The thing about eating like your grandparents is total bollocks. A few rationing years notwithstanding, diet was stunningly bad for most working people in postwar Britain - full of very processed food, tinned/canned stuff, cheap ingredients. A few people might have cooked nice food from scratch, but in their working-class community my grandparents, like most others, ate cheap food that was just as bad or worse than any UPF foods today. Spongy white bread with the cheapest meat paste on it, cheap jam, processed cakes (Mr Kipling and so on), builders’ tea nonstop with four sugars a cup, Fray Bentos pies, crab sticks, deep fried chips, processed hamburgers, Spam, Club and Penguin biscuits. A vegetable or fruit was rarely in evidence apart from a very rare banana, tinned peaches, and the odd glass of Vimto or Ribena (Ribena was originally a wartime supplement designed to stop British children getting scurvy).
Neither of my grandmothers were good cooks. Boiled potatoes (the cheap waxy kind with eyes) and a canned suet pie were their staples. One of my grandmothers simply gave up cooking at all in her sixties, and lived for thirty years after that just grazing on Mr Kipling cakes and sweet tea.
Processed foods made out of industrial food waste are much older than most people think. Why do you think Margaret Thatcher was busy using her chemistry degree working on soft serve ice cream? Cheap meat paste was made from connective tissue meat slurry long before Turkey Twizzlers were invented. Spam and other canned meat products were chock full of processed animal fats. Margarine and lard were staples for baking and for just about everything else.
Cooking decent food from scratch was something that was much more an interest of my parents’ boomer era. If you were middle class or lived in the country between the forties and the nineties then maybe you ate a decent diet. Most postwar working class people really didn’t — same problems as today, in which it was far cheaper to get spongy white bread, tinned food and eat chips, fried egg and marg, than to be eating fresh seasonal produce (plus, before the mid to late 80s/early 90s, air freighted or hydroponic-grown food was quite rare: it wasn’t yet the era of strawberries and grapes all year round).
If you’re wondering why they were less fat than today, it was largely portion size. And in postwar Britain everyone smoked like chimneys. Remember the days when leftovers were the norm? In my childhood it was rare to eat something you liked every day — you ate what was there or what needed using up, not what you fancied.
Today, we not only can access a huge variety of foods, but expect to eat things we feel like eating at every meal, as well as multiple helpings of it. It’s nicer, we don’t smoke so much, we have abundant food, we eat too much as a result. I for one certainly wouldn’t eat as much as I do, if what was on offer was the diced tinned swede, lumpy boiled spuds and grey flat hamburgers with thick Bisto that my maternal grandmother used to produce; or the gristly meat paste sandwiches on cheap Kwik Save bread that my paternal grandmother used to dish up. (Even with a Blue Riband biscuit or a Mr Kipling fruit pie with Elmlea for afters.)