What happened when I ate a 1960s diet for a week

It’s one of the hottest days of the year so far, but my oven is on and blasting. Inside is a joint of beef and a tray of roast potatoes sizzling in beef dripping. Ready to go is my Yorkshire pudding; bubbling away on the stove is a pan of rice pudding, next to a couple of tins of peas and carrots, ready to be heated up. 

It’s a bit counter cultural, given the soaring temperatures, but then so has been my last week. I have just spent seven days eating as if I was in the 1960s – roast beef, tinned veg and all – in a bid to see what the health benefits might be. And while there are some things I definitely won’t be continuing in my 21st century life (a dearth of fresh veg and toast at almost every meal), there are other habits I definitely will. 

They were obviously doing something right. In the 1960s only 1 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women in England were classed as obese compared to today’s 25.2 per cent of men and 26 per cent of women. 

At the end of the 1950s, the average man weighed just over 10 stone (65kg) and the average woman weighed 8 stone 6lbs (55kg). By 2021, the average man and woman reported weighing 13 stone 4lbs (85.1kg)  and 11 stone 3lbs (71.8kg), respectively. 

Though there was still quite a divide between rich and poor households, the 1960s were, as the social historian Prof John Burnett pointed out in his seminal work Plenty & Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day, the “affluent years” – postwar rationing was becoming a distant memory and the recession of the 1970s had yet to bite. 

In the main, the majority of working people ate reasonably well: Britons in the 1960s drank more milk per week – an average of 4.84 pints per person – spread more butter on their toast, ate more eggs, consumed way more sugar and ate more meat than their counterparts in either 1950 or 1974. Their fresh fruit and green veg consumption was also higher, although they ate fewer fresh vegetables overall. This was, after all, the beginning of convenience foods and the age of the tin can. 

Meat and two veg and family mealtimes

As a middle-class professional household, in which my husband would have gone out to work every day and I was at home looking after the house, my family would have been eating three main meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus a light snack at 11am and again at 4pm. Some households would also have eaten ‘supper’ before going to bed – again, a light evening bite. “Snacking didn’t happen in the way it did now, but you can legitimately sit down mid-morning, especially as a 1960s woman,” says food historian Dr Annie Gray, the author of The Call the Midwife Cookbook, which revolves around 1960s recipes. For my husband in an office, meanwhile, “this is still the era where the tea trolley would come round twice a day.” 

Perhaps the biggest difference between then and now, though, was first, the type of food people ate, and second, how much of it. Although sugar consumption then was far higher than it is today (an average of 17.76 oz, or 503g a week per person, compared to the 1.8kg consumed per person per year now) there were few processed foods. Tins, yes, UPFs, definitely not. And though this was the decade that saw breakfast cereals soar in popularity (Coco Pops launched in 1961 and Ready Brek in 1957), more adventurous crisp flavours emerge to tickle the palate (Golden Wonder launched Ready Salted in 1960 and Cheese & Onion in 1962) and the invention of Angel Delight, in 1967, the reality is that these were occasional and exotic treats.

Today we get a shocking 57 per cent of our calories from ultra-processed foods, while in the 1960s our intake was negligible.

Bread and butter, potatoes and suet pudding 

Most food was pretty plain, of the meat and two veg variety, and cooked from scratch. Starchy carbs – potatoes, bread, suet pudding – which filled you up cheaply, were a staple on any menu; meat was mostly red (chicken was an expensive luxury) or processed (sausages, ham and Spam) and leftovers weren’t called that, they were simply the next meal; not least because few British households, certainly at the beginning of the 1960s, had fridges. 

Even by 1968, only 50 per cent of households had one. Vegetables either came in tins or were what you grew or could get at the greengrocer: peas, carrots, cabbage, marrows (not courgettes). “Broccoli wasn’t invented” said my 77-year-old father. There was always pudding – usually of the something and custard variety – but it came at the end of a main meal; my mother remembers being allowed to eat plain cake at teatime during the week, but only after a slice of bread and butter. 

Portion sizes, though, were smaller; the average plate size was 23 centimetres and bowls were a modest 7 inches in diameter. The average size of many of our foods today, by contrast,has grown by as much as 138 per cent according to data from the American Journal of Public Health, the journal Nutrition and the Journal of the American Medical Association. A serving of meat would have been about 100g, and the lion’s share would have gone to the man of the house, leaving a wife like me with even less – my 1.5kg cut of beef turned into three meals for our family of four.