I loved Jodi's comment on another thread (and didn't want to hijack it, so I'm commenting here).

She wrote:

"i find it extreme that since about oh... the 1950's its become so obscure to eat fruits and vegetables. there used to be a time when parents would lament little johnny wouldnt eat his peas"


I was born in the 50's and remember that the majority of people I knew really did used to eat more fruits and vegetables then. There were only a few "burger joints" but no fast food places, yet. Lots of people grew some vegetables. One family had an empty lot that they had turned into a huge fruit and vegetable garden. At my house whenever we'd ask for a snack, my mom would always say, ""Eat a piece of fruit." And we ALWAYS had veggies at meals. I remember being shocked to see soft drinks and potato chips at a friend's house. I didn't know that people brought that kind of food into their homes because I only ever had it at picnics away from home.

Fast forward to present day: I travelled recently with a woman and her four-year-old daughter. In three days I never saw her give her daughter any fruit or vegetable!!! At one restaurant the child asked for some of my lettuce (which I gave her) and her mother was amazed when she ate it. The mother was "well-educated and wealthy" but I could only think how the child was "a poor little rich kid."


My favorite raw vegan

Trive,
The mentioning of "few burger joints" had me thinking what it would be like to go into a time machine and go down an average main road in an average town,say in the 1940's ,and see how it was...................
No burger joints every 200 yards,no atm's,no gas stations with mini marts attached where you could buy pretty much junk,and very small basic produce sections in mom and pop markets.
How it must have been.....

Vinny

yep wheni pop into my time machine i remember huge front yards , in urban vancouver no less ! , full of veggie gardens and fruit trees

fruit was alaways in the lunch bag (anyone else remember bananas making everything in their lunch smell like bananas lol)

dinner was always started with a salad

ahh dear , strange thing what they call progress these days *sigh*

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist

I was born in 1956 and grew up in a suburban environment. My siblings and I heard 'eat a piece of fruit' if we wanted a snack--my parents didn't buy snack food like potato chips. Every so often my parents would make popcorn for us--it was a Big Deal. We also had veggies with meals. However, we also ate a lot of stuff like tuna noodle casserole, meat loaf, and so on. My mom had a meat grinder that she would clamp onto the table and she would grind her own hamburger meat--it was cheaper than buying it pre-ground. We got milk and eggs delivered. (Sorry--I know this is a vegan site, but that was how it was in my family back then.)

I can remember a wringer washer in our basement--I think it dated from when my parents got married in the early 1940s. My mother used to hang clothes out to dry (on rainy days, the clothes would be hung in the basement). We didn't get a dryer until the late 1960s. Our refrigerator was so much smaller than the ones today and needed to be de-frosted. My mom used to go grocery shopping fairly often--due to the small size of the refrigerator, and the small size of our kitchen, it wasn't possible to stock up.

Everything had to be ironed--I remember filling an old coke bottle full of water and using a special stopper on the bottle to sprinkle the clothes to dampen them before ironing them. Sheets got ironed too.

People certainly lived smaller back then, at least our family did. I look back on this with some fondness, actually.

Ha! I grew up in the 70s and 80s, in suburban Detroit, and we had homecooked meals, preceded by large salads(except at breakfast, which was fruit and cooked cereal from the hfs), and always bowls of ripe fruit on the sideboard[some from the fruit trees in the back yard] for snacks and desserts--I didn't even know what a Pop Tart was until I was halfway through gradeschool! Bread was home baked or bought at a European bakery, and water, home made ice tea or real lemon aid were the usual beverages. Cake was had only on someone's birthday, and it was home made. We had Coke, in the teeny bottles of yore, only twice or thrice a year. My one grandma taught us how to harvest and preserve crabapples and blackcurrants from our trees and bushes, and we went mushroom gathering with the other grandma in nearby meadows; she also taught us how to harvest roses from my mother's bushes for preserves and syrup. I still love to chew Hansa rose petals! My grandpa put in two gardens in the backyard and fought to keep those fruit trees fecund. What a singular sensual experience it is to eat a peach right off the tree or an ear of corn right off the stalk. You could eat anything back there instantly, just pull it off the plant and chow down--the beginnings of my Raw Foodism! And with all of that, we still had room for a steel playset and a lawn on which to play, so it was typical suburbia anyhow.

It is so sad how kids today are growing up--it's such a sterile existence . . .

Yes jodis comment really had me thinking, im not old myself but i seen my gran and grandads principles towards food and there was no processed snacks like biscuits etc, everything was you want a snack you eat some fruit, every meal would be cooked with fresh ingredients big family get togethers rather than quick rapid processed meals get it over and done with, always lots of vegetables sometimes even homegrown etc.

ive seen them slip now that they cant be bothered eating healthy anymore, they just eat all the processed junk crap they can find these days. Sad really as we havent progressed as a nation much we've made things simpler everywhere, got a skin problem cover it temporarly with a cream, feeling abit down take anti-depressants, lazy cant be bothered cooking a decent meal use the microwave.

I'm not even 40 yet but my grands ate like GARBAGE. Lots of homecooked, lots of veg heated to mush, nothing healthy. My dad's dad though, old Ukrainian stock, made everything from scratch. He had it going on that old granddaddy o' mine.
My mom, bless her hippy heart, was the one who had us living a simple life and eating healthy foods. No tv, a small garden, a fire place and solar panels on the house (in downtown Windsor no less!), and find your fun outside kids.

My kids have it made.

What i also find interesting being born and bread in the UK although some europeans diets are very rich some of them eat rather healthy very raw based ive found.

i remember my mom packing my lunch for school , it always had its ABC (apple , banana, citrus)

3 peices of fruit for the day , that was her motto

now i cant even get her to suck on a single grape lol

coco my mom cooked everything to anhilation too ;p my dad on the otherhand was alot more lean to the fresh is best side

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/23/2010 03:40AM by Jgunn.

Tamukha, you sure were lucky! You too coco!

I was born in 1950, and I remember the banana in my lunchbox and everything in there smelling like bananas! (including the squished liverworst sandwich).

Probably most of our parents did their best, with some good stuff and some not so good. My father was on a "bland" diet, which meant we never had salads. But my mother did what she'd been told was best: chicken noodle soup when we were sick, and dinners always included meat (never fried), a starch (always white), one mushy yellow vegetable and one mushy green vegetable.

And of course a glass of milk with every meal (for healthy bones you know).

And how about that whiter than white "Wonderbread?" "Builds strong healthy bodies twelve ways!"

But we almost always had oranges, and we could eat them for snacks, along with an occasional - not everyday - hostess cupcake, twinkie, or fig newton.

We had Koolaid in the house when we were very little, but we never had sodas unless we were on a road trip. I think a bottle of cream soda (our favorite) was 10 cents from the gas station vending machines.

In the summer, we would go up to the mountains and pick wild blueberries. And we would stop at roadside farm stands and get the best apples and cider, like you wouldn't even believe!

I grew up in a small town in Michigan in the 60's and 70's. Eating/cooking was a bit schizophrenic: my mom had a huge veggie garden and would regularly pick and serve fresh produce for us to eat, as well as can and freeze. However, she also bought into all of the new "time-saving" processed food products that were starting to be so popular back then: Hamburger Helper (yuck!- and SO salty); packaged cake mixes; instant mashed potatoes; pop tarts; sugar cereals...).

Again, soda pop was never bought, but Kool-aid "Tang" were always available.

Summers were spent away at my Grandparent's humongous farm in rural Ohio, for my brother and me. We ate only fresh produce from the farm, and ran around like crazy. (I never knew that mashed potatoes could be created from picking and smashing actual potatoes...). I always seemed to come back home leaner and, well, happier...

It's funny because my Grandparents lived out here where we are now in farm country so they had fresh food galore. We did have lots of cukes and tomatoes in summertime and corn on the cob lots and lots but it was all loaded with salt and/or butter and all the other veggies were cooked to death and the lovely fresh fruit baked into pies (crisco crust). Gross. Everything was super salty or super sweet. My grandma was a fat little butterball.

My nan & gramps have ALWAYS had veg with their meals. I don't think I've ever not seen them make a dinner without lots of greens!

But growing up, my own parents didn't have much money so a lot of our veg came from tins (gross gross gross!) which really put me off my dinner. Still, I'd get told off for not eating my peas and being told I couldn't have pudding unless I ate them!

coco Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My grandma was a fat little
> butterball.

That makes her sound so cute!

A child in the UK in the 60s - 90% of my fruit was in cans, in syrup!

I wasn't born until 1986, but I lived with my grandparents until I was eleven. Every night we had fresh homecooked meals. Usually consisting of fresh vegetables, some sort of meat like chicken breast, and a starch like cornbread or biscuits. Everything made from scratch. My grandparents believed strongly in vegetables being the main dish with meat and starches being side items. Now breakfast was a different story...every morning was just lots and LOTS of greasy bacon paired with eggs. But my grandma's motto with that is "we eat healthy all the rest of the time, breakfast can be bad" lol