I was looking at https://www.amazon.com.au/b/node=22019347051 and it all looks like crap. What did the superior boomer generation eat for breakfast back in the good ol' days?
What Did Boomers Eat for Breakfast Back in The Day?
deme on 09/10/2023 - 21:53
Comments
@[Deactivated]: So now we are going from obese to morbidly obese and you are restricting it to nursing homes? They are out in the community. Have a look around you. Frankly 72 is not that old nowadays, especially amongst people who haven’t done manual labour. If you are in a nursing home at 72 then you have bigger problems than obesity.
I must mention your very special wisdom to the Okinawans who smash sweet potatoes every day - 69% of their calories, with another 12% from rice - and yet have record numbers of fit and active centenarians.
@GrueHunter: Ahh the Okinawans and their record numbers!
Record numbers of poor records it would seem…
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11299646
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/sep/10/japenese-cente…
Assuming that your question applies to 'all time', the answer is that they ate 'boomers' (kangaroos). For at least 70,000 years.
And they had very low life expectancy - until the guys with the porridge turned up.
LOL … then, all of a sudden at the hands of those very same guys, they had even lower life expectancy …
Toast. Only cooked on one side because I was too lazy to flip it (no automatic toaster).
My sister claimed she would only soak her 2minute noodles for 1 minute as she was too broke to wait 2 minutes.
Makes sense. Back in the days, they only gave a 2 min lunch. 1 min to cook and another minute to scuff your food down the throat. And then back to the tunnels for digging some red blood minerals for the missus.
We had the flip down toaster. They were good for making toasted sandwiches.
A scientific study found that the majority of baby boomers cooperated in packs to hunt wooly mammoth.
Currency was leaves, so they burnt forests to remove excess cash from the system, to control inflation.
Not a boomer (assuming you're using the term correctly) but as a kid it was typically toast and vegemite, plain weetbix, often with just hot water rather than milk, corn flakes or oatmeal. Bacon and eggs were a rare treat, typically for birthdays etc.
yOuR fUTurE
The meal that keeps on giving. Remember , everything is good for you,if it doesn't kill you. The latest 2 gens will soon be eating army rations.
1960s was when novelty processed food items really took off. So lots of sugary colourful breakfast cereals that usually came with little toys, collectibles, novelty items inside the pack so that kids nagged their mum to buy it. Coco Pops, Fruit Loops, Honey Smacks, Shredded Wheat, Chex, Corn Flakes, Rice Bubbles, Puffed Rice, Sultana Bran, Frosties, Crunchy Nut etc etc
You are close to spot-on. A few in your list came later but highly processed and sugary was all the rage.
Frosties
They used to be called Sugar Frosties.
I honestly can't remember. But I know we had goat's milk on it, because we had a goat for exactly that purpose. I suspect that what the goat's milk was poured on was often porridge, because it is very forgettable. It wouldn't have been the things like breakfast cereals you might imagine, because there were no shopping centres or supermarkets, just a local corner store, and of course back then mum didn't drive. Women didn't. My mum didn't learn to drive until dad died - of lung cancer from smoking - and she inherited HIS car.
A considerable amount of what we ate back then came out of our own garden. Peas, and beans, and carrots, and cabbages, and cauliflowers, and corn, and pumpkins, and squash, and lemons, and oranges. Back yards weren't for playing in, we did that in the streets, they were for feeding us.
The things you remember. Like all the kids walking to school. No-one was driven to school. You didn't see any parents at the school gate morning or afternoon. And no-one thought there was a problem with that. And there wasn't. And there still probably isn't, in reality. And no locks on anything. Our houses didn't have any locks. The school wasn't locked outside hours.
Oh, and when I was young eggs didn't come from the supermarket. They came from the chook yard in the back yard. So did chicken. And before you ate it you had to chop off the chook's head, and pluck it.
Getting close to "living int shoebox in middle't roard…territory.
When boomers were kids, and we're talking about the 60s/70s here, I feel like the more depressing the food the better.
I asked my parents and they said they had porridge that had been left on the stove overnight. They did not enjoy it.
I also remember my grandfather cooking vegetables (beans, brocolli) for literally an hour on the stove to the point where the liquid was dark green and the vegetables were anaemic and literally fall apart. something about that generation when it came to food was a bit off.
British heritage!
Pretty much.
I watched a doco a while ago from the former royal chef who had cooked for the queen and the other royals for a number of years. he went over the recipes. Pretty much garlic, ginger, onion and any spice (read: flavour) was not to be used. The food they cooked was the most anaemic looking crap that probably tasted as bland as those people were. But I guess that's old school British for you!
British invading countries, taking all the spices so no one can have spices in their cooking.
You have to remember up until the turn of the prior century eating meat or fresh vegetables could literally be gambling with your life. vegetables were often stored in root cellars for long periods and meat would almost certainly have at least some parasites in it. The safest thing to do was to cook the crap out of it, so anyone that grew up during that period or had parents/grandparents from that period probably experienced that cooking method.
spices traditionally were also often used to disguise food that was on the turn (so used to be seen as something for the poor).
I lived in UK in the 80's and can confirm that flavour seemed to be an after thought. I'm Indian background, so most of my food growing up was quite tasty, but my parents would force me to eat brussel sprouts boiled to the point of oblivion on Christmas Day as (presumably) some kind of science experiment.
For the record, I now like brussel sprouts because I toast them on my bbq with chilli, salt and pepper like a normal human being.
force me to eat brussel sprouts boiled to the point of oblivion
Ah yes, boiled brussel sprouts that fall apart just by being looked at. With no spices of course :D
I don't even remember them having salt in them, but maybe that's my poor memory. Can't complain, I'm sure I was luckier than many.
@kiriakoz: Salt was a luxury of rich people.
I don't recall any seasoning whatsoever, even on steak!
In the 1990s, Dutch scientist Hans van Doorn identified the chemicals that make Brussels sprouts bitter: sinigrin and progoitrin.[6] This enabled Dutch seed companies to cross-breed archived low-bitterness varieties with modern high-yield varieties, over time producing a significant increase in the popularity of the vegetable.
Oh so are you saying I like Brussel sprouts because they taste better now when I thought it was option b: personal growth?
Rice
Weetbix- at least 6, sugar and milk. Buttered with Vegemite on the rare occasions that the milk had run low.
Food in the 60s was unmitigated, boring rubbish. Meat and veg cooked until grey.
Fortunately our family learnt from Greek fishos how to cook and eat fish properly.
Shockwaves went through society when the Italians taught us all how to cook lasagne.
Its improved out of sight since.just finished 6 with a teaspoon of sugar and milk…😀😉
exactly what I had for breakfast today
I grew up in Geelong in the 60s and 70s. We had the post war migration boom going on so my friend’s families, and our neighbours, were German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, etc. They were very generous with sharing their food and culture which, certainly, brightened up my WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) existence.
Soup with sausages, Bienenstich, Stollen, etc. So much better than overcooked meat and vegetables boiled to their constituent parts in my household. My mother’s lamb fat deep fried roast potatoes and chips were the exception.
Meat and veg cooked until grey
You're giving me flashbacks to frozen steak being put directly under the grill until it is a grey looking mess that is tougher than boots!
Did your mum cook the Keens curry sausages? Sausages that were an almost fluorescent yellow green colour. My mother was a lot of things but a good cook wasn’t one of them.
I remember the old Keens curry powder tin. Currying things was the fallback if what was in the larder wassn't very appetising.
@GordonD: It wasn’t very appetising after it was curried either.
Man, I’m getting flashbacks.
This is why I have such a permissive view to immigration. You can come over but you have to bring your cuisine with you.
The one thing I can’t find in Melbourne is good Cajun/Creole food. I’ve been to New Orleans and Mauritius and the food is brilliant. If you want you can get food that blows your head off with the heat but they can also do spices just for the flavour. If anyone has a good place give me the heads up.
@GordonD: I still have a Keens curry powder tin - necessary if you're making curry recipes from the Commonsense Cook Book!
Are you my brother?
I don't remember ever eating steak when I was a kid.
When I was a kid in the 1960s:
coco pops, sugar frosties, fruit loops - whatever other highly processed, sugar laden cereal was new and available. Weetbix covered in… sugar.
Toast
And I pretty much made my own breakfast once I started school so my imagination wasn't that broad.I didn't like eggs. Mum didn't buy porridge. Dad boiled himself an egg most mornings.
In the 70s my tastes and food preparation abilities broadened.
Well none of that can be true because @1st-Amendment was there and he knows what every single person had for breakfast and he says you didn't eat that until the 1990s
Looks like he's deleted his comment before I could read it. But I can confirm - it was a treat, in the 60s and 70s, to get a Variety Pack in your Santa sack. It had Coco Pops, Sugar Frosties and Froot Loops along with the staples Rice Bubbles and Corn Flakes, plus a weird unwanted Sultana Bran. We'd keep the packs to take with us on our annual summer pilgrimage to the caravan at Lake Illawarra and they'd be our special holiday breakfasts.
(Upper?) middle class family and Mum bought anything that was new on the shelves. The less prep needed the better.
According to boomers, rock and nails, and they enjoyed it. Avocados had not been invented and toast was $500 a slice, so only the rich could afford bread, let alone a $28,000 toaster.
You had to eat breakfast on your 20 mile walk to school, and you only got to eat dandelions you foraged for (which was hard under all that snow and broken glass), and rocks, dont forget the rocks.
And that is how boomers could afford a house; rocks, nails, dandelions and walking to school…
One of my breakfast favourites was spaghetti on toast. The toast had lashings of butter and it was delicious.
The spaghetti was Heinz tinned spaghetti. I never knew that you could get real spaghetti (not in a tin) until I was 20.I believe real spaghetti was an illegal import until 1968.
Hated mushrooms as a kid, late teens I became aware that they didn’t just come in cans….Mum's side of the family were Sicilian and there was always pasta around. Never heard the "illegal import" thing before.
I used to work with someone who was a student at Melbourne Uni in the early 1970s.
He told me that when he first went with fellow students to a restaurant in Lygon St he wanted to seem more worldly than he actually was, but there was only one dish on the menu he recognised, so he ordered spaghetti in a tomato sauce.
When it arrived at the table he asked, "Where is the toast?", because that it how his mum always made it, straight from the tin.
The somewhat embarrassed waiter took the plate away and brought it back a few minutes later, with the spag now sitting on top of a slice of toast
According to boomers, rock and nails
..while living in a hole, in the road
You had to eat breakfast on your 20 mile walk to school
…if you were lucky, it was your day to wear the family shoe
Luxury, we had to eat our shoe so we had none
The joke is you aren’t that far off the mark. The difference is most of us didn’t think things were a hardship because it was just normal.
If you want to see the real hardships go to the previous generations to us. The ones who grew up in the Depression and World War 2.
My suggestion is be nice to the Boomers in your life or they might just spend your inheritance before they go:)
The joke is from the boomers parents not the boomers themselves they just retell it
Certainly the Chateau de Chasselay sketch from Monty Python was the previous generation. John Cleese is 83.
@try2bhelpful: He was making fun of his parents . He was very young at the time that's why they were dressed as older people
My mum learnt her cooking from the Depression cookbooks. It wasn’t pretty….
'only the rich could afford bread, let alone a $28,000 toaster.'
I believe the Sunbeam automatic toaster our family had (I still have/use a 1974 version with orange sides, still makes better toast than any newer one I've tried) probably cost a week's wages for the average worker around 1960 - so if it broke, you'd get it repaired as it was not a buy and throw in the trash like today's $6 toasters from China which cost maybe ten minutes of the average worker's wage.
interestingly we didn't have a toaster growing up in the 70's. toast was made under the grill. wasn't till the 80's my mother finally got one.
I got lucky, we had a bees nest in a tree next to my school. So every day after school we'll climb the tree to skiddy up some gold liquid so we can feed my any farm that I cultivated for my thesis that I had to do for School.
My old man always says he ate pinecones…. I now know he was lying to me all these years
I like weetbix, only just bought a box as being someone that never eats breakfast. Pretty good with a bit of sugar on top.
Try with butter and Vegemite. Sometimes it’s just the thing….👍
Wet concrete - which is why we're so forking hard.
Unlike today's youth who are a bunch of pussies - smashed avo on toast, organic granola etc.
Bread water and a bucket of concrete if my grandad was anything to go by
government cheese?
Porridge and a banana. Muesli on my birthday.
Same as now.
Four n twenty, a ciggie and a VB. We didn't give a crap about today's crap.
Corn flakes, but they didn’t help with my personal problem
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/food/eat/corn-flakes-origi…Weeties. Still eat them now, sixty years later. Although Uncle Toby's has recently stopped selling the large box, and made the small box smaller and dearer :-(
Second breakfast
A pack of Winnie blues and 2x 500ml Vs
Sugar. Lots and lots of sugar.
Cartoon Cereal Commercials (1950s to 1980s)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQmku8z44W8Lard.
While showing more respect than the youth of today and saving for a $15,000 house.
Topical application is good for your skin
I remember my grandparents having lard on bread for breakfast and lunch.Do you still have it or just something lost in time in Australia?
Probably more likely to be called dripping. It was the fat collected from when you cooked a roast and stored in a container in the fridge. My mum would use it to deep fry roast potatoes and chips. Because it was heated to a high temperature, regularly, it didn’t tend to go off. However, we never just had dripping sandwiches.
'we never just had dripping sandwiches'
our mother gave us dripping on bread sometimes as an example of her experience growing up in the Great Depression (1932 in Oz) - that needed a lot of salt to get past the sludgy greasiness on the roof of the mouth !
another tale from the Depression was that butchers would leave the ears on skinned rabbits so they could be distinguished from cats which would otherwise look similar.
ciggy bumpers and any bottle dregs from last night before
When I was a kid I think sometimes a bowl of sugar was the only thing that got me out of bed some mornings.
One thing you will probably never hear a Boomer say is how much better food was when they were young. I was surrounded by migrant families so I didn’t get the full WASP horror but the options nowadays are just so much better.
I think growing up (60s) my family was reasonably financially secure, but my mother still made all our clothes, and Christmas was really exciting because that was the ONLY time (apart from birthday) when you got any kind of toy.
'my mother still made all our clothes'
my mother made most of my clothes, including a full suit, not because we were poor, but because she was a trained tailoress. I remember one long-sleeved shirt with black and white vertical stripes made from mattress ticking, which was durable but kinda itchy irritating feel on my skin.
Breakfast? Luxury… no, we only had bread and poison for breakfast and we never complained, mind.
Not generally for breakfast, but I used to love Arnott Bush biscuits. Sad that they stopped making them. Nothing like them around today.😞
Dad's family used to go through a box of weetbix & crate of milk each day!
I guess, toast, peanut butter, Vegemite, jam, and fruit, apple, banana.
when I was six years old, I used to chop the wood first thing in the morning, to light the fire, to heat the stove, to cook breakfast - typically porridge.
I still enjoy oats most every breakfast, but these days I just add boiling water level to 35gm rolled oats in a small bowl, cover and leave for 5 minutes or until it has absorbed (no liquid appears when the bowl is tipped), add yoghurt, walnuts, milk - 2 minutes effort, 2 minutes to eat, and I'm not hungry for 5 hours. Still works for me.
"Doctor [Samuel] Johnson proposed to define the word ‘oats’ thus: ‘A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ And I replied: ‘Aye, and that’s why England has such fine horses, and Scotland such fine people.’" - James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ch. 14 (1791)
Bacon, eggs, tomato (fried) and saussage for breakfast. Both my Aussie dad (RIP) and German stepdad (RIP)…
Geez, a better question would have been to ask what we ate for school lunch?
For 12 years I was given devon and tomato sauce sandwiches.
It was horrid. Thankfully never eaten it since."Geez, a better question would have been to ask what we ate for school lunch?"
One or two salad rolls from the canteen. I can't remember ever eating anything else in 6 years of high school.
@[Deactivated]: That's because statistically they're more likely to be dead at that age