Why do we always demonise childrens favourite foods? In my day friends mothers always apologised for giving you beans on toast if you went round to tea. But no decent mother would have sent her children off to school without a proper cooked breakfast inside them - bacon, fried egg, fried bread, the lot. Nor would she have neglected the once a week (at least) cake baking session. Vance Packard tells the story of the initial failure of Betty Crocker cake mixes: what woman would not welcome the saving of labour brought about by simply adding water to a box of powder? But this failed the 'decent mother' test. Problem solved when the recipe was adjusted so that mother had to do the wholesome decent thing of adding an egg
Next came fish fingers - decent mothers cook proper fresh fish
In the 1970s sugar was the devil, with sugar companies & any scientist who had ever accepted a penny of their ill-gotten gains his agent here on earth. So mothers fed their children nice savoury crisps instead
Now its burgers. My mother told me never to eat anything made of mince when I went to a cafe or milk bar, since mince was probably a euphemism for yesterdays left overs, some even scraped off plates & put through the mincing machine. I remember a highly laudatory article in Time magazine in the 1960s, praising the new McDonalds phenomenon of fast clean food made from ingredients you could rely on. And it offered the perfect nutritional balance of starch (from the bun), protein, calcium from the cheese & vitamins from the lettuce & tomato
In my day the emphasis was all on protein for building healthy bodies in what was still a time of shortage. As far as I remember the fat on meat counted as part of the protein. And if you needed to lose weight for health or aesthetic reasons then you cut down on carbohydrates, obviously. Bread, potatoes, cakes, biscuits, these piled on the pounds
