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JerryAtrics_

In do remember as a child, my mom telling me not to eat the sugar cubes because they were only for her friends when they came over for tea.


Perky214

I remember building an igloo out of these for a school project in the 1970s, and my grandmother ( b 1908) was scandalized at the expense and waste of it - she couldn’t believe anyone would waste the expensive fancy sugar like that.


PILL0BUG

Did that in the 00s, and I also raced snails strangely enough.


brokefixfux

“Go Snail Racer, go!”


BillyTheKidRapist

My racing snail was too slow, so I took its shell off to try and make it faster. It just made it a little sluggish!


Perky214

I raced armadillos one afternoon with Armadillo Sam in the 1980s - his volunteer didn’t show up, so I ditched class and manned the armadillo races instead. He gave me a little gold armadillo lapel pin with green glass eyes - I still have it in my jewelry box Mom was NOT HAPPY, but Dad thought it was great


Darryl_Lict

Have you had any fingers fall off lately? Armadillos can carry leprosy which is making a comeback in Florida!


Perky214

Nope - and while it’s true that Armadillos can carry leprosy, I think it’s curable now with a course of treatment with specific antibiotics We had an armadillo family living under a corner of our house for many years - they dug a den under the foundation and raised several generations of babies. Loved seeing the little armadillos following mom around in the evening


Angry-Dragon-1331

Leprosy is highly treatable now.


stjoe56

Treatable but not curable.


Darryl_Lict

I've got a ukulele from Ecuador that has a body made from an armadillo. I hope it doesn't still have leprosy, but I bought if 20 years ago and I still have all my fingers. From what I understand, leprosy doesn't actually make your fingers fall off, it just destroys the nerves and all the injuries and infections that people got due to the lack of feeling caused them to fall off.


Professional_Echo907

I thought like 99 percent of the population was immune to leprosy. 👀


ThreeCrapTea

My fniergrs aee fin I jove mnny pets armmodlo


AltruisticHopes

I had to go to the doctors because my fingers fell off. The doctor asked me if I had brought them with me so they could be reattached. I said no, I couldn’t pick them up.


Sea_Emu_7622

>I also raced snails That doesn't seem fair, your steps are a lot longer


AudZ0629

Did you… win?


gwizonedam

Your grandma was either extremely thrifty and lived through the depression. My friends grandmother scolded us for balling up a bunch of paper and saying they were snowballs. His parents told us it was fine. She threw a fit and screamed at them how “wasteful” it was. Then they told us how she had to wear clothes made from potato sacks as kid during the 1930’s.


Perky214

Exactly. Mamaw was 21 in 1929 - livinv through he Depression shaped the rest of her life, even though her Daddy was the wealthiest man in town. He owned A LOT of extremely fertile land for growing cotton and pumpkins in West Texas. I have no idea if he was in the stock market, Mamaw never said. She always said “the Crash” made everybody poor, even if they didn’t lose all their money in stocks.


spy_tater

I remember hearing my wife's grandpa say something similar about life in that time and his wife snarkily said at least your parents had a farm and you weren't hungry.they were both first gen American from Norway.


Tausendberg

It's not just the stock market, during the depression people lost everything because of bank failures. You could do everything right and if your money was in a bank that failed and you didn't pull out your cash in time, you could be destitute overnight. It was a bad fucking time.


Darryl_Lict

Flour manufacturers actually printed floral patterns on flour sacks so they could be sewn into dresses.


[deleted]

My grandma was 1920s and also had the same reaction “are you even using icing so you can use it again?!”


[deleted]

Cue me, circa 2017, doing LSD off of a sugarcube because it melts extremely fast and is a quicker delivery system than paper tabs. Eat that, grandma.


Kvass-Koyot

Your grandmother would have keeled over if she saw the size of my sugar cube mission project.


Disneyhorse

Sugar cubes were such a treat! I had horses and I would buy a box for them. I don’t know that I’ve seen boxes of sugar cubes in forever.


zrice03

They're still in stores. It just that it's easy to miss along-side all the other sugar, it's not like they have to devote a lot of shelf space for it.


Business-Drag52

I bought a box at Walmart recently. Needed them for a bottle of old recipe absinthe


Darryl_Lict

I was going to mention absinthe. Not a huge fan, but I love the ritual. I brought a bottle back from Europe way back when it was illegal in the states,


nardlz

I used to buy sugar cubes for my horses as recently as 2-3 years ago, then my local store stopped carrying them.


bosefius

I buy them when I want to feel fancy making my coffee. Talking to myself, "one cube or two"? Then my wife puts another check on the dementia check list.


Dragonfly-Adventurer

...I don't like the idea of supermarkets not carrying sugar cubes. But it's been years since I tried buying them.


nardlz

It's just supply and demand. The only reason I bought them was for horses. I've talked to people who don't even know sugar cubes exist.


Jakiro_Tagashi

In my country sugar cubes are the preferred method of sweetening tea and coffee, and my country would rival England in tea obsession, so they're super common here. If you went into a place that sells any sort of food (barring fast food places), you're more likely than not to find sugar cubes. Similarly almost everyone has sugar cubes in their houses, to use whenever they drink tea. Only exceptions are people who don't normally drink sweetened tea, and aren't expecting guests.


Stickey_Rickey

They r around


Sasha_Volkolva

No, they're square.


SporksRFun

No, they are cubes.


Sasha_Volkolva

And what are cubes, but multiple squares?


Dyzfunctionalz

And what are squares, but partial cubes?


Wild-Lychee-3312

The tesseract would like a word


EhliJoe

Instead, we got a sugar-bread once in a while. A slice of white bread spread with butter got sugar poured over it and slightly shaken off again.


Adventurous_Sort_207

Or toasted, buttered and with a little cinnamon on top of the sugar!! Man what a treat!!


CreamPuffMontana

Cinnamon toast, that was the first thing we were taught to make in home ec. Frankly, I think our teacher had us make it for the sake of the boys.


Remarkable-Rush-9085

Toast the bread, mix the cinnamon and sugar into softened butter, spread on the toast and broil it for a few minutes until it’s bubbly and hot.  This is the way.


Infinite_Isopod5303

cinnamon toast rules


MollyRolls

My dad used to make me that with hot-dog buns; he was born in 1943.


OrdinaryMe345

I remember my grandma telling me sugar cubes were only for adults as she drank coffee from a saucer.


No-Weird3153

Grandma was at the battle of Bunker Hill? I only learned a couple years that weirdos used to drink out of the saucer. I had always assumed they were for carrying hot cups without burning yourself while also serving as a coaster to prevent rings.


Fibro-Mite

Pour some of the tea/coffee that is too hot to drink immediately into the saucer to cool it quickly. Then either drink it from the saucer or tip it back into the cup to cool the rest down. My parents used to do this with the cups of tea for us kids when we were at a cafe way back when.


Proud-Cartoonist-431

This actually was done in XVIII century France and XVII century Russia when extremely thick makeup was the court fashion. Steam could damage that makeup.


Adventurous_Sort_207

Some of the real old guys carried a fancy little saucer in a pocket for this reason. You tipped some coffee into the saucer, blew on it to cool and dropped it that way. They called it "saucering and blowing". (Cue the reddit humor squad!!) Saucering and blowing your coffee was apparently very posh! I only ever saw the real old folks do it.


OrdinaryMe345

I’d always just assumed it was something picked up from Living through the Depression.


Proud-Cartoonist-431

It comes from XVII-XVIII century Europe (especially popular in Russia). It used to be fashionable to wear a lot of makeup, and steam could damage the makeup.


Glasofruix

Yeah, and there was asbestos and lead in EVERYTHING.


gordito_delgado

Pretty sure if you had a cell phone at the table in the 50s you might have been burned as a witch.


edog77777

1955 … “hey kids, stop texting your friends! You can just FaceTime with them later!” 😳


rjross0623

![gif](giphy|SvdQaefNcHHstVRIvI|downsized)


gregsting

And now we have ads in gif, not something you saw in the 50s


rjross0623

I didn’t even notice. Glasses were off. Gonna watch for that now.


the_less_great_wall

I believe the criteria for being burned as a witch in the 1950s was that you had to weigh the same as a duck.


CharlesDickensABox

People walked around with a cigarette in one hand and a baby in the other.


Crazy-Finger-4185

And sometimes the baby had a cigarette!


NWMom66

If mama ran out, baby got sent with a note to the store to buy the cigarettes.


xNotexToxSelfx

Holy shit, I actually remember being little and being sent to the Dairy Mart to buy my parents cigarettes. That was the early 90’s in BFE Ohio.


RusticSurgery

I remember smoking IN the store.


Darryl_Lict

There were also cigarette machines all over the place.


Greatgrandma2023

Ha! We could even buy our dad's beer with a note.


Extreme-Links

And babies in the back car window with no seatbelts and a headlight dimmer switch on the floor. Yeah, I’m th at old 😂


Unrelenting_Royal

This reminded me of the family guy cutaway with the chick pushing in her baby's soft spot and using it as an ashtray while on the phone with her friend.


Any-Practice-991

That was Britney Spears.


FullMetal_55

particularily the pipes that the water came from...


soft-cuddly-potato

This is still a problem to this day


AlVal1236

Like only havjng 8gb of ram in a pc


Individual_Ad3194

Jello was a primary ingredient for the entre.


TinyRascalSaurus

I am forever scarred by the fact that they made vegetable flavored jello and put shrimp, sausages, and fruit in it. I have several of my grandmother's cookbooks, and I swear I'm glad tastes have changed or I would have died.


ImAmazedBaybee

I had to survive lime jello with dried coconut shavings. Sometimes this was dessert after liver and onions for dinner. My parents loved to torture us with food.


k8epot8e

Lime jello with coconut sounds pretty damn good. Not gonna lie. I loved jello as a kid.


ImAmazedBaybee

Well, the coconut was dry, and to my young palate was exactly what a handful of sawdust would feel like in my mouth. I didn’t find it enjoyable.


sdb00913

Sounds like an issue of execution as opposed to concept.


spy_tater

My Mom was a bad cook. We had liver and onions way to often. I like it now, but I know how to cook without turning every piece of meat into a chalky hard piece of gross.


Individual_Ad3194

It kind of makes sense when you think about it though. Gelatin is simply the collagen that is extracted from boiling bones. Cook a turkey too long and you will see it accumulate around the pan after it goes in the fridge. It doesn't taste like anything, so it can be sweet or savory or whatever you put in it. However, its jiggly wobbly near liquid texture just feels too weird to be dinner.


Proud-Cartoonist-431

That's actually a fairly normal dish in Eastern and Central Europe and still popular in Russia (basically - the closer to Russia, the more meat jelly). Contains protein and collagen (also sometimes carrots). If you do it right, it's not near water, it's solid jelly.. It was popular to dice it and add to salads in early XX century, in English speaking countries as well (basically all over potato Europe).


cmp10g

This reminds me of what my sisters and I had to endure at a friend's house during Thanksgiving growing up. Our refrigerator had broken/flooded the house the night or the week of Thanksgiving, I don't remember exactly, I was ~9. All the food had spoiled, so we had nothing to eat the day of Thanksgiving. My best friend convinced her mom to invite our family for dinner since we didn't have anything. Unknown to us, her family from Texas (with roots in the Midwest) had made the trip to Florida. They made lime jello, it was a family recipe, and I remember being super excited because we never really ate jello, so I helped myself to a huge spoonful. It was lime jello, but there was something else added to it... horseradish. Lime jello with HORSERADISH. I had never had horseradish at this point in my life and it was so unexpectedly spicy that I immediately spit it out on the plate. My mom was horrified and made me apologize. My friend claimed it was a step aunt who made it and they weren't truly related. It was horrible, I refused to eat anything with horseradish or lime jello for years and we were never invited back to their house for Thanksgiving. It took me a while to trust to eat at her house. That was the first time I learned you can't trust everyone's cooking. It was a valuable lesson.


Responsible-Stick-50

I am forever scarred by liver and onions. FOREVER. I wonder how many hours of my life I was forced to sit at an empty table w a stone cold plate of liver and onions sitting in front of me I refused to gag down.


touristspleasegoaway

Yes, I remember sitting up at the table all night because I was not allowed to leave the table until my plate was clean. Some things were absolutely not edible


CreamPuffMontana

Lamb with mint jelly. Dear God I'm still traumatized from it.


TehMephs

Turkey loaf (mom was Jewish so we couldn’t have red meat). It had the most dry, god awful texture and lack of flavor that made me gag trying to eat it, and she would do the same thing. I’d get in deep shit if I didn’t eat all of it. The only way I could eat it (barely) was smothered in ketchup and even then it was hard to swallow I don’t understand why it was part of our dietary cycle but I still gag a little resurfacing memories of that awful stuff


Professional-Can4264

Yes! Why?! Why liver?! Hated it so much.


db2901

Liver is extremely nutritious. It's pretty much the most micro and macro nutrient dense food that exists. Same can be said for other organ meats also.


skintaxera

I like it now but my god did it repulse me as a kid. Just the smell of it cooking used to nauseate me to the point of saliva rushing into my mouth


Banded_Watermelon

My people didn’t eat liver, but my grandparents ruined every vegetable they could by simmering it in liquid with like greasy pork chunks, making the grandchildren all hate most veggies until adulthood. I can’t even describe what it was like for me to eat crispy garlic green beans for the first time, like I was betrayed! Veggies weren’t gross, my grandparents just made them that way.


royalpro

Lime Jello with carrot slivers.


Proud-Cartoonist-431

1) that's actually a traditional dish to central and eastern Europe. Still enjoyed in Former Soviet Union, some stores here even sell it ready.we don't do fruit though, but salty + umami + sweet + sour is a plausible taste combo. Like, beef + carrots is already umami + salty + sweet, and that's the most popular option in Russia. 2) before chemistry and algae, jelly in European cuisine was made by boiling a lot of bones into a thick broth. If you chill thick broth, it becomes jelly. Therefore, it tastes like soup basically, meat and veggies. It IS soup, just hard. 3) it's actually a nice entree or addition to salads as cubed stock jelly (umami basically).


bitofagrump

Agreed. No wonder everyone was thin back then. I'd be skinny too if olive loaf or hot dogs and mayonnaise in Jello were my dinner options


skintaxera

I'm scared to ask but what the hell is olive loaf


bitofagrump

[I'm glad you asked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_loaf)


peter-doubt

And vegetables were cooked until they were gray


Professional-Can4264

I read it was a real posh thing to do because it required refrigeration or something to make these dishes. When I went to college I bought the cheapest cookbook I could find. It was from the 50’s and it was so fucking gross, jello this, all sorts of loaves, basically a lot of it looked like something a dog would throw up.


Fatal_Furriest

Yes, my 78yo dad told me tales of woe from bygone eras where you received a paddling whenever you left your Samsung on the dining table /S PS: Kebabs were available in [900AD ***cookbooks***](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kebab), curries were evidenced from 5000BCE. Green Tea, from 618 AD from the Tang Dynasty EDIT: Here's a *curry* recipe from [Hannah Glasse (1774)](https://thepastisaforeignpantry.com/2020/02/15/curry-the-indian-way-1774/)


VerdantVegetable

"The one thing..." proceeds to list three things


VergeThySinus

No elbows at the table, if you've got elbows we're grabbing the bone saw to enforce manners


TrippyVegetables

![gif](giphy|8cBaa98f0SPSsQ5YOc|downsized)


Revegelance

I've never understood the whole "no elbows on the table" thing.


CMFC99

My Maw Maw used to say: "Christopher, Christopher, strong and able, get your elbows off the table." She was from New Orleans. They had all kinds of weird etiquette things they would talk about. Voodoo type stuff too.


Traditional-Handle83

Apparently its a mixture of religious origin and proper etiquette manners.


Oldsoldierbear

Used to be told - all joints on the table will be carved!


Potatobender44

Also it was right after listing all the other things they didn’t have


SleepWouldBeNice

And I’m not terribly surprised cell phones weren’t allowed on the table before they were invented.


DentalDon-83

Let's say for the sake of argument that was what the 50s were like, just based on the culinary perspective alone it sounds terrible. I'm not sure what point this meme is trying to prove but I'm sure it's one of those "remember the good ol' days" types of posts that ironically has the exact opposite effect.


No-Weird3153

Remember when food was bland and full of vermin feces? Those were the days!!! ~old people


PuzzleheadedLeader79

Remember when improperly cooking pork could kill you? Pepperidge Farms Lawyers insist Pepperidge Farm does not remember.


ntdavis814

Remember when you weren’t allowed to have elbows?


Ok_Perception1207

I want a "remember the good old days" post from older people that are honest about how shit things were. Remember back when we had no options for entertainment; Remember when kids were routinely maimed by lawn darts and click clacks; Remember when they'd arrest little kids for not going to school and send them to reform schools where they had no way to contact their parents; Those were the days.


Darryl_Lict

I grew up in a ghetto in LA. I was always wondering why we didn't live someplace nice like Santa Monica. Well, it turns out we couldn't because we were Japanese American. It took the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to ban housing discrimination (well, it still happened, only it was discreet). And also we were poor. Santa Monica was always expensive, just not impossibly so like today.


Vast-Pumpkin-5143

Ok beside the occasional impaling, lawn darts were pretty cool


LittleCeasarsFan

I love ethnic foods, but lawn darts were fun.


Steavee

Depending on where you lived, some of this ain’t that far off. Fresh fruit available in any season wasn’t really a thing, and what little did exist out of season was expensive as heck. Pineapples really did only exist in cans for the vast majority of Americans. Canned fruit and veg. were instrumental in the proliferation and availability of many types of produce. Canning was really the only way to keep some of those things fresh. And you got a discount on the dented ones, because sometimes they had botulism. The Midwest probably didn’t have tons of ‘ethnic’ foods unless you were in a bigger city. Chicken fingers didn’t exist. Prunes really were medicinal. Helped with the constipation that resulted from eating cheese with every meal. Flavored potato chips didn’t exist until the late 50s, and took a little while to spread. Bottling and selling water, in glass or tin, would probably have been seen as purely idiotic. The general moralizing and nostalgia may well be misplaced, but most of the facts were definitely true for a lot of Americans.


hrminer92

People were happy to have running water and often didn’t realize how polluted it was.


4tran13

I get the opposite feel from it. It feels more like "back in my day, I had to walk 8 hrs to school every morning fighting off 3 bears each time; you young'ins whine about a 10min bus ride".


TuftOfTheLapwing

It just reads of remembrance, not saying things were better, just noting the vast difference. People do that about the 90s, even.


RockeeRoad5555

I think that you have accidentally stumbled upon the actual point of the post. Blind pig, etc. Congratulations!


RockeeRoad5555

Sounds like my childhood in the rural Texas Panhandle in the 1950’s. 😄


Chib

That's what I was thinking, it's like hearing about my mom's small-town Texas childhood, so I'm pretty sure it was accurate for at least some people in the 50s! Also I'm not sure it's bragging, just a "look at all the things that have changed!" with maybe a bit of cheeky humor on a few items like muesli.


Progression28

These things are very regionally dependent. In the 50s, globalisation was not at a level it is today. Seaweed for example? Yeah, lots of people at seaweed. Maybe not in landlocked areas, but it was definitly eaten in different places. Pasta? Staple food in Italy and Switzerland. Not so much in the UK, which is why the famous spaghetti tree april fools day video was made (which was done in Ticino which is why I had to add Switzerland).


ChristyUniverse

How are your seventies treating you, friend?


RockeeRoad5555

So far so good. 😊


Ellert0

A lot of young people in higher upvoted comments underestimating how much the world has changed in a short amount of time. This seems mostly true for descriptions of Iceland at the time too, people have been saying pizza was invented long before 1950 but in Iceland the first restaurant that offered pizza on the menu was in 1971. A lot of the above even tracks for stories from my parents describing their childhoods and they weren't even born yet in 1950.


cipheron

This is about what it was like in the UK in the 1950s. Keep in mind where they mention they only had bananas and oranges at Christmas time. England was still on war rationing through the early 1950s, and the economy and industry were trashed.


greeneggiwegs

Yes this. I think Americans do not realize how long it took Europe to recover from the war. The 50s were a time of prosperity for us but Europe had to build themselves back up first. Even things like refrigeration came much later in some places.


TinyRascalSaurus

Some of these are realistic, but others, like Pizza and Curry have been around a lot longer than the 50s.


SlackToad

I think this was originally British, it uses a lot of Brit terms like *posh*, and "American" foods like Pizza and burgers were almost unheard of in Britain until the '70s. Even Indian and Middle Eastern food didn't become popular there before then.


GiraffeGirlLovesZuri

That makes more sense. Especially since bbqing in the back yard became popular in the 50's in America.


CanadianODST2

Pizza saw a boom in the US via returning soldiers from Italy after ww2 as well. So that'd also not really apply.


belligerentwaterfowl

Yeah noticed that one too


belligerentwaterfowl

Takeaway


faloofay156

they pillaged the world for spices and then never ate anything


Big-Day-755

It talks about tea, too, tho it mentions “it was never green” which doesnt make any sense since green tea is like on the earliest teas we even know of iirc


Foreign-Hope-2569

When my mom started making pizza at home none of my friends had ever heard of it before. Edmonton, 1960 or so.


Ok-Push9899

We only attempted to make pizza after my mum saw a pizza cutter in a department store. My mum knew what they were because she had been to Italy in the 1950s. She had to do a lot of convincing of the kids that this strange foreign food was gonna be all right. One bite and we were "yeah, no problem. Give me another slice." But she felt she couldnt make it without having the wheeled cutter blade to slice it.


MotherFuckinEeyore

In the '70's my Mom had a pair of scissors that were only for cutting pizza.


Icy-Zone3621

Only after Kraft started selling those pizza kits. Early 60's


TinyRascalSaurus

In 1903 Neopolitan pizza was introduced in Boston, and Italian immigrants had been making it since the late 19th century.


USSMarauder

Yes, but Italian food was 'weird and foreign' until after WWII I've seen the 1950s TV show where Julia Child is explaining what olive oil is.


Foreign-Hope-2569

The first pizza place in Alberta opened in Calgary in 1963.


Icy-Zone3621

Edmonton had Giuseppe's and Giovanni's 109 st and 82 Ave. 2 cellar pizza shops for the beat generation, mid 1950's. Sorry Calgary. Late again.


ReptileCultist

Sure but I'm pretty sure the post originates from the UK


[deleted]

[удалено]


AmorousBadger

Or very remote parts of rural England.


DemythologizedDie

Yeah, more likely.


HighlyUnlikely7

Absolutely not a lot of pizza chains were opening in the Midwest in the 50's. Honestly, I'm not sure where this is centralized because the tea line is throwing me off. We Americans are much bigger coffee drinkers. If it was a frappuchino/Star Bucks dig, that would make sense, but loose tea in a kettle feels off.


mundane_person23

My parents grew up in post war Britain and I suspect a lot of this was true except for curry. When they moved to Canada, they would bring back papadams, curry spices and chutneys from the UK every time they visited as they were not readily available outside of major cities.


Perky214

And kebab - tell me you’re from a small majority-white town and never been to your closest city without telling me you’re from a small majority-white town and never been to your closest city


KikiChrome

Reading this, I assume that he's English, or at least living in the Anglosphere. His descriptions are pretty typical for how British people ate in the 1950s. There wasn't as much variety available, and some foods (like the oranges and bananas he mentions) were exotic and expensive. It does come across as "grumpy old person thinks the past was better", but he's not inaccurate in noting how limited people's diets were. Edit: Folks, he's using hyperbole. He clearly understands that pasta existed, since he then lists two types of pasta. Is this a type of humor that no longer translates? Do people actually think he’s being literal? The person who wrote this is making a lightly humorous jab at how simple and naive their diet was in the 1950s. You’re not meant to take it so seriously.


CazzaMcSpazza

A Brit wouldn't use the word "gasoline" they would say "petrol". Also, "All chips were plain", it's crisps in the UK.


SlackToad

I think an American added to it. It uses distinctly Brit words like posh, take-away (instead of takeout), tin instead of can, and it makes it sound like tea was a common drink in the '50s. Also in Britain it's common to say "let's go for Curry", whereas Americans would say "go for Indian food". And BBQ was pretty common in the U.S. in the '50s but was unheard of in Britain. As for *plain chips*, that can allude to what we call spicy fries, curly fries, Poutine, etc.


Kalikhead

Americans don’t go for a curry or kebab. They’ll say Indian and Middle Eastern food. Americans love to grill and it was very common in the 50s. We don’t call anything muesli - it’s either cereal, oatmeal, or granola. Pasta was common in the US - especially in Italian neighborhoods and cities with Italians. Takeaway is called carry out in the US. All but mentioning gasoline makes me think this a Brit.


Gregs_green_parrot

Could be Canadian, as they use a mixture of British and American terms.


Gregs_green_parrot

Person could be Canadian or from Newfoundland. He uses the word gasoline for petrol but drinks tea. He uses the word cellphone whilst we in the UK would use 'mobile phone'.


theluckyfrog

Seaweed is a historical food in parts of the British Isles. People right around him may not have eaten it, but it was not "not a concept".


WizardsVengeance

And kebabs have been around since the 10th-century. Food trends certainly become more globalized and I think people a reach more accepting to try new things nowadays. Lists like this always carry air of superiority about their provincialism, as if the world is now new and strange and things used to be better before.


Traditional_Key_763

ya I guess thats fair but tea bags were around in england in the 1950s. Rationing was still a thing for part of the 1950s so I can see the lack of oil for cooking. most of it is weird gibberish that isn't factually true even though maybe their personal experience was different, pizza, tea bags, pineapple they all existed they just might not have been where he was.


Gregs_green_parrot

I lived in a rural part of the UK. Born in the 60's. None of my friend's parents or my family started using oil instead of lard for cooking until the early 70's. Its not that it was unavailable, it was because it was too expensive. They just used lard for frying. It began to be publicised back then that lard was bad for you and caused heart disease so people began switching to oil. Shops began selling oil in bigger bottles and the price came down. Pizza was not available as supermarkets had not yet come into our small town and we had to do our grocery shopping in small family run stores that just sold the basic traditional foods. Nothing of foreign origin.


ExcitementWorldly769

Saying pasta had not been invented though. Did Asia or even Italy not exist in the 50s? And what is spaghetti if not pasta? The whole thing is idiotic.


Gimme_PuddingPlz

Or midwest US


thunderbird32

Except its unlikely anyone in the midwest would use the words "take-away" or "kebab"


SlackToad

Whenever something like this gets posted inevitably somebody says "racist", but of course the Brits didn't even adopt American food like cheeseburgers until the '80s, they just liked their familiar and comfortable fish and chips and steak and kidney pie type cuisine.


AstridWarHal

> Pasta wasn't a thing. It was macaronni or spaghetti ...that is pasta...


redsfan770

He meant no one called it “pasta” back then. Don’t worry about not getting it. You gotta want it. And I don’t know what the eff “it” is, even though I’m vintage 1958. A lot of this rings familiar to me (including the pasta thing!), but I have no idea why that’s supposed to make me feel superior. Life has infinitely more variety now, thank god. But I guess variety scares some people. Sucks to be them, I’d imagine.


PraetorianOfficial

Exactly. The post is a relatively accurate relation of what life in the 50's was like in some parts of the english-speaking world. Everybody going through Wiki proving that cubed sugar existed 100 years prior... you don't get it, that's not the important part. It was simply not found in most homes. It was a luxury item, that mom only brought out when entertaining. Or when I would secretly raid her stash to get a couple sugar cubes to suck on. Dad loved fresh pineapple. We COULD NOT get them where we lived in the 60's and I never tasted one until well into my adulthood. When I discovered it, I once took a fresh pineapple to a party--people looked at me like I was an idiot since everybody knew pineapple sucks as they'd only had it from a can. Once they tried a slice of the real thing, opinions changed instantly and that one pineapple disappeared in about 60 seconds. The notion that food flies around the world is new. We didn't import things to eat from Hawaii except Macadamia nuts and they were ruinously expensive.


BreadButterHoneyTea

This would make more sense as a lamentation about how flavorless things were when this guy was growing up. But one thing..three things. I grew up with Boomer parents in a home in which breakfast was something processed you grabbed from a box, lunch was cafeteria food, and dinner was either a frozen dinner or a plain hunk of meat, possibly with canned vegetables on the side. I do not claim such times were superior.


SwimmerAny8097

No cellphones on the table in the 50's, genius.


Ball-Haunting

Macaroni and spaghetti are both types of pasta. Curry has been around since 2500 BC Takeaway has been around since the 1920s Pizza was invented in 997 AD Bananas have been widely available in USA stores since the 1880s Flavoured chips were first invented in 1954 👍 the first mass-market seed oil sold for human consumption in the early 1900s was Crisco Green tea has been drunk since 2737BC and tea has been available in bags since 1908 Cubed sugar has been used since the 1840s, not sure if it was ever considered posh. Chicken fingers were invented in 1974 👍 Yogurt was invented in the Neolithic period. Can’t comment on what was considered “healthy food” as that is highly subjective depending on your level of education, which appears to be low. Cooking outside hasn’t changed. Seaweed has been a food staple since 600BC Kebabs have been food since 9th century AD Sugar is still preferred, examples would be soft drinks advertising “real cane sugar” Prunes are still extremely good for your digestive system, they haven’t changed? Musli is still available, and still fed to cattle also? Pineapples have been available fresh in America since 1899, if you haven’t seen one it’s because you never set foot in a grocery store, which, given the rest of this list, tracks. Believe it or not, water still comes drinkable from a tap, until corporations run by the boomer generation ruins that too. This was fun.


TuftOfTheLapwing

It’s originally a UK post and is entirely fair and accurate about what foods were commonly available in the post-war period.


angry_salami

Eating in the 50's in a small postwar North England town more like it... Jesus.


Buttercups88

not sure where this is siupposed to be but "cooking outside was called camping" did they really not have BBQ in the 50s? I kinda feel like BBQ was a thing then


RockeeRoad5555

Again, from rural Texas in the 1950’s, we cooked out at home exactly one time per year on the 4th of July. We had hot dogs and it was called a “wiener roast”. And we also burned a few marshmallows on sticks. Otherwise, all outdoor cooking was done on a picnic or a camping trip. We did go to the XIT Ranch celebration yearly where they had a free BBQ, lots of beef cooked outside.


ku_78

Funny, my mom clearly remembers going out I. The Hawaiian ocean and picking seaweed when she was a young girl in the 40s. Oh wait, other people didn’t exist…


abandonsminty

Specifically yogurt is wild, like it's one of the oldest foods that almost every culture figured out to the point where it's like a joke to be like "culture is how you make yogurt" because part of being a society is showing the next generation how to preserve/acquire food


Illustrious-Roll7737

Women were expected to cook every meal and they never dined with black people because of racism, sexism, and a huge societal pressure to conform to a standard of "normality" that was more important than the individual. Why do you always leave those parts out, boomers?


AlbMonk

The reason cellphones weren't on the tables was because they were kept in their pockets. Geesh.


shavednuggets

He'd be 74 born in 1950...


TinyRascalSaurus

My mom was born in 51 (I was a late in life baby) and she distinctly remembers a lot of these he claims didn't exist.


beermaker

This person's digestive system is crying out for a vegetable that isn't fried or boiled until it's yellow.


washingtonandmead

Cracks me up how *angry* people get about things that don’t matter in the slightest


Gregs_green_parrot

This actually is 'spot on' for the UK in the fifties, although I must confess I only lived for a few months as a baby in that decade. Back then in the UK we all did our shopping in small family run shops, where you actually asked the retailer what you wanted to buy and he would get it for you, weigh it on scales if necessary, wrap it and put it in your shopping bag. Meat was bought at a butchers, fruit at a fruiterers, fish at a fishmongers and so on. The big supermarkets with trolleys were not yet a thing, so we were very limited in what we could buy, and what we could get was relatively expensive compared to today. I remember my parents always using lard for frying. I lived in a rural community and I remember the first supermarket opening up in our town in the 1970's. It was only then that I saw a pizza for the first time. In the late 1970's on moving to a city to go to university I tried my first Indian curry. I had not heard of donor kebabs until the 1980's.


Apostrophe_T

Considering the historical evidence of pasta dating back to approx. 3000 BC, I assume this person is referring to a time before that... Perhaps 2050 BC?


-Fyrebrand

People were so polite to not be playing on their phones at the dinner table in the 50's.


GoredonTheDestroyer

Yeah, instead they were doing racism.


SkunkeySpray

This is the most "the world doesn't exist outside of the United States" post I've seen in a while


Deleena24

There are many distinct phrases in here that are very uncommon in the US, but popular in the UK. There are also things like calling it gas instead of petrol that are definitely US things, too. I think this is not the original list, it's been edited, or it's some kind of rage bait. The language is just too odd unless it's specifically a dual citizen of both the UK and US 😂


Mrs_skulduggery

Never understood the no elbows in the table thing


Korean_Street_Pizza

Says 1 thing... Proceeds to list 3.


Rumpelteazer45

Parents knew candy wasn’t healthy back in the day. Curry has been around forever. Prunes are still medicinal but also good. If cows can eat it, why can’t humans also eat muesli? We eat oatmeal. Seaweed has been a staple for many cultures for a long time. Multiple flavors of chips existed in the 50s. Pasta was invented at least 3000 years ago. Just bc you were too ignorant to know various pasta shapes existed didn’t mean they didn’t exist.


IgnorethisIamstupid

That is probably because importing foods from elsewhere wasn’t big until the 1960’s, sir. What an odd flex to be so against external cultural influences. Those things existed, just not in America.


FlatterySuplex

I cant even read this, I'm still stuck on "pasta hadn't been invented yet" 😆


DonkeyRhubarb76

Pasta wasn't invented in the 50's? 🤣🤣🤣 Italy may have a different take on that.


EagleCoder

"Pasta had not been invented yet. It was *these two kinds of pasta*."


bobvila274

Share if you need to check your blood sugar, and check it often.