What was your childhood diet?

CupOfChai

1985.

Mum stayed at home until we were a bit older, then she went back to work part-time, and dad worked. We had mostly some form of meat dish with potatoes and vegetables, but there were lots of variants of this so it wasn't like it was the same boring thing all the time. Sunday was always a roast, there were a couple of pasta dishes Mum did but pasta can only eaten about once a week as to have it more often is somehow bad for you, apparently XD. They ate rice too, but it was the packet savoury rice and also less frequent - I didn't eat this, it was the one thing I remember disliking. I've since grown to like normal rice haha. Fish was only consumed in the form of fish & chips or prawn cocktail. Mum cooked nearly all dinners entirely from scratch, and we had tinned puddings like rice pudding, semolina, tinned sponge and custard, and tinned fruit with arctic roll. She doesn't really bake but others in my family did/do and I baked with them when I was little.

As I got older things like potato waffles and fishfingers started appearing occasionally, I think because we'd then got a proper freezer so there was room to keep them, and occasionally had fish & chips, Chinese or Indian takeaway. Although we always ordered the exact same things from the takeaway every time!

I don't remember anyone explicitly teaching me to cook, I think I just absorbed it through some sort of osmosis since most of my family cook. I've got a bit more adventurous than my mum is, for instance I more often use forms of carbs other than potatoes, I cook with fish and shellfish and there's fresh garlic in my kitchen. But I also make some of the things she does, and I asked her to tell me how to do certain meals so I could carry on having them.

ETA: Bleurgh, Ready Brek! My dad eats that, it's vile filth!

flubberyzing

I was born in the mid 80s. As my older sister says, "I was older than I should have been before I realised pasta had a purpose beyond threading on string or sticking on paper!" Pasta didn't enter our household until my sister started cooking with in food tech lessons in the mid 90s. That being said, we did eat quite a lot of rice, but of the freeze-dried Batchelors stuff.

Otherwise we were very much a meat and veg family growing up. Mum had her bank of perhaps 15-20 meals that we cycled through. I remember the very exciting times of mum discovering a new recipe that she wanted to try! That's how fish pie and a "cheese and tomato sandwich pie" got adopted into the mix!

We ate a lot of boiled potatoes, which I was never (and still am not) fond of. Potatoes in their worst form I feel! I also remember eating a lot of cooked plum tomatoes! Mum also had a habit of never making gravy thick enough. So we just had a watery brown puddle on the plate.

All that being said, we were well fed as kids, never went hungry or felt deprived of what we liked. Mum tried to make sure she'd make each of our favourites reasonably often.

misspointy

I was born in 76 and remember hating the food i had to eat. We would often have meat and 2 veg meals - rabbit, pidgeon, goose, pheasant etc. My Dad was friendly with the gamekeepers and often we ate what he shot. Vegetables were potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower.....eww i'm starting to feel nauseous.

When I reached the age of 13 my stepmum (who I lived with) stopped cooking tea for me so i didn't bother eating any...:(. I worked most evenings so would nick something from there and spend my own pocket money on odd bits of food.

scottishminnie

What a great thread - isn't it amazing how life has changed?!

I was born in 69 and grew up in the country. My grandparents had a farm, as did my parents however my mother was a "townie" and had worked in London for some time before she met my father so was quite experienced in dinner party cooking.

At home breakfast was weetabix with butter- I got it in a brown paper bag to eat on the school bus.

If I was at my grandparents then breakfast was a slice of porridge. There was a big oak dresser and each morning the porridge was made and served - anything left over was poured into a small dresser drawer (never used for anything else) so if you were hungry at any point you cut a slice of porridge.

Milk came from our own cows- we drank the unpasteurised stuff straight from the tank. There was an endless supply of milk!

Granny had hens so one of my daily chores was finding where they had been laid and collecting them as the hens roamed wherever they wanted.

There was a big veggie garden and orchard at the farm and my mothers garden had many fruit bushes so we didn't want for fruit and veg.

A couple of times each year a friend of my grandfather's would come and butcher a bullock and perhaps some sheep. Took place on a special table in an outhouse at the farm and mum and granny would bag up the meat, label and freeze it.
We stayed near a reservoir and often men (I guess they were poachers as it happened overnight) would leave a big fish in a pail at the back door.

Because mum had been Cordon Blue trained she made some amazing meals - I learnt to caramelize satsumas at a very early age! Granny was the baker and there was never such a thing as bought biscuits in either house - god forbid!

I never had a takeaway or anything like fish fingers, angel delight or fizzy juice unless I visited "townie" friends and their foods seemed so exotic.

Treats were sugar sandwiches, a bag of sugar and a stalk of rhubarb for dipping, jelly with fruit in (was quite advanced in the 70's) and on very rare occasions a bottle of cream soda which mum would use to make ice cream floats. Absolute heaven!

It wasn't all roses though - there was a spell when money was really tight and like someone else said mum would flit around while dad and I were having dinner. I now know it was because there wasn't enough to go round and when I was first married we didn't have much money and I did the same with my husband on many occasions. Didn't do me any harm, in fact maybe I should do it now and I might lose a few pounds!

It's only reading this that I realise how lucky I was compared to some.

p.s I do remember going shopping with my mother once to "Woolco" (think it may have been Asda in a past life) and asking for yogurt - she was most dismissive and said it was "only for hippies"!)

Kathy535

B. 1968

With hindsight, we were v poor but I never really realised until I was an adult. Mum used to buy a big sack of spuds from the market and would scrub them (as all the vitamins are just under the skin) until they became too manly and then she would cut the black bits out. I remember her hands being red raw from the cold water.

Our diet was nutritious and healthy but fairly dull. Breakfast was cereal, cornflakes, rice crispier or weetabix. At Christmas we might have sugar puffs or golden nuggets but they were full of sugar and therefore bad for you. Lunch was homemade soup (made from meat and poultry bones, pearly alley, rice, lentils and veg), made in the pressure cooker and served as a lumpy soup for the first few days and then liquidised and served smooth. Dinner was meat, potatoes and veg - mince was cheap and eeked out with TVP, bacon fat was poured over potatoes and veg for taste (yum), fish and chicken were very rare but offal was common - we had kidneys and rice, liver casserole but never tripe, my dad wouldn't have stood for that! Mum still doesn't eat much meat as she gave most of it to my dad (manual labour) and us kids (growing bodies). There was always a pudding, mainly based around fruit from the garden, apple pie, rhubarb crumble, blackcurrant pudding etc. She was a constant baker and there was always something cooking in the oven, often somewhat bizarre inventions. She made her own bread, it was like a brick. Dad had piles, so everything (even jelly) had bran added.

We knew spaghetti but no other pasta. Brown rice was full of husks but we had to at it because it was good for you. Lots and lots of veg and salad.

There was a pattern to food - breakfar, morning snack (fruit), lunch, afternoon snack ( after school - cake, fruit bread), dinner and supper (milky pudding, fruit). Snacks were fruit and veg. If we wanted food between the standard then there was water in the tap and bread in the bread bin. Squash was for special occasions and watered down till the water was barely cloudy.

When I went to high school I was allowed 50p per day for school dinners, that bought me chips and beans. Alternatively, mum's packed lunch would be homemade pizza (2" thick), fruit and veg sticks - I got teased constantly.

Comparing it with today's food, meat was scarce, potatoes and veg were plentiful and made up the bulk of the meal. We got loads of exercise through walking the 2 miles and back to school and playing in the garden and local park. Hardly any sweets / sweet things but fat was liberally added to food.

sparklefrog

born 1966
cereal for breakfast, school dinner or sandwich/beans on toast for lunch
evening meal was meat and two veg or scouse
The meat was usually spam/brawn/liver/tinned ham/sausage, basically the cheap stuff
Most meals contained potato. so it would alternate between chips/boiled/ mash and roast on a sunday.
mum wasnt a big veg fan so we got either beans/peas or cauliflower.
no puddings but maybe 2 biscuits. except sunday when she would do heinz sponge pudding (1 tin between 5) drowned in custard.
Drinks were either milk or water from the tap.
during the 70's my dads wage improved and my mum got a freezer and discovered processed foods. so it was all crispy pancakes chicken kiev balls, hamburgers and pizzas. Basically all crap.

[Deleted User]

It seems reading through the posts that diet has changed radically over the past 40-50 odd years .my generation wouldn't have known what 5-a-day meant and would probably have thought it was cigarettes :)My Dds gennerations (67 &69) had far better food as lots of herbs and spices were coming on to the market so I would cook any new recipe that was available in the magazines.Pasta and rice, which were great and when I was little unheard of (although rice was always in pudding form)With the advent of freezers the diets improved 100% as you didn't have to go shopping every day and could maybe go twice a week.I can remember when I first had a fridge with a tiny ice box at the top being so excited because I could have a packet of frozen peas in there :) I also remember making ice cream (what a slog it was as well all that freezing and taking it out and beating it again every so often )I learned the joys of Bejams and buying ice cream in a box ready made :)So exciting to be able to buy out of season vegatables though
Now my grandchildren don't think that the freezer is a wonderful thing its just the big cold cupboard in the kitchen or the square chest in the hall,nothing special about it.I can remember lovingly wiping the outside of mine down every couple of days so it shone, and yelling at the kids if they kept opening the doors I was convinced the inside food would melt immediately.Life is so different today to what it was 60 + years ago.I am happy with some of the technology that we have but I think sometimes we have lost a little bit of magic when things are no longer exciting to buy or own.I certainly wouldn't want to return to mangles and cold water tin baths or milk kept in a tin bucket of water to keep fresh,but I do have good memories of people helping each other out in the tough times and children playing in the street together.If you fell over and Mum wasn't on the scene someones Mum would pick you up smear a bit of pink Germolene on your knee and give you a hug and you went back to play again with your friends.Today its rare you see children playing like that and youngsters in the streets are seen as a threat to some folk.I always try to smile at my local kids as its better to smile at them than scowl and grumble we have all been children once and they do grow up so quickly.My DGS use my house as a half way house on the way back from the swimming baths and often I will be feeding not only them but several of their hungry pals with cake and biscuits and squash.Consequently I do seem to know and get a smile from lots of the loacl lads as they know I am Jack & Henry's Granny and good for a biscuit :)

marisco_2

Such a beautiful, heartwarming post JackieO. Thank you for sharing with us.

dogcat_2

Tiglath wrote: »

I was born in the 60s. Food was very plain - every meal was meat of some kind with potatoes and other veg grown on the allotment (endless stringy runner beans, boiled greens). A roast every Sunday but no leftovers were used; I presume they went in the bin as Dad always took cheese sandwiches to work. A shepherds pie or steak and kidney pud was considered adventurous. Friday night treat was something from the seafood van by the local pub. Salads were a slice of ham, a lettuce leaf, a tomato, maybe a few slices of cucumber, and salad cream (we weren't posh or adventurous enough to have mayonnaise). No herbs or spices of any kind - only salt and occasionally pepper. No pasta apart from sweet macaroni pud, no rice except rice pud, no pizzas. Once we got a freezer in the 70s the parents discovered Bejams, so it was boil in the bag sliced beef, frozen individual mousses, arctic roll etc. Dad always had a cooked breakfast (egg, bacon, fried bread, or bacon cooked in tinned tomatoes), we tended to have cereal. We always had a pudding - apple pie/crumble, milk-based or tinned fruit with evaporated milk/sterilised cream; we used to fight over the cherries in fruit cocktail. Tea was always made in the pot from leaves, with a woolly cosy added and brought in on a tray - it was Dad's special 8pm ritual. Christmas treats were a box of dates and some mixed nuts + raisins.

I remember having coq au vin at a friend's in the 70s - it was a taste explosion. So many things I didn't have till uni - coffee, yoghurts, tuna, mushrooms, brown bread ... the smell I most remember from home was Dad's homemade wine in the airing cupboard (which never got drunk - I think he used to give it away at work) and homemade marmalade. Overall it was simple but fairly healthy, I think. It left me with a lifelong love of liver, and my go-to meal is still meat, spuds and peas.

Ha ha....this made me chuckle......this could have been my childhood........:rotfl::D

Josslette

I was born in 1990.

My parents both had(and still have) good jobs that paid well so buying food was never really an issue for them it was all just very healthy.

Both my parents were very educated about healthy food and my mum used to order lots of health food from Suma like dried fruit, oats, lentils, beans and they had an organic veg bag delivered weekly too.

Everything we had was organic for a long time, I used to hate having organic food because I felt like I was different at school.

I never drank(and still don't) milk so my mum used to send me to school with cartons of organic juice with either a smiley apple or orange on the carton.

I used to take packed lunches to school and they always used to be cheese and cucumber sandwiches and fruit. Or sometimes left over veggie Dominos pizza, that was the best lunch ever and only ever happened when my dad had been away on buisness.

About 95% of meals were home made and cooked by mum during the week and dad at weekends.

When I was 5 and my brother was 7, he decided to turn vegetarian and seeing as my mum didn't want to cook 2 meals every night we all turned pretty much vegetarian.

She used to make Lentil lasagne, minestrone soup, broccoli soup, boiled eggs and leeks in cheese sauce with jacket potatoes, weird lentil and veg crumbles with breadcrumbs and seeds on the top(bleugh), quiche, salad and jacket potatoes, strange veggie stews with jacket potatoes, big fresh morrisons pizzas sliced up and served with salad. I also remember her cooking a lot of quorn in sauces, I think they were ready meals.

My dad used to make roast chicken and roast dinners in general, baked salmon, roasted veg, cauliflower cheese and amazing roast potatoes.

There was always loads of vegetables and if we had meat my brother had vegetarian sausages.

We weren't really allowed sweets and junk unless it was a birthday or holiday. But when my dad took us swimming every friday night he used to buy us something from the vending machines but we weren't allowed to tell mum lol. I normally chose chewits

Birthday parties were always awesome when it came to junk food, my mum used to organise them all and we got to make our own ice cream sundaes(4 flavours of ice cream, loads of sweets, spray cream, sauces), make our own pizzas with loads of toppings and she always used to make me this marbled birthday cake with melted chocolate as the topping which was studded with loads of different sweets. I NEED to re create that lol.
We also played a game where they were loads of smarties on a tray and we all had to try and pick them up by sucking them up with a straw and putting them in our own cups.

When I became a teenager I really got interested in cooking and used to cook most week nights and always wanted to cook the sunday roast or cook it with my dad.

But yeah, I really think my parents gave me a good start regarding food, I love pretty much all food and really love lots of healthy food too. I've never had a filling I am overweight but that's not due to the diet my parents fed me, thats due to being greedy, eating takeaways and having a really bad sweet tooth! :rotfl:but I am trying to lose the weight at least

I wonder if my mum will read this, she does browse the old style forum. Hi Tiddles!