THE 1970’s DIET - sun ch5 9pm

[Blondeshavemorefun]

A social experiment with Josie Gibson

who eats and drinks and exercises in the way they did in 1970’s

what can we learn from their diet

That's a great insight into another culture.
Never thought of that scenario.
Apart from the brilliant Goodness Gracious me sketch.
"Going for an English"

Lol I remember once she relented and did a shepherd's pie but made a Keema mince base. We moaned about it so much but now it's how I make it! My kids love it!

The main thing is that portions were much smaller. Meals out were a very rare thing. Takeaways weren't something I experienced until the early eighties.
My mother was a terrible cook and we didn't have much money when I was a child. It was all very basic. Weetabix or toast for breakfast. Dinner was sausages, pies or mince, or eggs cooked in various ways. Veg was all overcooked and tasteless in my Mother's pressure cooker. We never ate biscuits or cakes and snacking was fruit. Puddings were tinned fruit or very occasionally jelly with carnation milk. I wouldn't say it was a healthy diet really but people just weren't greedy or eating more than one serving. A lot of bread and butter.

When I went on diets in the seventies it was lettuce, cottage cheese and tomato. That was a salad. Ham was a big thing but I never ate it. I remember living off Vesta curries when I went Youth Hostelling with friends and thought they were so sophisticated!

I also remember though that everyone was obsessed with their weight and waist measurements. Women's statistics were quoted as a normal thing in magazines and on TV shows.

I'm a mid seventies child - youngest of 4 children eldest born end 1969. In the seventies my mum fed us cottage pie, spag bol, greek rissoles, marrow stuffed with mince and rice, her version of chicken risotto (it was more of a European take on a Biryani), savoury mince with potato, braised beef with potatoes, several types of soup (onion, celery, potato and leek were the main ones) egg and chips, roast beef and lamb with the trimmings. Sometimes we would have boiled eggs as a lunch or easy tea and we also had fish fingers, which I think we're just about the only frozen item we had bar peas. Puddings were angel delight, prunes, tinned peaches, fruit cocktail (tinned) with evap milk and on Sunday fruit crumble custard. I think we ate really well. We did have biscuits but I don't remember having loads. My dad gave us 2 squares of caburys chocolate once a week and we had a tin at Christmas. We drank diluted squash and tea. Moving into the 80s we had more casseroles with rice but kept the stuff from the 70s too.

"Oooh, that's really bland! You won't shit for a week!" 😂

I agree. I think the mid-to-late 70s were when the slide into convenience foods, fast foods and UPFs really started.

Prior to that the UK diet was largely healthy and seasonal, but in the late 70s mothers - especially working ones - were really targeted by companies peddling junk as quick, cheap and convenient. Now that most households had a freezer, places like Bejams were full of shite you could feed your family without having to shop every day. We were basically trailing 15-20 years behind America.

Years earlier my mum would make a pie from scratch before she left for work, with all fresh ingredients, but she really bought into the convenience revolution, and who could blame her? None of the health implications were understood at the time.

Having said that, everyone was still pretty skinny and healthy. Smoking was ubiquitous, but kids played outside because there was nothing else to do (not even daytime telly!) and portions were definitely much smaller then versus today’s (another US/fast food distortion).

There some weird faddy weight loss trends though - the diet industry was just as toxic for women even though most people were slim. I can remember my mum at one point subsisting on black coffee and grapefruit for days on end!

I was 12 in 1970. We didn’t have much money so dinner was 20 ways with mince, or egg/spam and chips. We occasionally had one of the Vesta meals, chow mein or chop suey.

My favourite lunch was Heinz baked beans with little sausages with a grating of cheese.

When I started work at 18 I sometimes bought my own dinner of a bag of crisps and a bar of chocolate, washed down with Coca Cola.

Breakfast was either a slice of white toast or a bowl of Cocopops.

Not a lot of f&v happening, but I did like tinned fruit with Carnation.

In the 60s I had the sugar and butter sandwiches mentioned above by a PP, I thought that was my mother's invention I didn't realise it was a thing!

I don’t think this was a good thing though 🤷‍♀️

“People weren’t greedy”

i was labelled a greedy kid. Like I said, I remember being hungry a lot as a kid but not allowed seconds, and food being witheld when I asked because I’d “had enough”.

it definitely stemmed from my mothers fear that I would put on weight. At primary school age. As a kid in competitive sports/dance training at least an hour every day. Then when that was stopped because I was getting “too muscly” I did start struggling with my weight- I didn’t become the desired skinny dainty teen, my muscle turned to fat and I was still constantly hungry from food being withheld.

it set me up for a lifetime battle with my weight and body image.

I was 15/16 in 1970 and as far back as I can remember, my mum always cooked an evening meal for us even though we had school meals until I was about 14.

We ate only seasonal fruit and veg as that was what you could get, we always had vegetables with our meals, we had biscuits and mum baked cakes sometimes and sweets but we didn't eat any of that to excess, just occasionally through the week.

We had puddings sometimes i.e. spotted dick, jam sponge, rice pudding etc. usually fresh fruit in the summer, strawberries being a favourite as we picked loads of them during the season as we were surrounded by lots of fields for picking.

Neither me or my brother had weight problems as we got into teenage years, we still did games/PE at school at least twice a week, we went by bus everywhere or walked or rode bikes.

We may not have had the choices we have today but despite the food maybe being stodgier, I don't think it had the additives or preservatives that we get now and as we were all so much more active on a daily basis, I think we burned off what we were eating.

I would say that out of my school year at that time, the number of overweight kids was around six or seven. Mainly girls, only two boys and by today's standards, they weren't really that big.

Has no one mentioned the nanna salad.

One piece of iceberg lettuce, a sliced tomato, sliced cucumber with salt (why?) and some tinned salmon or a cold boiled egg. And salad cream!

No Mumsnet "massive salad" back then 😊

We always had the sliced cucumber pickled in malt vinegar with rings of sliced onion! It was vile!

If mum pushed the boat out we had tinned Heinz vegetable salad and/or potato salad. It's one of my favourite memories of the salad Sunday tea, it was the only bit I really liked.

I hated tinned salmon and still do. Horrible stuff.

Mum was a good cook. We had delicious stews, home made soup, roasts, pork chops. Once I started secondary school the main meal was eaten when Dad got home in the evening. Plenty of fresh veg and seasonal fruit. Strawberries were a massive treat and the season so short. Mum baked regularly, I swear she got nervous if there was no cake in the house to offer visitors. Portions were definitely smaller and we were outside for most of the day playing,roller skating and riding our bikes.

My packed lunch consisted of salmon paste between two buttered slices of white bread. And a Penguin. Every day.

We never drank water in school except at lunch. The water bottle mafia weren't around then.

Plates we're smaller, no one was obese and fatness was stigmatised. No sympathy for people who indulged in "comfort eating" or complained of "food noise."

It was a different time indeed. Not better, just different.

If you like this I recommend Back in time for Dinner, BBC, a family spent a week in each decade with the food, really interesting.

To add to this, the decline of the 'traditional housewife' model - as time has progressed it has become more and more of a necessity for both parents to work, and the time/tiredness factor leads to use of convenience food.

I'm not advocating 'traditional' models - my mum was much happier when she returned to the workplace, but in those early days my dad's fairly average civil service wage was enough to keep us all, pay the mortgage and as time went on, to run a car and acquire things like a freezer and an automatic washing machine (none of which we had in the 70s, I assume because interest rates were so high on said mortgage). It was my mum's choice to go back to work in the 80s because she was completely bored once my sister and I were of any age where we were becoming independent and doing our own thing.

Once my mum was working again, when I was in my early teens, we had more money, we had the freezer, we'd got a microwave (oh, the novelty, microwaved soup was on the menu every day for lunch just to watch the bowl going round and round) and Bejam started supplying much more of our food! We also had a car by then, so no more carrying heavy shopping bags home on the bus.

Very similar to my packed lunches - either salmon or crab paste or leftovers from the Sunday roast in one round of sliced bread, plus Penguin, Club or two-finger Kitkat. And a flask of lemon squash to wash it down with. I had one of those plastic lunchbox and flask sets.

Paste in jars was very popular we had it a lot.
I was also going to post about my plastic lunch box with flask of squash. They used to have a character sticker in the front. We all had them. Would have been early 80s when I was in junior school.
Yes one sandwich and a chocolate biscuit.

Our puddings were custard, semolina, stewed fruit kind of thing-I still love these things now

Yes that’s exactly what we had with grandparents for Saturday tea. Always cucumber and onion in vinegar. I like it!

You also need to look at the daily exercise: walk/cycle/bus to work and school as even for families with cars it was not used for daily commuting or going to school. Even if you took the bus to school/work it would often involved quite a bit of walking.

I still buy crab, beef or salmon paste in jars. It's lovely on a Ryvita or similar for a summer lunch, with a bit of iceberg lettuce, what I do for a picnic is take the whole, sealed jar to keep it fresh, salad in a bag, and a knife to spread it on the crackers.

My favourite was rice pudding - I used to fight with my sisters for the caramelised skin. Ironically, the upf puddings were the treats along with a Viennetta for a ultimate treat.

I also really identify with the being told it’s nearly tea time you’ll spoil your appetite. Children being a bit hungry and ready for their meals was seen as a good thing.
We didn’t mither for stuff as it wasn’t the norm to be bought food or snacks out.
So we’d have lunch at home on a Saturday, go into town shopping and then have tea at my grandparents.
To be fair my elderly mum still eats and enjoys lots of things in this thread. I spot things in her fridge- Binghams potted beef and get blast from the past. Tinned fruit, stewed apples etc are still her staple puddings.

I sang that