To be slightly horrified now by what I ate as a kid in the 80s?

[NotWantingToBeRude]

Breakfast was a bowl of either Coco Pops, Frosties or Sugar Puffs. (At least they didn't sell Froot Loops over here I suppose).

Packed lunch in my My Little Pony or Care Bears lunchbox was a sandwich (usually some form of processed meat, occasionally even jam), a pack of crisps, a chocolate bar and a juice box (Ribena or Um Bongo). Never any fruit.

Snack on arriving home from school would be not crisps and chocolate, possibly a Pepperami. Sometimes we’d stop off for pic ‘n’ mix.

Dinner included a full dessert every single night, usually with custard or cream.

Is it just me or would this not be considered so acceptable now?

I was born in the 80s but had such a different diet to my friends growing up. My mum grew up on a farm in Lapland so very different food attitudes which she brought over with her to the UK, plus she had coeliac disease at a time when there wasn't all the gf options there are today so all our meals were cooked from scratch with plenty of veg, our packed lunches were very often home made bread (she made normal bread for us, gf for herself) with things like pate and cucumber or tongue, always fruit and never things like Penguin or Club bars (which made me so jealous of my friends' lunches) but we did always have a packet of crisps. Pudding was only on Sundays and birthdays/Christmas.

I remember loving it when I'd go round a friend's house for tea and get some frozen processed food and pudding on a weekday! But looking back as an adult, I'm very grateful for the diet I had as a child.

My diet in the 90s was very similar. Breakfast was sugary cereal - coco pops, Frosties, ricicles, sugar puffs etc.

My lunchbox would have been white bread sandwiches, packet of crisps. Toffee Crisp, Club or Penguin biscuit. No fruit or veg that I remember. Drink would have been squash.

After school snack was normally cake or biscuits and a glass of Nesquik/ Crusha milkshake.

Dinner/ tea would have been chicken nuggets, sausages or fish fingers with oven chips, potato waffles, smiley faces etc. We would normally have baked bean, peas or carrots on the side so I guess at least that’s one veg! We always had a pudding too.

I did have a friend who wasn’t allowed anything like that, she would have veg sticks and rice cakes with whole nut peanut butter and fruit in her lunchbox along with dips and other things I didn’t recognise, she could well have had hummus but the rest of us in the class definitely treated her food with a lot of suspicion!

We had toast or cereal for breakfast.

Packed lunch, white bread sandwich, ham or Easy Singles.
Juice carton or milk. Pot of strawberry yoghurt.

Sweets in the shop on the way home.

Homemade soup & toast when we got in.

Cottage Pie or similar for dinner. Maybe some carrots.
Don’t remember getting dessert. Or any fruit apart from bananas.

Sausage, beans, chips & ice cream if we ate out.
Pick & Mix, crisps, donuts, when we were out shopping.

My mum was at home & made all of our food.

I had a mixture of very healthy and quite unhealthy. Similar lunches to OP but always had fruit. We had cereal- often weetabix or ready brek but sugar was liberally sprinkled and I sometimes had sugary cereals. I loved "Toppas" - sugar crusted shredded wheat! Dinner was usually homemade - my Mum was quite adventurous for the time and we had a lot of vegetarian food from the Cranks cookbook. We also sometimes had fundus crispy pancakes and mini kievs though. Pudding every night. Sometimes homemade but also stuff like tinned rice pudding, or my favourite Birds lemon crunch.

I don't know where this idea that all 80s kids were outside playing in the fresh air every day comes from though. I was either watching TV or reading a book in my bedroom.

In the 80's, I had to have several fillings around the age of 8 or 9 because of all the sugary crap around.I did use to brush my teeth twice a day, but clearly it wasn't enough. My mum was a stay at home housewife though and would cook different meals every day, but deserts, snacks, sweets were rife, and we'd drink sugary cups of tea with our meals.

Can confirm, I was the child whose parents sent her in with pitta bread, veg sticks and home made hummus, and I wasn't allowed a Care Bear lunch box either (parents had Strong Views on plastic items being marketed at children only to end up in landfill). I attribute my career in law to the negotiating skills I learned swapping a carrot stick for a monster munch😂

oh yes nesquick was my favourite drink

My daily diet as a child in the 80s was really similar to yours OP, except it was fish paste sandwiches in the packed lunch. It's the pudding after every meal that was the norm throughout childhood (lunch AND dinner), that I honestly think has done lasting damage to me. I have a terrible sweet tooth but also never feel like a meal is complete or finished until I've had something sweet at the end (not fruit) - it's massively programmed into my psyche and I've struggled my whole adult life to break the cycle and I can't. I feel agitated and unable to settle until pudding has been eaten, can't focus on anything else. I am about 1.5 stone overweight, I hate it, this compulsion to include pudding with every meal. I also still have that mental programming that Saturday is 'fun day' even though it is now invariably taken up with cleaning the house which I hate, and I still get that 'new start of term, new pencil case' feeling at the beginning of september - I'm 46. I honestly feel programmed by my childhood.

Spot on.

I grew up in the 60's, Fruit was very very expensive relatively, as was meat. Many meals were largely comprised of potatoes and snacks were almost unheard of. Milk was pricey, we all drank squash and water was free and squash could be diluted down to almost nothing. No sweets, except maybe once a week and turned outdoors to play in all weathers.

We were a healthy bunch, on the whole. There was no real knowledge of 'nutrition', your aim was to fill everyone up and keep them full until the next meal. I remember even packets of crisps being a real treat!

But I still hate potatoes to this day...

I don't think the main health issue in the UK today is eating disorders.

Sugary cereals for breakfast would have been fine if the OP had not been fed sugar at every meal.
It's not an eating disorder to not eat processed food at every meal. Unless you think the whole world has an eating disorder.

YANBU 🤣 I understand the point you are trying to make OP. But apparently in the 50’s/60’s it was even worse - my Mum says she, her siblings and their friends often ate “sugar sandwiches” (literally white bread, butter and sugar!) as adults thought sugar was good for kids 🤷‍♀️

But of course they were playing outside all the time in all weathers, without the need for supervision there would be today so there were rarely any weight issues and they needed the calories -they regularly filled up on white bread and butter after meals too and puddings were usually stodgy sponges. Different times and it probably means their teeth aren’t the best but it doesn’t seem to have caused any other health issues.

My parents were into the whole foods thing, so I did tend to take wholemeal bread salmon paste and cucumber sandwiches to school. No crisps or chocolate when other kids has crisps every break time. I remember a kid asking if a piece of red pepper I had was poo as he didn't know what it was. I've gone the other way now really as my eldest son has a very restricted diet and it's emotionally exhausting to try to make lovely healthy food only for them to just not eat any of it. So we do tend to have a lot of easy foods for the sake of him getting some calories in him. It does worry me.

Why do people assume the lack of weight issues was due to children playing outside in all weathers. People just ate less food.

It is such a middle class pass time to obsess over kids diet/nutrition, especially by mothers who imo use it to make up for other areas of parenting they fall short on. I doubt there are any children in whole of UK who are deficient in nutrients. As long as not obese diet makes little difference to overall health.

What else would you like to bash your parents’ generation for?

Must be wonderful to be as perfect as you.

Actually, for hummus as we know it- smooth with tahini, it was quite undisputably Syria.

I do suspect most of Mumsnet has an eating disorder, due to the number of food-related threads.

I understand that cereal/sugar isn't the greatest thing to eat, but it could be so much worse, honestly. Some children don't even get regular meals. I never got fed at my father's house until he got a girlfriend (he refused to learn how to cook). I used to eat frozen peas out of the freezer because I was so hungry. Madness! Just awful, neglectful parenting. This was only about 20 years ago.

I think it's okay to accept that diets are rarely perfect and that eating processed food isn't the end of the world. All we can do is our best. I try to avoid unhealthy food, but if I eat too much of it I don't beat myself up. At least I'm eating.

Fruit has a lot more sugar in it 'naturally' now because it's been selectively breed that way, so it's probably not that different to what your mum gave you.

I think we’ve reached peak Mumsnet - a heated debate on when hummus was invented!

I was fed the same and I accept it. This is just how history works. We are part of a generation at a certain time, place and context like everyone else is. I think to point out individual unfairnesses is pointless. I could argue my very poor family and their own poor upbringings who made poor food choices, gave me the best education they could give me and gave me an unstoppable work ethic which I don’t see in today’s generation. Horses for courses

We weren't fed like this - sounds like your parents were uneducated about nutrition and sucked in by the heavy advertising of all that crap. I do agree it's better that cereals have had to reduce sugar content now, etc.

People definitely did eat like this in the 80s! It was the peak of ready made meals. I will say that snacking probably got much worse later on in the 90s. In the 80s, it was believed that a snack before lunch would spoil your appetite, in the 90s people started to believe you should eat more or less all the time and we're still stuck with that.

My DM used to make oven chips and burgers for my brothers every weekday. On Saturdays we had chips from the chippy and Sunday roasts on Sunday - that at least did have vegetables in it. I do remember my DF cooking us casseroles sometimes, but we didn't really appreciate his efforts.

Very interesting.

Putting sugar on strawberries was usual in those days.

my dm made humous, one time, followed the delia smith recipe, early 1980s