How The Oldies Ate

What was the diet our Grandparents used?

To go looking for answers we have to go back into the past and look at our grandparents, evaluate how they lived, what they ate, their level of stress and the effect it had on their nervous system.

Anxiety attacks as we know them now were unheard of, especially in such a large ratio of the population, and definitely not seen as a children’s complaint as it is becoming in this generation.

I lived as a child in North Queensland, and to cook a meal the wood had to be chopped and the fire lit, there had to be time allowed for the stove to become hot enough, all vegetables had to be pealed and cut, the meat was sliced and prepared by the household cook. There were no marinades or butcher’s diced meat for those housewives. Any desserts were made in the home kitchen. At night the bread was set to rise and the oats had to soaked and cooked well in the morning for breakfast, usually followed by bacon and eggs. After such a solid breakfast there did not appear the need to snack mid morning and nobody seemed to eat again till the midday meal, which in the heat of the north usually always constituted of a salad and some form of protein, often fish, meat or in some cases lentils.

School days these ingredients were made into a sandwich with wholegrain bread made at home, a banana or apple completed the meal. A glass of plain milk was encouraged when children came home from school, in most cases no food wasoffered as it was thought dinner would not eaten if there were snacks at this time.

Dinner was the meat and three veg I have heard many people laugh about, “the old people didn’t know how to cook”, often their sweets were just a piece of fruit. Sweets were treats, only for special occasions like Christmas, Easter and Mothers day. The excitement those treat generated weeks before had to be seen to believed.

The tiredness we see in children today just didn’t seem to be there. Why?

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