What kids eat now compared with what you had at their age

We had a large garden and my dad grew most of the veg we needed, the butcher delivered twice a week and the fishmonger on a Friday. We had a joint of beef, pork or lamb on a Sunday and cheaper cuts like stewing beef, belly pork, mince, sausage, liver etc in the week served with fresh veg and potatoes. Chicken was reserved for Christmas when we had a capon, occasionally we’d have a chicken at Easter. My mum was a good baker and we rarely had brought cakes, we’d eat what was in season, rhubarb or gooseberries out of the garden made into a crumble or pie, homegrown strawberries & raspberries with a block of ice cream or carnation milk or made into jam for cakes & tarts, we also had apple, pear and plum trees. Both grandmas and my mum pickled onions, red cabbage etc and made homemade lemon curd. We had very few snacks, maybe one bag of crisps a week each with our Sunday tea and the odd custard cream or cream crackers, occasionally we’d have something like a club biscuit or Taxi bar. We always had a full fruit bowl but would have half a piece of fruit each rather than a whole one. I didn’t start eating yoghurt till I was about 12 when Ski came in churn shaped pots, my favourite was the pineapple flavour but I only got one occasionally as a treat. Now & then we would have fish and chips but other than that no takeaways, we might have a crusty cheese & onion or ham cob at a country pub in the summer. I can’t remember people having takeaway coffees back then either.
I suppose one of the biggest differences now is the variety and availability of food products. Also the massive increase in the number of takeaways and meals out people have. Lots of restaurants and pubs now welcome families which didn’t happen when I was a child although I don’t think we would have been able to afford eating out all the time. We now have some great restaurants and delicious foods from different cultures available in the supermarkets.Unfortunately a lot of the popular snack foods and takeaways are just full of junk. Looking back we had quite a healthy well balanced diet.

We did also have great desserts tho. I remember in particular a baked jam roly poly. Heaven!
With custard! Yum

My mother made curry with leftover meat from the Sunday joint with curry powder.

However, the first time I tasted Spaghetti Bolognaise was when it was cooked by another girl when I was 18.

The thing is, when many of us were young, there just was not the variety of food stuffs readily available to buy in the shops that there is now, so our diets tended to be plainer

There was still rationing for years after WW2 too.

My mum was a very plain cook but my dad was a good adventurous cook. A lot of his dishes were based around roadkill. We lived in the country and it was not at all unusual for him to appear with a rabbit, hare or pheasant which he would pluck or skin and then cook. Judged hare was a favourite of his - but not mine!! He would also make curries in the frying pan, which meant we had yellow fried eggs for days after.

My diet in the 50s was plain but nutritious. All cooked from scratch of course. Meat pies and puddings, liver, a chop, stews, sausages and plenty of fruit and veg grown by Dad. Fish on Fridays. Always homemade cake, fruit pies and steamed puddings and occasionally jelly and blancmange. A roast on Sundays but never chicken as it was very expensive then. Turkey for Christmas and maybe chicken for Easter. I remember how wonderful fish fingers and beef burgers were when they appeared, also Birds Instant Whip which was replaced by the much more sugary Angel Delight. And of course eventually the exotic Vesta packet meals, only for me as a teenager though! Mum didn’t cook curries or pasta. I think Dad preferred plain English cooking, and she was good at that. And yes, though Mum was always very generous with food plate sizes and therefore portion sizes were smaller then.
What I wouldn’t give to enjoy Mum’s cooking with her again!

Being born at the end of the war I didn’t have much choice but it was good food Nan especially was a good cook as mum was out at work
Lots of mince gravy potatoes and fresh veg Nan made her own ginger beer and meat loaf and we had sweetbreads and liver and kidney's, shepherds pie, cheese and potato pie
Jam on toast, tongue sandwiches, celery, pork pies … cheese, tinned fruit with evaporated milk and trifle rice pudding
Snacks were bread and jam ,dripping on toast, biscuits or smiths crisps with a blue packet of salt
Usually a cooked breakfast egg bacon fried bread

we also started the day with a cooked breakfast and porridge..my mum was a fantastic cook, especially with pastries and cakes, and she was very generous with her range of jams and chutneys.. all her friends were given a jar. We would also go fruit picking in a local smallholding and she would bottle and tin them so we always had fruit in the winter.. Dad grew all our vegetables.. we were very well nourished and like others I wish they were still here

My main memories of childhood meals are beef with gristle, lamb fat which I still loathe (you must eat it it's good for you!) very stringy runner beans and endless boiled potatoes. My mother didn't like cheese so that rather limited flavours. I loved macaroni cheese but only had it a few times at my grandmothers The only cheese in our house was kept for Dad's sandwiches even cauliflower was served with a plain white sauce instead of a cheese sauce. What a revelation it was when I met my husband with his Italian background! Living in central London he was surrounded by delis full of lovely stuff.

Near with gristle - school dinners 😲

Meat !!

Sorry, one eye on dinosaurs 🦕

I’m Cornish, so was brought up by a Cornish mother.

So breakfast was often bread and milk with butter and sugar (yum). The milk was always unpasteurised from Monica the milk lady and we used to go out to her van with jugs to be filled.

Other breakfast was bread, jam and of course clotted cream or cream my mother made especially in the summer. The milk was scalded and left overnight then skimmed. The scalded milk didn’t go off so quickly.

Mum used to pack up 2 buttered jacobs cream crackers wrapped in grease proof paper to eat with my mid-morning milk

Dinner (midday) varied, but roast of course usually beef.
Cold meat and mashed potato
Meat and potato pie with vegetables
Fried hogs pudding, egg and chips
Salad in the Summer
And of course beef, turnip and potato pasties

We always had a pudding many based on milk. So rice, macaroni, tapioca, apple pie and custard, they also grew all soft fruit, so my absolute favourite was raspberry and red current tart and clotted cream. Strawberries. Blackcurrant tart. Gooseberries. I can remember walking amongst the bushes collecting ladybirds.
Tea would be usually something cooked but also cake like saffron cake - which I still love.

Sometimes bread and milk for supper.

Blimey and I was as thin as a griddle all my childhood in fact thin until the menopause.

Oh yes mountains of runner beans in the summer.

My MIL used to make clotted cream, that was when the milk came delivered in churns and poured into jugs.
Of course, it was Devon clotted cream, Whitewave 😀

Saffron cake - we used to buy one every Friday at the place I worked at in Devon and have it with our afternoon tea. Lovely.

Rice pudding - my mother's speciality. Bread and butter pudding, apple pies .........

And of course beef, turnip and potato pasties
Well, that's proper Cornish!

swede, Whitewave

Oh, for a proper pasty

We always had plain food growing up, meat and two veg. My Granda had a huge market garden and fields of potatoes so a lot of stuff came from there. I remember the chip pan though, full of lard, everything that came out if it was probably a heart attack on a plate. I don't think I had anything fancy until my first girls holiday in Spain. The kids now eat all sorts, they have so much to choose from.

My mother would never have claimed to be much of a cook, although she baked a good cake. My older sister was born in April and me in August so our two birthday and Christmas were evenly spaced through the year and there was a Christmas-type rich fruit cake for each occasion. After I'd had a birthday party once when I was still quite little Mum said one of my friends' mothers complained that children don't like rich fruit cake but she replied quite rightly that nobody had told her two that. We would have mutinied otherwise. I remember sponges with jam, lemon curd and/or butter cream, butterfly cakes and various tarts. There was a well-thumbed and dog-eared copy of the Be-Ro book in a kitchen drawer.

Sundays was always a roast; lamb or beef mostly, pork less often and chicken only an occasional treat, in summer I think because when I think of it I think of new potatoes and fresh garden peas which I enjoyed helping to pod. Otherwise it was mashed potatoes, brutally-boiled veg and Bisto gravy, often with lumps in. I still can't hear With A Song In My Heart without feeling a little queasy! There would be pudding to follow; a steamed pud or a fruit pie or crumble (rhubarb, blackcurrants or gooseberries from the garden in season, oh joy!) with custard, maybe rice pudding, maybe banana custard.

Sunday tea would typically be a salad of lettuce, tomato, sliced hard-boiled egg, cucumber with tinned salmon, tinned sardines or whatever was the tin of the week; tinned peaches or pears usually with sterilised cream, which I wouldn't eat, but occasionally with ice cream. There was always bread-and-jam, cake and tea to wash it down.

Midweek tea when dad got home from work would have been cold leftover roast with chips or mash on Monday, often fish on Tuesday because that's when the fresh fish van came round, otherwise variations on egg, sausage, fish fingers, luncheon meat with chips or mash, or maybe beans on toast. Plus bread and jam, cake and tea of course.

Grandparents don't really register with me on the food front. All three of the grandparents I knew were in their 60s by the time I came along, and they lived a hundred miles away which in pre-motorway days was a long trek in a hired car through Liverpool, Preston and Lancaster (there's a reason why Preston and Lancaster got very early motorway bypasses) or by train. I can't remember eating at my Grandma's (dad's side) except that she did toast on the toasting fork (or "forking toast" as I once put it and was never allowed to forget) in front of the fire, which I thought was really cool (the act, not the toast or the fire). At Nanna and Granddad's the food was much as I described for Sundays at home. Their house smelled of a mixture of boiled cabbage, boiled washing (Nanna had a dolly-tub and mangle complete with dolly-peg and posser, if any of you remember those), Granddad's pipe and outside privy. It's one of those unforgettable smells I can conjure up any time. Oh, and they were inordinately fond of sago and tapioca pudding with the tinned fruit, which I wouldn't eat. I wouldn't eat the crusts of my bread and butter either. They told me if I didn't eat my crusts my hair wouldn't curl but that was a dirty rotten lie – I take after my mother hairwises and had thick, naturally wavy locks much to the disgust of my big sister who inherited dad's thin, straggly hair!

I wouldn't eat the crusts of my bread and butter either. They told me if I didn't eat my crusts my hair wouldn't curl but that was a dirty rotten lie – I take after my mother hairwises and had thick, naturally wavy locks

It's DH who tells me off now for not eating my crusts. I must have eaten too many as a child because my hair is neither nicely wavy nor lovely curls - it's an unruly mess which needs taming.

Growing up on an arable farm I ate vegetables - a lot of them. My Mum was very good at putting together a tasty, nutritious meal out of not very much. There was meat for protein each day, fish on Friday and a pudding at the weekend. I’m sure my diet was more healthy then than it is now. When he returned from the old Covent Garden market my Dad usually had fruit with him, often uncommin for the time, the gift of traders who had become friends. I would probably have preferred a bag of sweets back then!

The young members of our family cook and eat a far wider range of food. Much more spice, fewer vegetables. We’ve been out with family for a meal this evening. The teenagers confidently ordered their steaks, knowing how they would like them cooked and the cut they each prefer. I didn’t know steak existed when I was 14 or indeed 17. Different times for sure. Different is of course not necessarily a bad thing although I do think it a shame that although the teenagers confidently order steak and can cook a stir fry or curry from scratch they have no idea how to make a tasty cottage pie from very little.

I remember huge dinners and banquets for visitors. There was always loads to eat s we were very 'well fed'. We weren't allowed anything 'common' like fish fingers, evaporated milk, chips, jam etc. I felt (and was) sick an awful lot - being lactose intolerant, so gradually found out what to avoid. There was pressure to finish your meal and clear your plate.

I was vegetarian from an early age so mostly veg and fruit from our garden, eaten at the dreaded dinner table, trying hard not to look at the huge chunks of dismembered dead animals - so enjoyed by the rest of the family. I did love the snacks, cakes and puddings, though.

Now, the kids eat curries, pasta, pizza - so many things unheard of then but seem to have fewer vegetables and salads, sadly.

I always believed other people had better food than us and now I know it was true!

I have little memory of early post war rationing apart from what I was told

My dad, who died when I was 5, made up a rhyme about me

She won't eat cabbage and she won't eat beans,
She dislikes carrots and hates her greens,
She eats potatoes for politeness sake,
But the only thing she really likes is mummy's chocolate cake!

I did eventually learn to like vegetables and have been a vegetarian for over 30 years

Breakfast was porridge, cornflakes or all-bran.
School dinners at lunch time or a packed lunch of jam or cheese sandwiches, or a buttered pancake.
For dinners I remember sausages, mince (I hated the mince my mother made), bacon, liver, all with potatoes and usually green vegetables, though I also remember getting carrots. Roasts were cooked on Sundays.
I remember a lot of very simple salads and frequent homemade vegetable soup.
My mother was a great baker but not a great cook. She made 3 Victoria sponges every week, (without a mixer), one for our family and one for each set of grandparents. Her fruit cakes were wonderful.

Our DGC seem to eat a lot of pasta
When I was young you had macaroni or spaghetti but not much else.
I don't remember having chips though fish supper from the fish shop was a treat.
I don't think crisps were a thing.

Growing up working class in Liverpool we had scouse (like Irish stew but with a bit of everything in it) in a big pan which was made to last 2/3 days. That was the evening meal. Or sausage and mash. Bread and butter and tea with everything.

I loved visiting my grandmother because we had afternoon tea on beautiful china plates with delicious cream cakes and sandwiches cut into triangles. It was in my grandmothers' that I learned to appreciate coffee.

My parents scoffed at that as "posh" and "middle class" but I adored it.

I remember the oranges we got then were very dry and I didn't get a proper juicy one until I left home and went to Portugal on holidays. They still had rationing when I was very young. Funny thing is, you could get pomegranites from the local greengrocers down in SE London. As for curry- well they had some awful powder but not many bothered.

GD, 15, is a pescatarian.

When I was growing up, you tended to eat anything put before you.

Can’t recall anyone with allergies or intolerances, if you didn’t eat certain stuff you were just labelled ‘a fussy eater’.

My DH came from a family of 8, don’t think any of them were fussy. It was noticeable at school how those from large families were the hungriest, and the dinner ladies made sure they were first in the line for ‘seconds’.