I am happy to be born in a place where food is not scarce but damn it is bottom to the barrel. Luckily i am old enough to explore more foods now i live on my own but as a kid, i grew up on only 1 meal a day and only ate British food. BUT! only proper British foods so no potatoes or tomatoes ect. My family also thought spices and herbs were unhealthy so only salt. British food is already limited (though many is nice such as the English breakfast, Cornish pasties and sausage rolls ect) but it is even more worse without potatoes, bread, dough and pastry. Used to come to school with 3 boiled eggs and a piece of liver, come home to just minced beef... just minced beef. No trick or treating on halloween, no foods on birthdays besides a bottle of Tizer and Christmas there was no sweets, just a traditional Christmas dinner (Actually really good, i won't lie there)
Just sucked the life out of me growing up, eating just a greasy minced beef hash for 5 days straight and nothing else besides maybe some sardines or liver with boiled turnips for bulk. Kids at school used to laugh at me and found me weird for what i ate. (If i even got anything because that school meal on school days was it for the day)
A few years before i moved out, i made a wonderful stir fry with my own ingredients and nobody ate it because it was foreign food. (Random side note but i used to watch my step mother eat an entire block of butter as a snack). Never went to a restaurant or cafe or takeaway until i was 19.
Enjoy my rant (or dont). I just needed to rant and hopefully someone to read this and laugh, yes. It's genuinely all true what ive said here.
Not even potatoes, the one saving grace that might have saved your childhood. I feel sorry for you but it was indeed a funny read, so cheers.
With respect, are your family mentally handicapped? I can't imagine giving your child boiled eggs and liver for school lunch.
I think the best poor food I had was Nans boiled potatos, heavily salted mince beef and beans.
>>472762 It was just a belief they had. No tinned foods, nothing with more than 1 ingredient, no bread, pastry, dough and no foreign foods that could not be grown in Britain pre Roman times so no things like cabbage really and no herbs to flavour food as "Food should be eaten as it was meant to be" and also it is "unhealthy".
(p.s sorry for not clicking the "complain/rant" box, i didn't see it somehow)
>>472763 Did they ever explain the logic behind this? As in, did they claim to have proof it was nutritionally superior, or was it just a neurotic obsession with "being natural"?
>i used to watch my step mother eat an entire block of butter as a snack
People are fucking weird, man.
I kind of still hold a grudge against my own parents because how badly they fed me as a kid verges on neglect. They had no culinary ability, anything they fed me that wasn't a ready meal or something hard to fuck up like chicken nuggets and chips was just a dry, grey, flavourless stodge. I blame this primarily for why I was such a skinny pale kid and got stick for it at school, and I'm sure the lot of you know how that shapes you as a person growing up. But even so it wasn't as bad as this.
I eat pretty well now, I taught myself to cook once I was old enough and knew how lacking my diet was compared to what my friend's families fed them. But I was still a skeleton until well into my mid 20s, and I've only just started filling out into what I feel like is a proper man's physique, although still fairly slender, now in my 30s.
I don't think you can underestimate the sort of lasting impact this kind of thing can have on you.
I remember getting harsh internet beatings for my grammar and typos when I was a teenager.
>>472804 My parents are similar when it comes to cooking but I'm not sure I can hold a grudge against them for it when they were just working from the context of the British working class families who grew up in the 1970s. I remember 10 years ago reading some predication that are own children will similarly scoff at us for all the sugar we eat and we've definately seen a change in attitudes since on how much sugar is acceptable - but 10-20 years ago we were all scoffing sugar and we'd have struggled to even avoid it.
I'd end on an optimistic note that the curve is at least going up but then children are losing height and suffering malnutrition in the UK so probably not.
Sugar is still everywhere if you read the ingredients list - even where you wouldn't even expect to find it. It's as if there's some conspiracy to make everyone dependent on sugar like a crack addict. Cutting out / reducing sugar is great, but if you're like me you spend half your shop reading packets. I was looking at some cake the other day which was literally 40% sugar.
