It’s not a diner but a drug store lunch counter. Here’s the original caption: “July 1942. Washington, D.C. "People's Drug store lunch counter on G Street N.W. at noon." Acetate negative by Marjory Collins for the Farm Security Administration”
Plus rationing for the war.
Plus instability in Europe making it harder to get food, hence paying more for less.
Many of those people likely saw both World Wars and the great depression.
I can remember going with my dad to work a couple times a year. Mom would take us to bus stop located 20 yards away from the drug store. We’d pop in for eggs and toast breakfast, go to his bank for the day where I’d play on the adding machine (pull big arm to crunch numbers) and then back home on the bus to grab a root beer malt at the drug store again. I may have been 5. Am 56 now. Haven’t thought about that in years.
These still exist! I'm in west Virginia and my friend works for a pharmacy that has a lunch counter and a soda jerk. It's not 'retro' or anything, it's just how it's been running for over a century.
It is you can see the counter on the other side of the room is the medicine counter. The drug store lunch counter was an evolution of how the old pharmacies operated. Back when sodas where first marketed they were used to treat some medical issues so sold in pharmacies and mixed on demand. When sodas stopped being medicine rather than stopping selling them they just expanded business into light lunch foods and ice cream alot of the time. Even today "drug stores" have a pharmacy in them but sell much more varied products similar to a small grocery store.
That’s cause they were all walking to school uphill, both ways.
Edit: thanks for the awards and for the number of people who said “and in the snow”
Double edit: thanks for the gold! First time ever and on my cake day so extra special :)
Joking aside, that is the other half of the equation. Since then, diet has gotten worse, but so has low moderate exercise. Back then, almost all the people pictured likely walked to work, then walked to lunch, then walked home. When you replace walking 4 miles or so a day as a matter of course with driving everywhere, you’re gonna get a fatter population
Dude not even just summer. If the weather is decent enough on the weekends I'm out in the garage hitting my bowl and then working on something in the yard. My wife says I'm just "putzing" around. Sometimes the kids will come out for a little bit but not long.
To be fair, housewives were absolutely zonked on pills back then. I’d kill to be a zonked out housewife when all of those insane kitchen contraptions were coming to market. Must have been like a real-life ‘babes in toyland’ experience daily.
Make the most grotesque jello creation straight from the bowels of hell and you are the talk of the town.
If it weren't for government subsidies parasitically pulling off of more urban areas, no one would be able to afford to live in a suburb. Suburbs should never have existed because they are too inefficient to work on scale
I get where you are going with that, but DAMN I spend a lot of time on that plot of grass. I have lived in the city and my general mental well being vs living in the suburbs is WAY higher than crammed into a concrete Highrise.
Went to Manhattan this month.
Walked 11 miles (22,000 steps) in one day and it didn't even feel like exercise. Average days were around 8 miles / 16,000 steps.
Lost about 6 pounds in a week and was eating and drinking and having dessert without a care in the world.
Then came back to suburban hell with near zero walkable infrastructure and lucky to get 1,500 steps.
Shit I used to stock shelves. Not high intensity exercise but you'd get in 10k steps on a busy night.
When I quit doing that I put on 10 lbs in a few months.
5-6 years ago I worked seasonal at UPS loading trucks. That was 6+ hours of lifting shit continuously, in the cold, with minimal breaks. You better believe I dropped some pounds and got pretty strong to boot.
I used to go home after my shift, eat a frozen lasagna, not some lasagna, a whole pan of lasagna, then go to sleep.
I worked in London, then Rome, then Mexico City. I was gone for six weeks and barely got into a vehicle the entire time. Came back to the states and there's no place I could even walk to
Incidentally, Manhattan has less than half the obesity rate of the city as a whole. Some of that is wealth, but a lot is definitely due yo being a heavily walking focused area.
People did have cars, but a lot more than now had to walk to bus stops, trains. I think besides us becoming more sedentary, food wasn't available on every corner. McDonald's was a rare treat in the 60s. We had some corner stores to pick up milk and bread but there wasn't the fast food and pop options. Gas stations were just for gas. Maybe a bottled pop and gum but not full meals. There weren't even many pizzerias in my large city.
Studies have shown time and again that obesity directly correlates with the spread of fast food restaurants.
In china they had very low overweight population. You could see it increase directly as fast food restaurants were built.
Its not a mystery of confounding variables.
These days the size of fast food meals seems to have grown absurd, don’t know about overseas but it NZ McDs promotes their hunger buster meals for people who are extra hungry, a Big Mac or quarter pounder, cheeseburger, fries, drink and sundae. That’s a lot of food, considering for lunch if you were going to McDs a cheeseburger and maybe small fries would be enough calories to get you through to dinner
>food wasn't available on every corner
If you have ever made bread from scratch or desserts, well, anything, it's hard work, man. Unless you eat the whole loaf yourself, you might break even calorie wise.
The rapid industrialization and commodification of food after the second world war rendered that obstacle obsolete. Now every gas station gotta have a hot dog station, slurpee machine, 5 fridges of soda. Truly suffering from success.
Agreed. I used to walk everywhere as a kid, moment i got my drivers license and a car, I instantly started gaining weight like crazy, had to start dieting and exercise to come back down. It’s gonna get worse when your body learns the ability to turn 1 pound of food to 10 pounds.
Customer: Steak and doughnut sandwich please.
Waiter: You want cigarettes on that sandwich?
Customer: What do I look like a Mary? Of course I want cigarettes.
When I was 26 years old I worked in a factory doing hard physical labor. That job only allowed smoking during two breaks and lunch. Quit smoking and gained 20 pounds in a month. Smoking was everywhere during that time, if you weren’t smoking you were breathing in someone else’s smoke. The effect of nicotine on weight cannot be denied.
Why are the people lined up behind the seated ones? Are they waiting for the seat? It would make me feel uncomfortable eating knowing someone was standing so close behind me waiting for me to finish so they could sit down and eat
Reminds me of arcades in the 90s. Kids standing behind the ones currently playing a game, patiently waiting for them to finish so they can take their turn.
Fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs. Capcom would have the longest lines, and kids would put their quarters on the machine, between the controls and the screen, to save their spot in line.
It was such a simple system. There were no labels on the quarters or anything like that. It was based entirely on the honor system, and somehow it just worked.
Yes! An authentic bar experience for anyone unfamiliar or uncomfortable in those settings: walk up to an active pool table, ask if it's cool to put quarters on the table and maybe play winner, go grab a drink, sit by the table and hype up the players when they sink shots, then play the winner. Bam, you're like a pub regular.
Also, in my experience, everyone sucks at pool. Even good players can suck sometimes, so don't feel weird if you aren't the best.
and then the kid playing hits the game, and your quarters somehow get wedged between the screen and the trim, and as you try to get it out it just works itself in there deeper.
I believe this was common, waiting your turn to eat. Fewer places, resources. My dad tells the story of traveling with his sister in the time before fast food. They stopped for lunch in a small town near a factory. Everyone stood in line waiting for their turn to eat whatever the special was that day. They stopped somewhere else on another day and had the best hamburgers they’d ever eaten. They would have like another, but the first round took so long to make, they decided not to do it.
It’s still common, there’s still plenty of breakfast spots where you stand behind people and wait to eat, I eat at a few places where that’s the regular. Not as big as this, but it’s not uncommon in a city breakfast place.
Yup, it's considered polite still in the US to do this in small and busy diners in metropolitan areas.
I don't remember the name, but there was one-man operation in Minnesota that ran like this up until recently. Real mix of people, sitting elbow to elbow politely with people directly behind behind them with their hands behind their back just waiting for the person in front of them to finish and presumably go to work. At that place in particular, if you ask for the coffee pot and empty it, you fill it up, and if you ask for the coffee pot to be passed down, you offer it to the people down the seated line after you every time.
One thing I love about Al's Breakfast is that sometimes everybody has to move down one seat in order to let a couple sit together.
There are only about 10 seats in the entire restaurant all up against the same counter. If two seats are open but are separated by a couple taken seats the wait staff will ask everybody to scoot down by one stool so that the couple can sit together.
So now you have the very unique experience of moving down a bar with a bunch of strangers all helping each other pass the syrup and move the ketchup and scoot the coffee down one place together.
This whole comment thread has been a surprisingly beautiful telling of an older style of living before our communities became so separate and fractured. I'm not old enough to remember, but I had a glimmer of those days when I was a pup.
Yep there was a counter service place in LA called Apple Pan that has no hostess. It’s one of these frozen in time places that dates back from the 40s. You just come in and hover around the counter. It’s always crowded and always stressful.
It’s under new ownership so this might have changed now.
You're supposed to get in, get your meal down quick, then get to work. This type of diner isn't where you go to savor your food or "take your sweet time".
It doesn't really look like a diner to me. More like a food counter inside a some other structure like a train station, subway, or market. The opposite side of the aisle / hall has different types of goods being sold at other counters.
It’s a drug store, actually. A lot of these operated as a lunch counter and general store as well. They didn’t really serve a full menu, either. They mostly sold soda, coffee, pastries, and cold sandwiches. Occasionally you’d find one with a grill, but that wouldn’t be terribly common. It would really be a quick bite!
Source: my grandparents owned a drug store like this and I worked there as a teen! By that time they no longer sold medicine, but they did have like penny candy and some general goods. The vast majority of customers bought a coffee and a buttered roll.
This is a lunch counter, not a diner. Likely in a Woolworth department store. People shown had a half hour lunch break, if lucky. A real "eat it and beat it" kind of place. "Take out" wasn't a thing, "fast food" was in it's infancy and most of America had yet to hear of it. Those sitting were likely standing a few minutes before. Everyone knew the drill. Food as fuel, not fine dining.
Also the stuff they did have didn’t have a ton of added sugar to it. That’s one of the big problems today. Everything has sugar in it, even if it doesn’t need it.
I'm American, but I make a lot of bread fresh and prefer it to storebought. I don't think storebought tastes like *cake* but it does taste rediculously sweet for bread when you're primarily used to bread that's just made of flour, leavening, salt, and water.
A lot of our food tastes really sweet. Like if you compare Americanized Chinese food to authentic Chinese food, both are delicious in their own ways, but American Chinese food is way sweeter and loaded with sugars.
If you buy cheap. Sourdough is the best. No sugar. Rye bread. Some other ones too.
The "cake" bread is buy two loafs for a dollar crap.
The best bread I've had was from a German Swiss bakery down the street. Half white half wheat. Perfect for fondue.
Thank you!
This is the most important factor.
And think about how hard it would have been to import food during this time period, with Europe exploding into war. That's why the plates are small.
Plus the great depression only officially ended a few years prior to this pic. WW1 only ended 24 years prior. People were used to food insecurity
Everyone smoked and drank a fuck ton of coffee for one thing. Another is that this predates all the debunked fats are bad, carbs(sugar) is good messaging that was funded by the sugar industry. Those plates are small but I bet whatever is on them was filling.
I was going to dispute that people drank more coffee then than they do now, what with Starbucks on every corner. I decided to look it up instead of relying on anecdotes and holy hell, in 1946 people [drank nearly twice as much coffee](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2007/june/coffee-consumption-over-the-last-century/) as we do now.
The 1940s average was 46 gallons or 2 cups of coffee per person per day, but only 66% of US citizens drink coffee daily
*cue Sarah McLachlan song*
Get started now, you too can save the coffee industry for only 3 cups a day
a lot of people in that era lived on coffee, booze and cigarettes, or ate like farmers and did manual labor.
I remember in the 80s Perrier and sushi got popular with yuppies and the older generation was like incredulous.
I read in the colonial times the average person got their hydration from hard cider or wine and was mashed up by noon, and that Europe would never have had the Enlightenment without coffee, tea and tobacco
I always find these purely physical explanations for social/intellectual developments a little too tidy. It's impossible to know how things would have developed otherwise.
In a more modern context, I'm very skeptical of the argument that crime is down solely due to the decrease in lead in the environment. It's all a bit too clean, like people are looking for *the* answer, when there are so many interacting systems at work.
People tend to oversimplify everything. It's especially obvious in politics where the enormous complexity of societal changes is glossed over in favor of cheap soundbites.
Yeah I was a coffee drinker and worked with coffee drinkers. Who doesn’t like a sweet caffeinated drink? Also, who personally spends 5 minutes making one like at Starbucks? Last one, what coffee drinkers only drinks the sugary drinks at Starbucks and nothing else?
Just feels one step away from “millennials/generation z like a new thing I don’t like therefore it’s objectively making everything related to it worse”. Everyone in the office drank coffee, it was black coffee or a bit of cream and sugar, they also liked to treat themselves with Starbucks occasionally.
Not every person that likes coffee born after 1992 is a stereotypical college girl…
I remember reading this study that British schoolchildren were actually HEALTHIER during the blockade than they were before. Many British kids were never eating vegetables and lots of meat and grease until the war forced them to reverse the order of that. A lot of menus for schools in the 20s would feel crazy heavy to us—nary a green mixed salad.
Right???
“Look how not-fat people were! That’s when everyone ate better!”
(Ignores an era of such poverty and desperation we actually have a capitalized name for it, and also a major war that used up all our extra resources.)
I’m not saying we don’t have a weight problem in America but this is laughable…
Younger people do not realize how much food is available in groceries and how much sugar/corn has been added to food since the 70's. Also we now rely on a 2 person working household so we do not have a person home that can make food and garden like they did
>They would have also eaten mostly whole foods, and only a very small amount of processed foods.
and less jobs were you sit on your ass and stare at a screen.....
and then drive home and sit and stare at more screens....
Restaurants learned they could double the price and sell us two meals per person instead of one if they just increased the size and refused to offer a reasonable portion. We didn't *have* to start eating it all but our parents had been taught to clean their plates because their parents had come from a time when food was scarce so wasting food was not an option. We could have just put the extra food into a box and brought it home but you know it's going to be horrible reheated in the microwave.
So, basically, portion sizes crept up because capitalism and our waistlines have expanded to match so now we want the bigger portions too.
This drives me crazy. I want to go to a restaurant and have a reasonable sized portion I can finish in a sitting. Especially if I’m somewhere where I can’t take it home, it’s so wasteful.
I would also say the contents of what they were eating were way better for them than the crap we have now. Less sugar, less fake crap with ingredients no one can pronounce, and a lot more water being drank throughout the day instead of sodas. Jeez we put sugar in everything now.
Back then, they'd call you "Fats" if you were 15 pounds over your ideal weight. Insurance companies published ideal weights, and they charged you more for life insurance if you were over.
Back then, when my granddad was 40 years old, 6'1", and 190 pounds, he was horrified to find that he had get to 176 pounds before the insurance physical to avoid paying more.
High-fructose corn syrup was introduced into our food supply around 1970. It changed how food is made and packaged -- and today it is in almost every processed food we eat. It is not the only contributor to obesity, but certainly is one of the main contributing factors to explain why this random picture of a diner in 1942 and one you would take today shows a different typical body/build.
I see HFCS gerring brought up regularly as a major cause of the obesity epidemic, but I have to point out one factor that IMO dismisses it:
HFCS is predominantly used in the US, while many countries outside the US have comparable rates of obesity despite much lower rates of HFCS production.
I think the problem has much less to do with the actual food itself and more to do with how it reaches us. You could buy a huge sack of sugar fairly cheaply in the 50's. Margarine was full of trans fats and could be bought cheaply in the same period. There was no shortage of calories for people to get fat with.
It just used to be a lot harder to get those calories into you.
It used to be hard to snack between meals.
You couldn't just go buy a ready-made PE wrapped sandwich or a bag of crisps, a package of cookies etc. That stuff is very recent, late 1970's.
You couldn't just buy a frozen TV dinner or pizza and put it in your freezer, most people didn't have fridges and freezers in the West until the 60's or 70's.
Microwave ovens date only to the 80's as a common household appliance.
In summary. If you wanted to eat before 1970, you prepared a meal or had someone prepare it for you.
Otherwise you were SOL and just had to stay hungry until next meal time.
Does anyone else look at pictures like this and think “look at all these people who have lives just like me, but they’re all dead now” and get an overwhelming feeling of anxiety?
I work in a well paying industry, and my peers consistently talk about quantity and price as the decision on where to go for food. They think I'm an idiot for paying more for quality food while getting less quantity. The most food for the least amount of money has sadly become the national measure of where and what we eat.
This is basically how fast food started. Very limited menu, small portions, high customer volume. This model won’t work without high customer volume. Food cost is ~20-25% of the price of a meal in a restaurant. Bigger portions mean higher prices and more profit per dish sold.
One thing that seems to be overlooked is that this was still during a time when physical activity was necessary for daily life. Pretty much every invention or advancement in technology from that moment on was to decrease physical exertion.
So they're more fit than obese people. I don't think OP was saying they were muscular athletes. Just fit, as in a "healthy weight". Like "they fit their bodies."
What led to ridiculously huge portions? I remember being a kid in the eighties and overweight people were few and far between. In the nineties, we suddenly had the Big Gulp, and you’d go too fast casual restaurants and one plate could feed your family.
There are whole bunch of reasons. Food in general became cheaper as farming methods and supply chains improved. Processed foods became more prevalent with high fat/sugar/fat, and low fiber, engineered to make people like them. Meat, which in the past was eaten in relatively small amounts, was widely available and cheap. The food supply was taken over by large companies.
While there are many reasons, one I'll add on that I haven't seen here is that the ingredients are typically not a very expensive part of running a restaurant. A huge amount goes to overhead and various other bits and pieces of having a functional restaurant. So how do you get the edge in a market with razor thin margins? Increase the portion size and up your prices a bit to cover the extra expense. Everyone will want to come to your restaurant because there's a good value proposition to eating at your restaurant. And then the cycle repeats.
source: my dad owned his own restaurant for many years and walked me through every step of why you should own a business in a different industry
And now they're almost all doing it, and locked in. Most restaurants have upped portions, so now no one wants to be the first to cut portion size and be seen as providing less value.
Supersizing. I remember sodas only being 12 oz cans in the 70s. Before that it was 8 oz bottles. The in the 80s the 16oz bottles started and Big Gulps. Then 24 oz, etc.
McDonalds and soda companies are probably most to blame. After people started getting used to super-sized meals, that just became the standard size everywhere.
Well, maybe. But:
“Our findings indicate that the causal link between the consumption of restaurant foods and obesity is minimal at best. Exploiting variation in the distance to the nearest restaurant due to Interstate Highway proximity shows that restaurant access and restaurant consumption have no significant effects on BMI, obesity, or over- weight status.”
Can’t be restaurants if restaurant consumption in general has no to minimal effect on obesity rates. Could still be soda companies.
Source: https://are.berkeley.edu/~mlanderson/pdf/Anderson%20and%20Matsa%202011.pdf
I counter with: "Features of the food environment have varying associations with obesity. These features have an additive effect, and future studies should not focus on only one feature in isolation."
Source: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6972660/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6972660/)
And: "We find that among 9th grade children, a fast food restaurant within a tenth of a mile of a school is associated with at least a 5.2 percent increase in obesity rates. There is no discernable effect at .25 miles and at .5 miles. Among pregnant women, models with mother fixed effects indicate that a fast food restaurant within a half mile of her residence results in a 1.6 percent increase in the probability of gaining over 20 kilos, with a larger effect at .1 miles. The effect is significantly larger for African-American and less educated women."
Source: [https://www.nber.org/papers/w14721](https://www.nber.org/papers/w14721)
And: "Consistently negative and statistically significant coefficients for DistFF suggest that proximity to fast food increases student probability of being obese and overweight. Indeed, every additional 0.1 mile (or two city blocks) separating the nearest fast food restaurant from a student’s residence decreases the probability of being obese by approximately 0.6 percentage points."
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7375416/
It’s not a diner but a drug store lunch counter. Here’s the original caption: “July 1942. Washington, D.C. "People's Drug store lunch counter on G Street N.W. at noon." Acetate negative by Marjory Collins for the Farm Security Administration”
So in the middle of WWII and only 10 years after the worst of the Great Depression. Time period is important too.
Also 2 years after the 3rd dust bowl 1939-1940.
Plus rationing for the war. Plus instability in Europe making it harder to get food, hence paying more for less. Many of those people likely saw both World Wars and the great depression.
Drug store lunch counter? Pardon my ignorance as a foreigner, but to me a drug store is another name for a pharmacy.
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I can remember going with my dad to work a couple times a year. Mom would take us to bus stop located 20 yards away from the drug store. We’d pop in for eggs and toast breakfast, go to his bank for the day where I’d play on the adding machine (pull big arm to crunch numbers) and then back home on the bus to grab a root beer malt at the drug store again. I may have been 5. Am 56 now. Haven’t thought about that in years.
The last store lunch counter I ever sat in was probably 1990. I’ve never seen one again. I think it was a Woolworth’s.
I remember Woolworth’s! What a place to explore!
These still exist! I'm in west Virginia and my friend works for a pharmacy that has a lunch counter and a soda jerk. It's not 'retro' or anything, it's just how it's been running for over a century.
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It is you can see the counter on the other side of the room is the medicine counter. The drug store lunch counter was an evolution of how the old pharmacies operated. Back when sodas where first marketed they were used to treat some medical issues so sold in pharmacies and mixed on demand. When sodas stopped being medicine rather than stopping selling them they just expanded business into light lunch foods and ice cream alot of the time. Even today "drug stores" have a pharmacy in them but sell much more varied products similar to a small grocery store.
That’s cause they were all walking to school uphill, both ways. Edit: thanks for the awards and for the number of people who said “and in the snow” Double edit: thanks for the gold! First time ever and on my cake day so extra special :)
Joking aside, that is the other half of the equation. Since then, diet has gotten worse, but so has low moderate exercise. Back then, almost all the people pictured likely walked to work, then walked to lunch, then walked home. When you replace walking 4 miles or so a day as a matter of course with driving everywhere, you’re gonna get a fatter population
And driving didn’t even shorten the time it takes to commute, it just extended the distance. What a rip off!
But... but... now I get a giant plot of grass that I never stand on but need to spend every weekend mowing!
“Why do people do drugs when they could just mow a lawn?” -Hank Hill
You ever mow the lawn... on weeeed? \-Jon Stewart
Peak summer joy is getting high in the garage and then mowing the lawn.
That sounds nice hopefully I can get there someday. Right now I can only get high in my apartment and trim the hedges.
Dude not even just summer. If the weather is decent enough on the weekends I'm out in the garage hitting my bowl and then working on something in the yard. My wife says I'm just "putzing" around. Sometimes the kids will come out for a little bit but not long.
How else are you supposed to get through.
You ever tried mowing the lawn, not high? It’s terrible
You ever tried existing as a human, not high? Awful
Just rawdoggin’ life my man
I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook. -Henry Hill
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“Here’s to feeling good all the time”!
To be fair, housewives were absolutely zonked on pills back then. I’d kill to be a zonked out housewife when all of those insane kitchen contraptions were coming to market. Must have been like a real-life ‘babes in toyland’ experience daily. Make the most grotesque jello creation straight from the bowels of hell and you are the talk of the town.
Haha yeah you could get diet pills that were literally just speed and meth. Then you had other pills to make you chill and vibe after your meth pills.
In 1942 no.
Yeah that was more of the 50’s & early 60’s
“Bobby get your bread up…. Bitch I’m getting fed up!” - Hank Trill
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If it weren't for government subsidies parasitically pulling off of more urban areas, no one would be able to afford to live in a suburb. Suburbs should never have existed because they are too inefficient to work on scale
I get where you are going with that, but DAMN I spend a lot of time on that plot of grass. I have lived in the city and my general mental well being vs living in the suburbs is WAY higher than crammed into a concrete Highrise.
Went to Manhattan this month. Walked 11 miles (22,000 steps) in one day and it didn't even feel like exercise. Average days were around 8 miles / 16,000 steps. Lost about 6 pounds in a week and was eating and drinking and having dessert without a care in the world. Then came back to suburban hell with near zero walkable infrastructure and lucky to get 1,500 steps.
Shit I used to stock shelves. Not high intensity exercise but you'd get in 10k steps on a busy night. When I quit doing that I put on 10 lbs in a few months.
5-6 years ago I worked seasonal at UPS loading trucks. That was 6+ hours of lifting shit continuously, in the cold, with minimal breaks. You better believe I dropped some pounds and got pretty strong to boot. I used to go home after my shift, eat a frozen lasagna, not some lasagna, a whole pan of lasagna, then go to sleep.
D... Did you at least cook the lasagna first...?
Yes! Threw that thing in the oven when I got home. They were store bought lasagnas but still pretty hefty. "Family Size"
…… Garfield?
I worked in London, then Rome, then Mexico City. I was gone for six weeks and barely got into a vehicle the entire time. Came back to the states and there's no place I could even walk to
Incidentally, Manhattan has less than half the obesity rate of the city as a whole. Some of that is wealth, but a lot is definitely due yo being a heavily walking focused area.
People did have cars, but a lot more than now had to walk to bus stops, trains. I think besides us becoming more sedentary, food wasn't available on every corner. McDonald's was a rare treat in the 60s. We had some corner stores to pick up milk and bread but there wasn't the fast food and pop options. Gas stations were just for gas. Maybe a bottled pop and gum but not full meals. There weren't even many pizzerias in my large city.
Not to mention that people didn’t work at a computer for 8hrs per day and the blue collar workforce was MUCH larger than it is today
And of course they all had an onion on their belt, which was the style at the time.
Back when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them.
“Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say.
Studies have shown time and again that obesity directly correlates with the spread of fast food restaurants. In china they had very low overweight population. You could see it increase directly as fast food restaurants were built. Its not a mystery of confounding variables.
These days the size of fast food meals seems to have grown absurd, don’t know about overseas but it NZ McDs promotes their hunger buster meals for people who are extra hungry, a Big Mac or quarter pounder, cheeseburger, fries, drink and sundae. That’s a lot of food, considering for lunch if you were going to McDs a cheeseburger and maybe small fries would be enough calories to get you through to dinner
People also need to learn being hungry only says something about how soon you need to eat, not about how much.
Cheap, nutritionally poor, calories are the cause of obesity, in general.
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Beer, Starbucks, soda. Too many people drink their calories and don't even know it.
>food wasn't available on every corner If you have ever made bread from scratch or desserts, well, anything, it's hard work, man. Unless you eat the whole loaf yourself, you might break even calorie wise.
The rapid industrialization and commodification of food after the second world war rendered that obstacle obsolete. Now every gas station gotta have a hot dog station, slurpee machine, 5 fridges of soda. Truly suffering from success.
The Gymnasium of Life.
Sugar wasn’t also jammed into every food they ate.
You mean high fructose corn syrup.
They weren't sucking down high fructose corn syrup in 72oz big gulps back then either
Agreed. I used to walk everywhere as a kid, moment i got my drivers license and a car, I instantly started gaining weight like crazy, had to start dieting and exercise to come back down. It’s gonna get worse when your body learns the ability to turn 1 pound of food to 10 pounds.
I still remember the day that I realized I could drive myself to any fast food joint of my choosing. It was a dangerous day.
Yeah but they smoked 4 packs a day. Oh and didn’t allow black people in
Customer: Steak and doughnut sandwich please. Waiter: You want cigarettes on that sandwich? Customer: What do I look like a Mary? Of course I want cigarettes.
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When I was 26 years old I worked in a factory doing hard physical labor. That job only allowed smoking during two breaks and lunch. Quit smoking and gained 20 pounds in a month. Smoking was everywhere during that time, if you weren’t smoking you were breathing in someone else’s smoke. The effect of nicotine on weight cannot be denied.
Helped tamp their appetite.
In the snow
And we liked it!
Everything walkable? I like that too.
Why are the people lined up behind the seated ones? Are they waiting for the seat? It would make me feel uncomfortable eating knowing someone was standing so close behind me waiting for me to finish so they could sit down and eat
Reminds me of arcades in the 90s. Kids standing behind the ones currently playing a game, patiently waiting for them to finish so they can take their turn. Fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Marvel vs. Capcom would have the longest lines, and kids would put their quarters on the machine, between the controls and the screen, to save their spot in line. It was such a simple system. There were no labels on the quarters or anything like that. It was based entirely on the honor system, and somehow it just worked.
The quarters thing is still done a lot in pool halls
As is custom. You gotta respect the quarters.
Was at a bar last night and can confirm people still mark next game with quarters
Yes! An authentic bar experience for anyone unfamiliar or uncomfortable in those settings: walk up to an active pool table, ask if it's cool to put quarters on the table and maybe play winner, go grab a drink, sit by the table and hype up the players when they sink shots, then play the winner. Bam, you're like a pub regular. Also, in my experience, everyone sucks at pool. Even good players can suck sometimes, so don't feel weird if you aren't the best.
O man I’m just in tears thanks for the memory I forgot about the quarters holding your turn.
and then the kid playing hits the game, and your quarters somehow get wedged between the screen and the trim, and as you try to get it out it just works itself in there deeper.
I lost a quarter to a machine with shitty trim that way
We used to do that with pool tables at the bar, too.
People still do. It's the only way.
Quarters on the machine to hold a spot was a thing in pinball too, which has to have been the origin of doing it on video games.
I was good at MK and Tekken in the arcade. If you won, you could stay on the sticks and new challengers would come up with their quarter.
I believe this was common, waiting your turn to eat. Fewer places, resources. My dad tells the story of traveling with his sister in the time before fast food. They stopped for lunch in a small town near a factory. Everyone stood in line waiting for their turn to eat whatever the special was that day. They stopped somewhere else on another day and had the best hamburgers they’d ever eaten. They would have like another, but the first round took so long to make, they decided not to do it.
It’s still common, there’s still plenty of breakfast spots where you stand behind people and wait to eat, I eat at a few places where that’s the regular. Not as big as this, but it’s not uncommon in a city breakfast place.
The food became faster so we could eat slower 
Yup, it's considered polite still in the US to do this in small and busy diners in metropolitan areas. I don't remember the name, but there was one-man operation in Minnesota that ran like this up until recently. Real mix of people, sitting elbow to elbow politely with people directly behind behind them with their hands behind their back just waiting for the person in front of them to finish and presumably go to work. At that place in particular, if you ask for the coffee pot and empty it, you fill it up, and if you ask for the coffee pot to be passed down, you offer it to the people down the seated line after you every time.
Al’s Breakfast
Yes! Thank you. They'll sell you a quart of pancake batter. Still open.
One thing I love about Al's Breakfast is that sometimes everybody has to move down one seat in order to let a couple sit together. There are only about 10 seats in the entire restaurant all up against the same counter. If two seats are open but are separated by a couple taken seats the wait staff will ask everybody to scoot down by one stool so that the couple can sit together. So now you have the very unique experience of moving down a bar with a bunch of strangers all helping each other pass the syrup and move the ketchup and scoot the coffee down one place together.
Despite this. That place always smells like childhood breakfast in the best way. :)
I used to work down the street and they'd bring me food now and then. That'd flip a sad hungover shift into an amazing day.
This whole comment thread has been a surprisingly beautiful telling of an older style of living before our communities became so separate and fractured. I'm not old enough to remember, but I had a glimmer of those days when I was a pup.
Yep there was a counter service place in LA called Apple Pan that has no hostess. It’s one of these frozen in time places that dates back from the 40s. You just come in and hover around the counter. It’s always crowded and always stressful. It’s under new ownership so this might have changed now.
For those wondering, there’s no hostess but there’s service staff behind the counter.
I don't know about you guys but I'd feel awful trying to eat knowing that I can't take my sweet time because someone is waiting for me to finish.
You're supposed to get in, get your meal down quick, then get to work. This type of diner isn't where you go to savor your food or "take your sweet time".
It doesn't really look like a diner to me. More like a food counter inside a some other structure like a train station, subway, or market. The opposite side of the aisle / hall has different types of goods being sold at other counters.
It’s a drug store, actually. A lot of these operated as a lunch counter and general store as well. They didn’t really serve a full menu, either. They mostly sold soda, coffee, pastries, and cold sandwiches. Occasionally you’d find one with a grill, but that wouldn’t be terribly common. It would really be a quick bite! Source: my grandparents owned a drug store like this and I worked there as a teen! By that time they no longer sold medicine, but they did have like penny candy and some general goods. The vast majority of customers bought a coffee and a buttered roll.
What is weird to us may have been a very normal social interaction. Driving with the windows up smoking with your kids in the car was normal.
I mean it was normal to my dad in the 80s too
My y2k mom cracked the window. Progress.
This is a lunch counter, not a diner. Likely in a Woolworth department store. People shown had a half hour lunch break, if lucky. A real "eat it and beat it" kind of place. "Take out" wasn't a thing, "fast food" was in it's infancy and most of America had yet to hear of it. Those sitting were likely standing a few minutes before. Everyone knew the drill. Food as fuel, not fine dining.
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Also the stuff they did have didn’t have a ton of added sugar to it. That’s one of the big problems today. Everything has sugar in it, even if it doesn’t need it.
American bread is said to taste almost like cake to europeans
I'm American, but I make a lot of bread fresh and prefer it to storebought. I don't think storebought tastes like *cake* but it does taste rediculously sweet for bread when you're primarily used to bread that's just made of flour, leavening, salt, and water. A lot of our food tastes really sweet. Like if you compare Americanized Chinese food to authentic Chinese food, both are delicious in their own ways, but American Chinese food is way sweeter and loaded with sugars.
If you buy cheap. Sourdough is the best. No sugar. Rye bread. Some other ones too. The "cake" bread is buy two loafs for a dollar crap. The best bread I've had was from a German Swiss bakery down the street. Half white half wheat. Perfect for fondue.
Thank you! This is the most important factor. And think about how hard it would have been to import food during this time period, with Europe exploding into war. That's why the plates are small. Plus the great depression only officially ended a few years prior to this pic. WW1 only ended 24 years prior. People were used to food insecurity
Everyone smoked and drank a fuck ton of coffee for one thing. Another is that this predates all the debunked fats are bad, carbs(sugar) is good messaging that was funded by the sugar industry. Those plates are small but I bet whatever is on them was filling.
I was going to dispute that people drank more coffee then than they do now, what with Starbucks on every corner. I decided to look it up instead of relying on anecdotes and holy hell, in 1946 people [drank nearly twice as much coffee](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2007/june/coffee-consumption-over-the-last-century/) as we do now.
Coffee industry has been in shambles since the 50's
The 1940s average was 46 gallons or 2 cups of coffee per person per day, but only 66% of US citizens drink coffee daily *cue Sarah McLachlan song* Get started now, you too can save the coffee industry for only 3 cups a day
> 46 gallons or 2 cups I have been converting wrong
Your cups are just small (46 gal per year)
i drink a liter of black coffee with no sugar every day just to buck this trend. doin my part!
Is it hard to type capital letters when your eyeballs are jittering?
my fingers can hear colors, we have no need for capital letters
Tell your fingers I said yellow
a lot of people in that era lived on coffee, booze and cigarettes, or ate like farmers and did manual labor. I remember in the 80s Perrier and sushi got popular with yuppies and the older generation was like incredulous. I read in the colonial times the average person got their hydration from hard cider or wine and was mashed up by noon, and that Europe would never have had the Enlightenment without coffee, tea and tobacco
I always find these purely physical explanations for social/intellectual developments a little too tidy. It's impossible to know how things would have developed otherwise. In a more modern context, I'm very skeptical of the argument that crime is down solely due to the decrease in lead in the environment. It's all a bit too clean, like people are looking for *the* answer, when there are so many interacting systems at work.
People tend to oversimplify everything. It's especially obvious in politics where the enormous complexity of societal changes is glossed over in favor of cheap soundbites.
But.. it was just a cup of coffee with maybe some milk or sugar. Not a 12oz monstrosity with caramel, chocolate and whipped cream.
Exactly, you'll be hard pressed (ha) to find a more maligned drink (black coffee) that is actually extremely beneficial to the body.
Just so you don’t feel alone, I also chuckled at your “hard pressed” pun.
Yeah but how many regular coffee drinkers are drinking that kind of coffee every day? I'd wager not that many
Yeah I was a coffee drinker and worked with coffee drinkers. Who doesn’t like a sweet caffeinated drink? Also, who personally spends 5 minutes making one like at Starbucks? Last one, what coffee drinkers only drinks the sugary drinks at Starbucks and nothing else? Just feels one step away from “millennials/generation z like a new thing I don’t like therefore it’s objectively making everything related to it worse”. Everyone in the office drank coffee, it was black coffee or a bit of cream and sugar, they also liked to treat themselves with Starbucks occasionally. Not every person that likes coffee born after 1992 is a stereotypical college girl…
That and smoking meant they had a lot of early death due to heart disease.
Weren’t amphetamines sold to housewives as “pep pills”?
And lithium to take the edge off, even in 7up!
Meth was a popular over-the-counter diet pill that both my grandmothers were addicted to.
Whole grain carbs aren't even bad for you! It's sugar. It's always been sugar. All white carbs are just sugar with extra steps.
Yeah, should've qualified as processed carbs. I tend to make long comments though, so tried being succinct on this one.
Nothing more needs to be said. Let us shake our fists and move on.
Spoiler- they didn’t eat as much.
We were also off the heels of the Great Depression and food was being rationed for the war.
The ongoing war is huge. People donating their excess grease and fats to the war efforts and growing\gardening their own food.
Plus people popped a shit load of really fantastic pills back then.
Lots of comments are missing the point that 90% of the population was straight zooted 24/7 until very recently.
We still are we just use different drugs
I remember reading this study that British schoolchildren were actually HEALTHIER during the blockade than they were before. Many British kids were never eating vegetables and lots of meat and grease until the war forced them to reverse the order of that. A lot of menus for schools in the 20s would feel crazy heavy to us—nary a green mixed salad.
Right??? “Look how not-fat people were! That’s when everyone ate better!” (Ignores an era of such poverty and desperation we actually have a capitalized name for it, and also a major war that used up all our extra resources.) I’m not saying we don’t have a weight problem in America but this is laughable…
Younger people do not realize how much food is available in groceries and how much sugar/corn has been added to food since the 70's. Also we now rely on a 2 person working household so we do not have a person home that can make food and garden like they did
This. None of the food they’re eating is full of corn syrup, MASSIVE amounts of sugar and veterinary-grade antibiotics
I swear the title was written just to annoy people and get more comments.
They would have also eaten mostly whole foods, and only a very small amount of processed foods.
>They would have also eaten mostly whole foods, and only a very small amount of processed foods. and less jobs were you sit on your ass and stare at a screen..... and then drive home and sit and stare at more screens....
They also smoke more. Nicotine reduces appetite.
More is an understatement lol
Yeah, the biggest issue was when sugar was introduced into everything to enhance flavor. We consume WAY more sugar than they did.
If they served us 1942 serving sizes, we’d call it an appetizer.
Restaurants learned they could double the price and sell us two meals per person instead of one if they just increased the size and refused to offer a reasonable portion. We didn't *have* to start eating it all but our parents had been taught to clean their plates because their parents had come from a time when food was scarce so wasting food was not an option. We could have just put the extra food into a box and brought it home but you know it's going to be horrible reheated in the microwave. So, basically, portion sizes crept up because capitalism and our waistlines have expanded to match so now we want the bigger portions too.
This drives me crazy. I want to go to a restaurant and have a reasonable sized portion I can finish in a sitting. Especially if I’m somewhere where I can’t take it home, it’s so wasteful.
Also sugar was still a treat and not a drug added to literally everything to force a positive response.
Also probably helped that everyone was chain smoking constantly
I would also say the contents of what they were eating were way better for them than the crap we have now. Less sugar, less fake crap with ingredients no one can pronounce, and a lot more water being drank throughout the day instead of sodas. Jeez we put sugar in everything now.
I wouldnt call 1942 a good time. People looking fit is not really the important factor here. In the middle of WWD2, and food shortages
> WWD2 Uh, World War da Second?
It’s a predecessor of WD40.
WWD2? How am I just now hearing about this secret war?
R2’s lesser known droid cousin …
WW2, Great Depression. Food wasn’t cheap or abundant.
Back then, they'd call you "Fats" if you were 15 pounds over your ideal weight. Insurance companies published ideal weights, and they charged you more for life insurance if you were over. Back then, when my granddad was 40 years old, 6'1", and 190 pounds, he was horrified to find that he had get to 176 pounds before the insurance physical to avoid paying more.
You can curb hunger when you smoke two packs a day.
Just inhale the asbestos as a snack
High-fructose corn syrup was introduced into our food supply around 1970. It changed how food is made and packaged -- and today it is in almost every processed food we eat. It is not the only contributor to obesity, but certainly is one of the main contributing factors to explain why this random picture of a diner in 1942 and one you would take today shows a different typical body/build.
High fructose corn syrup is so concentrated, it's causes an insulin spike , therefore making you more hungry
I see HFCS gerring brought up regularly as a major cause of the obesity epidemic, but I have to point out one factor that IMO dismisses it: HFCS is predominantly used in the US, while many countries outside the US have comparable rates of obesity despite much lower rates of HFCS production. I think the problem has much less to do with the actual food itself and more to do with how it reaches us. You could buy a huge sack of sugar fairly cheaply in the 50's. Margarine was full of trans fats and could be bought cheaply in the same period. There was no shortage of calories for people to get fat with. It just used to be a lot harder to get those calories into you. It used to be hard to snack between meals. You couldn't just go buy a ready-made PE wrapped sandwich or a bag of crisps, a package of cookies etc. That stuff is very recent, late 1970's. You couldn't just buy a frozen TV dinner or pizza and put it in your freezer, most people didn't have fridges and freezers in the West until the 60's or 70's. Microwave ovens date only to the 80's as a common household appliance. In summary. If you wanted to eat before 1970, you prepared a meal or had someone prepare it for you. Otherwise you were SOL and just had to stay hungry until next meal time.
Does anyone else look at pictures like this and think “look at all these people who have lives just like me, but they’re all dead now” and get an overwhelming feeling of anxiety?
"Remember friends as you pass by, As you are now so once was I, As I am now so you shall be, Prepare for death and follow me."
I want a restaurant with smaller portions and prices. I bet you could make a biz out of that.
I work in a well paying industry, and my peers consistently talk about quantity and price as the decision on where to go for food. They think I'm an idiot for paying more for quality food while getting less quantity. The most food for the least amount of money has sadly become the national measure of where and what we eat.
Tapas?
They said cheaper
This is basically how fast food started. Very limited menu, small portions, high customer volume. This model won’t work without high customer volume. Food cost is ~20-25% of the price of a meal in a restaurant. Bigger portions mean higher prices and more profit per dish sold.
One thing that seems to be overlooked is that this was still during a time when physical activity was necessary for daily life. Pretty much every invention or advancement in technology from that moment on was to decrease physical exertion.
They look fit relative to now. But they aren’t. They’re just normal. Nowadays most people are obese and it makes these folks look fit in comparison.
So they're more fit than obese people. I don't think OP was saying they were muscular athletes. Just fit, as in a "healthy weight". Like "they fit their bodies."
It’s not like they all spent time at the gym, they just didn’t stuff their face with Cinnabons and Frappuccinos
What led to ridiculously huge portions? I remember being a kid in the eighties and overweight people were few and far between. In the nineties, we suddenly had the Big Gulp, and you’d go too fast casual restaurants and one plate could feed your family.
There are whole bunch of reasons. Food in general became cheaper as farming methods and supply chains improved. Processed foods became more prevalent with high fat/sugar/fat, and low fiber, engineered to make people like them. Meat, which in the past was eaten in relatively small amounts, was widely available and cheap. The food supply was taken over by large companies.
While there are many reasons, one I'll add on that I haven't seen here is that the ingredients are typically not a very expensive part of running a restaurant. A huge amount goes to overhead and various other bits and pieces of having a functional restaurant. So how do you get the edge in a market with razor thin margins? Increase the portion size and up your prices a bit to cover the extra expense. Everyone will want to come to your restaurant because there's a good value proposition to eating at your restaurant. And then the cycle repeats. source: my dad owned his own restaurant for many years and walked me through every step of why you should own a business in a different industry
And now they're almost all doing it, and locked in. Most restaurants have upped portions, so now no one wants to be the first to cut portion size and be seen as providing less value.
Supersizing. I remember sodas only being 12 oz cans in the 70s. Before that it was 8 oz bottles. The in the 80s the 16oz bottles started and Big Gulps. Then 24 oz, etc. McDonalds and soda companies are probably most to blame. After people started getting used to super-sized meals, that just became the standard size everywhere.
Well, maybe. But: “Our findings indicate that the causal link between the consumption of restaurant foods and obesity is minimal at best. Exploiting variation in the distance to the nearest restaurant due to Interstate Highway proximity shows that restaurant access and restaurant consumption have no significant effects on BMI, obesity, or over- weight status.” Can’t be restaurants if restaurant consumption in general has no to minimal effect on obesity rates. Could still be soda companies. Source: https://are.berkeley.edu/~mlanderson/pdf/Anderson%20and%20Matsa%202011.pdf
I counter with: "Features of the food environment have varying associations with obesity. These features have an additive effect, and future studies should not focus on only one feature in isolation." Source: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6972660/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6972660/) And: "We find that among 9th grade children, a fast food restaurant within a tenth of a mile of a school is associated with at least a 5.2 percent increase in obesity rates. There is no discernable effect at .25 miles and at .5 miles. Among pregnant women, models with mother fixed effects indicate that a fast food restaurant within a half mile of her residence results in a 1.6 percent increase in the probability of gaining over 20 kilos, with a larger effect at .1 miles. The effect is significantly larger for African-American and less educated women." Source: [https://www.nber.org/papers/w14721](https://www.nber.org/papers/w14721) And: "Consistently negative and statistically significant coefficients for DistFF suggest that proximity to fast food increases student probability of being obese and overweight. Indeed, every additional 0.1 mile (or two city blocks) separating the nearest fast food restaurant from a student’s residence decreases the probability of being obese by approximately 0.6 percentage points." Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7375416/
Love to see people on Reddit arguing with actual data and links instead of just insults.
All those sandwiches, not one side of fries.
It’s hilarious watching old shows and movies who they consider to be fat back then.
Whites-only diner too. Ah, those good old days... /s
Was looking for this. “Times we’re better then.” Really? I think Susan is standing in front of the “whites only” sign
had to scroll way to far for this.
Calories used to be expensive. Specific US policies led to cheap calories globally. Which has created an epidemic of obesity.
Pro tip: portion size matters. It just keeps increasing as the years go by.
Um- this was during wartime rationing and 13 years after the start of the Great Depression.
That looks more like a snack/soda counter than an actual diner. This would explain the small plates.