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?

Now I started craving coco pops. Have to pop to the shop

That was definitely not my diet (as much as I'd have loved it!). Brown bread only, all meals home cooked, plenty of vegetables, sugary treats and drinks were extremely limited.

Your childhood diet sounds like cavity city.

Omg just had flashbacks to the tuck shop at school… every day a chocolate donut or a sausage roll for 20p! And a fizzy drink. Beggars belief now 🤣

My mum has always been good at cooking dinners with veg - casseroles, shepherd pie type stuff, but lunch and breakfast were pretty processed and sugar filled. I remember heaping spoons of sugar on my cereal and scooping it out at the end. Being horrified at my friend who was “only” allowed sweets on Fridays and thinking her parents were really mean 🤣 Bonkers.

My mum is always amazed that my kids love fresh fruit and eat their veg sticks raw, with humus etc. She says she never thought a kid would eat “that stuff” and always thought she had to hide veg in the dinners. My adult brother still doesn’t touch any form of vegetable. I was like it for a while, but travelled /ate out a lot and my eating habits got better over time.

Kids in the 80s were no way as obese as now. I don’t remember any fat kids at my school. We all are the same kind of food

No, just harsh.

You'd have approved of me until very recently, because for 40 of my 60 years I starved myself to stay skinny, along with the occassional binge. 5 years ago I packed it in and am now fat - I don't give a shit, I have a healthier mindset than ever.

My relationship with food was forged in my childhood, and my son's relationship with food was forged in his. He loves food, but listens to his hunger in a way I was never able to until recently.

When there is very little money, you are told to clear your plate, whether you are hungry or not. If there is very little money, there is sometimes no food, so when there is food, you eat it, because you don't know when there will be more. If your mother's only way of showing love is to feed you, then you learn that food is love. All of this means that hunger and eating become unrelated.

There's a great podcast called 'Maintenance Phase' if you'd like to understand more.

Kids are fatter and less active now. It starts so young. All those organic puff snacks are still shit. It's the modern equiivalent of a bag of quavers , yet the word organic makes people think they're better. Same as the pouches that are squeezed directly into kids mouths. It's literally shoving food down their throats.

There is more choice and variety of food now, but pre packaged food aimed at babies and toddler is still shit, but worse because it makes so many claims to be lower salt, sugar, organic etc.

No I don't! I have a horror of chips, having being force fed them as a child!

I think it's the OP who is worried about chips!

I had similar growing up in the 80’s. We also had meat and two veg type dinners most nights and always had a Sunday roast. Salads in the summer at least once a week. We didn’t have sweets for snacks though every day, they were saved for pudding if we did get any.

I think food prices were relatively higher then than now for certain things, although I think we’re heading back that way now.

I don't think there was as much snacking and kids walked to school. My parents worked but didn't drive so we had to leave the house when they did and walked to be dropped off.

Plenty more ‘nobody was fat and we were all outside all day’ posts I see.

People were fat in the 80s, I promise. Even children. I’ve just googled ‘1980s class photos uk’ and I promise you there’s more than one overweight child in most of them.

Again, absolutely not denying that we’ve continued to go wrong since then; and the rates have risen and that needs addressing.

But the oversimplification and complete insistence that that 80s/90s were some utopia of kids with visible ribs eating unprocessed food, never snacking and scampering about the sunlit fields all day just really gets on my goat - I feel like I’m being gaslit as someone who was there!

I am so jealous!!!

My lunch was Vogels bread (which if you bend it, it just breaks in half because of all the seeds lol)... But it gets worse because the filling was vegemite and tomato slices.

Then I would also have some fruit... But not nice fruit... Usually a floury apple or a banana with brown spots.

My friends soft had white bread with ham and crisps etc and I was green with envy! They are all slim these days.

But I've struggled with moderation and disordered eating ever since childhood because of how heavily healthy was prioritised. I became obsessed with the foods I wasn't allowed to have.

The grass is always greener and there is a balance, but I know what I would have chosen.

And it wasn't due to a lack of money, we were well off. Vogels bread cost a fortune.

Definitely nothing like my children had in the 80s. They still moan now that their lunch boxes were all healthy food while their friends had good stuff like chocolate and crisps. The way they carry on you'd think childline should've been involved!

For us, the 80s were about whole-food and homemade. I'm more relaxed as a nana but still prefer to make things myself than to buy them. Which works well when considering UPF.

I don't think it was a "utopia" or whatever I just said we walked and there wasn't as much snacking. It's hardly over exaggerating. Kids go through chubby stages even now so ",80s photos" will show chubbier kids.

I was an 80s Irish child and my mother told me we were too poor to have Turkey Drummers and Billy Bear sandwich meat and all the foods we now associate with the 80s. I was mortified by her veg and lentil heavy home cooking, refusal to buy fizzy drinks and all I wanted for my birthday was a shop bought cake. Fish soup in a flask for school lunches still makes me question her sanity, even though she was feeding us well.

Great username!

I think I would be more horrified if I grew up during the war and had fuck all to eat because everything was rationed. Growing up in the 80s was a sign of the times just like it was in previous years and just like it is now.

Oh god. I am so sick of people churning this reply out for all sorts of posts. And this one is especially ridiculous as it's thinking retrospectively.

Yes there is a col crisis. But this is a public forum where people have mixed incomes and more importantly can post what they like. You are NOT the thread police so bore off.

Op. It was a different time with less awareness of upf and getting your 5 a day. I bet you were probably more active than children are these days with no tablets or phones and less choice on the television. No harm done

I WAS the fat kid at my school ! I didn’t even have breakfast , or lunch. There were 4 others in my class too.

Also kids back then had 15min morning break, 1 hour lunch break, 15 min afternoon break and we got out in the evening and went biking, swimming, youth club, hanging round with our mates, playing street games and getting exercise.

Now our kids are locked up at school, locked up at home, they are like caged animals, no wonder there are so many behaviour problems.

I don't think some processed ham was the problem

It was the opposite in my house. One weekly shop was done on a Thursday. The small amount of treats bought were gone by Sunday. Breakfast was weetabix, porridge or toast, lunch was a sandwich, apple, banana and yogert, dinner was meat, potato and veg. No such thing as a snack in my house maybe a digestive if you were lucky. Only got sugary cereal for easter and Christmas and dessert on a Sunday was usually trifle or apple tart.

Gosh there are some odd replies to the op's perfectly harmless post.

I have to say I envied kids like you when I was young. My Annie lunchbox contained wholemeal bread sandwiches, fruit, maybe a yoghurt or some nuts and a club or a wagon wheel. No crisps allowed! Squash was very diluted and we never had pop.
My mum cooked all our dinners from scratch and dessert was a piece of fruit.
We weren't allowed sugary cereal either, we had stuff like Weetabix and readybrek.
It's only as an adult I appreciate what a great job she did of keeping us healthy, despite me being a really fussy eater.
At the time, all I wanted was to eat like my friend who's mum had a deep fat fryer and a soda stream!

OPs childhood diet was pretty similar to mine, and the lunchbox contents closely match what I and all my friends ate. And we came from a pretty varied mix of working class and middle class backgrounds. So I don’t think you can just say OPs family were an outlier.

Family dinners in my 80s childhood consisted exclusively of frozen stuff you ‘put in the oven for 20 mins at 200C’. Sometimes there were e.g. frozen peas as well, but thinking about it now, the serving size of any veg back then was tiny, compared to what I’d make now.

Also I have found myself chuckling at the rose-tinted view on this thread that 80s diets were offset by all kids being very active. I spent the 80s trying to avoid PE, I never cycled anywhere, I loved reading so spent loads of time in my room with a book, and particularly when we got satellite tv in the late 80s I watched hours and hours of tv each day.

I see what you mean! I suppose these we are more aware of healthier eating and we have healthy schools etc don’t forget also that I bet the majority of us were fitter and running around all over the place burning off all the sugar whereas these days more kids are likely to be just sat down watching tv and gaming x

This is really interesting! I ate nothing but coco pops for breakfast for probably about 12 years, and definitely had treats in my lunch box - I was a child of the 90s so think those colourful lunchpack Pringles tubs, mini Jaffa cakes, BNs, penguins, clubs etc.

BUT my mum was also a fantastic home cook and we ate delicious home cooked meals every night, along with always having plenty of fresh fruit and veg in our lunch. “Snack” was also really not in our vocabulary back then - if we wanted something outside of meals it really was “appleorangeorbanana” as my mum would say. I have tried to emulate that with my kids!

i agree, we had no snacks,
apart from one biscuit in the afternoon
although i did have milky tea with lots of sugar so the spoon would stand up, but that was the 1970s