia.

They were very into healthy eating - very little red meat, lots of fish, vegetables, whole-grains and fruits. Pasta/rice/bread was always the "brown" version, nothing was ever fried and we had lots of oven roasted vegetables too.

No takeaways, no junk food, no fizzy drinks, no sweets, no fatty foods - if we went out to eat I'd be allowed Appletiser or Orangina but never anything like coke. We never had crisps or chocolate or sweets in the house unless it was a special occasion.

My mum was more relaxed but dad was very extreme in his views and I definitely "rebelled" as soon as I had my own money and the freedom to make my own choices. I think they had good intentions but went too over the top.

My diet as an adult is fine but I'm nowhere near as restrictive.

I’m Canadian and grew up un the late 80s/90s.

My mum is a brilliant cook so I was very lucky. We had pretty ‘typical’ foods like roasts with mash and veg, shepherd’s pie, spag bol, lasagna and casseroles but also a smattering of Chinese/Thai/Mexican dishes. Almost always had some form of dessert, too. All made from scratch.

I was a picky child and wish I had appreciated it more. I live alone now so find it hard to motivate myself to make interesting dishes.

My mum used to make a lot of stuff like cottage pie, chilli, roast dinners and occasionally Cornish pasties from scratch. She also used to make things with jars and packets such as pasta bakes or lasagna's. I didn't most of it, I'm a vegetarian and she never wanted to make seperate meals for me, so I mainly lived off of packet noodles, beans on toast or baked potatoes! If she made a roast I'd have that without the meat.

She is a very good cook, but with 3 kids, various pets and often working 2/3 jobs at a time she didn't have a great deal of time/energy to cook from scratch.

Also an 80s Irish childhood. We had cows and chickens so had our own eggs, milk, cream, butter and buttermilk. DM would bake soda bread, we rarely had sliced pan. Dad would grow almost all of our vegetables and he was weirdly ahead of his time doing it all organically as well. We lived near the coast so there was lots of fish and seafood in our meals.

Breakfast was porridge. Having toast or orange juice was rare. Usually only when we had visitors. Lunch for school was homemade soda bread with homemade butter, milk and an apple. Dinner was usually 50% veg, 30% potato and maybe the rest was cheap cuts of meat. Egg and chips on Saturday. When money was tight, a massive pot of veg soup and spuds.

We got a treat on Sunday after mass, usually a bag of crisps and a bar of chocolate, and a pudding on Sunday as well - cake/ apple or rhubarb pie/ jelly with custard.

We are all foodies now, and all of us are willing to try almost any food I think. None of us have any health issues and I attribute it to us having such an unprocessed food childhood. I moved back to the countryside some years ago and my dream is to have the time to produce as much of our own food as possible.

Grew up in the 80s. My Mum worked nights so was always knackered and she hated cooking. So we really did grow up on a lot of processed food. Findus crispy pancakes/ pizzas/waffles/chips. Apparently my brother’s first word was ‘chip’ 🙄, she did used to make a roast from scratch and we liked fruit and some veg so not completely awful.

I don’t blame her but now with all the research coming out about ultra processed food it’s a worry to have been brought up on the stuff. We were all rake thin so being overweight ever an issue. And very active but still.

I try to cook from scratch with my kids but processed stuff will creep in. Definitely more health conscious now.

Oh and yes jars of baby food too. I think people maybe just didn’t realise back then. Food companies have a lot to answer for. Plus women starting to work more.

I can't really remember what I ate, I just remember the foods I didn't like!
Corned beef hash
Some weird cheese tomato and breadcrumbs dish that looked like vomit.
Spaghetti bolognaise
Roast dinner.
I think I ate a mostly beige diet. Not because I was fussy, but because I have IBD and they were "safe" foods.
We did have lots of Indian food and occasionally Chinese. My mum was quite experimental and as we lived in London, could get "exotic" ingredients quite easily.

Really difficult to remember. There are some still in my head though.
My nan (born 1910 -I'm not sure if that's relevant to what she fed me!) raised me first so late 70's- I remember potato fritters. So like a cross between chips and crisps. They were nice. Minced beef with peas and carrots. With mash. So like a deconstructed cottage pie I suppose. And rice with chicken in a tin. It came in a white sauce.
Then my dad met my step mum. She hates cooking. There were fish fingers and chicken soup. And crispy pancakes.
I went to boarding school at 10. We had hamwiches and butterscotch angel delight. That's not all we had :) The nasty strong taste of hamwiches stays with me. I still love butterscotch angel delight though.

My dad always took me for a Chinese restaurant when I was little and he hadn't seen me for a while (posted abroad). Chicken and sweetcorn soup with a roll in the shape of a triangle. King prawn fried rice. And pineapple fritters. Yum 😁In fact I just looked up that restaurant. Its still bloody going! and it still has the same decor as it did in the late 70s/early 80s😂

My mum and dad both cooked - my mum pretty much hated it though she does a good curry and roast.

We had quite a lot of ready meals growing up alongside standards like baked potatoes, spaghetti, steak and chips etc
I'm a veggie now (probably as a direct result of terrible cooking 😄).

All processed food growing up with a roast on Sunday and maybe a meal cooked from almost from scratch with a jar of sugary sauce on Saturday e.g. spaghetti bolognese using dolmio instead of chopped tomatoes. Very little veg. Loads of sugary cereals for breakfast, snacks and coca cola (my mum bought 24 cans a week for me and my brother!). I had loads of infections as a kid- always ill and on antibiotics and at 19 had high blood pressure. Exercise was never thought about, though I did do some. No judgement for parents, they had no idea how unhealthy this was and also eat much healthier now.

Now I'm in my 40s, us and kids eat a healthy balanced diet. Lots of fruit and veg. Cereal is high fibre/ low sugar e.g. weetabix, bran flakes. Loads of exercise. Not much processed food and cooking from scratch a lot (use asda recipes section, gousto and hello fresh when I need inspiration for a week or 2). Our kids have never been on antibiotics and seen a doctor once between the two of them (ds1 age 16 months). They are 7 and 5 now. I never get sick as an adult. I don't remember trying to change, it's been gradual and is just our habit and has been for many years. I've never been on a diet. Still same weight I was at 18 when my diet was terrible.

Grew up in WC northern home. Mum cooked meat (pork and lamb chops, chicken, steak), potatoes and veg, roasts on a Sunday, casseroles made from scratch, spaghetti bolognese (again from scratch). Never ready meals or frozen food. She loved a nice take away tho but always Chinese and Indian from a restaurant and never from places that did chips with everything!