Stepping back in time to try the diet of the early 1960s had its upsides, but as one millennial discovered to her cost, some of the foods tend to take over the kitchen. The baby-boomer diet included cuts of meat that are quite unfashionable today, such as tongue. Keep up to date with the latest stories with our WalesOnline newsletter. Many people believe that we’re eating more healthily than previous generations. Certainly, there’s more awareness of nutrition these days, but could a 1960s diet actually be better for us?
One intrepid pioneer set out to discover the truth but struggled with a classic breakfast staple that she just couldn’t stomach. While the food that most of us might choose to represent the 2020s would be something wholesome like smashed avocado on toast, in fact, more than half of the average Brit’s caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods. Favourites such as ice-cream, ham, sausages, and crisps are all on nutritionists’ “naughty list”.
So, writer Emily Craig set out to recreate the “Baby Boomer” diet, winding the culinary clock back to the 1960s to see whether we really do eat better in the 21st Century. The immediate post-war generation were coping with impacts of rationing, which didn’t end in the UK until the mid-1950s. This might have contributed to the fact that their portion sizes were generally smaller than ours are today. Even the plates were smaller. “Meat and two veg” was the order of the day, but when it came to meat, Brits would often eat cuts that have fallen out of favour today, such as tongue and offal.
Dietitian Rebecca McManamon points out that those Cold War babies would also have eaten a good deal more veg than we tend to. Some experts have blamed this dramatic change on the cost of living crisis, while others suggest that perhaps we’re just becoming fussier eaters. But as our grandmas would always remind us, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and it’s there that we’ve seen the biggest change since the Sixties.
Emily says she usually has a very 2024 brekkie of Greek yogurt, blueberries, pomegranate, and mixed seeds. However, for her time-travel diet, Emily went old school: “During my experiment, I start my day with kippers, a boiled egg, boiled spinach, and a slice of seeded toast,” she says. There are more calories in the traditional breakfast – 460 in comparison to 360 in Emily’s 2024 breakfast – but that wasn’t the real problem from her point of view. She struggled with the “pungent fishy aroma” pervading her flat.
Emily plans to include a few more traditional elements in her diet, but acknowledges that she may need to dodge the kippers. While they’re full of flavour, the smell is definitely an acquired taste.