Debunking Boomer Memes
Millennials killed the table elbow industry.
However, I am happy to report that normally, when stuff like this gets posted on the UK nostalgia Facebook groups I've been infiltrating, someone does usually pipe up in the comments to, if not debunk the facts, then to at least call out the mean sentiments.
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00:00 Intro
00:25 Pasta, curry and takeaways
01:07 Pizza, flavoured crisps, and rice
02:16 Big Macs, brown bread, and oil
03:47 Tea bags, sugar, and fish fingers
04:45 Sushi, yoghurt, and unhealthy food
06:07 Potato peelings, Indian restaurants, and barbecues
07:32 Seaweed, kebabs, and prunes
08:26 Muesli, bottled water, and elbows
10:32 Wrap-up
"Healthy food was anything edible" *immediately brags about wasting perfectly edible potato peels
Also the peels contain lots of fibre so you are wasting the most nutritious part of the potato by peeling.
@@Jemini4228 100% that. Unless you're making mashed (in which case I question your sanity) the skin stays on, roasted, fried or sauteed.
tbf, I remember people from this era did tend to eat potatoes that were clearly waaay past what we would class as best before though, like they had properly sprouted and were going green, you needed to give them a heavy peel to get to the remaining edible part. That is ww2 conditioning again I guess.
@richmcgee434 though I agree with you for the most part as far as skins on mashed potatoes, my favorite mashed potatoes are made with those little red skinned potatoes where leaving the skins on actually improves the flavor. Of course I then ruin any health benefits by adding lots of butter and cream cheese while mashing them! 😅
@@kahkah1986 Yes, new potatoes get brushed and rinsed. Older potatoes get the peeler.
Imagine living in one of the most historically imperialist countries in the world and thinking its people hadn't heard of foreign foods or culture.
the food we think of as "bland British food" is what British food would be like without empire. bubble and squeak is why they conquered India. Chicken Tikka is their national dish.
@JosephSimoneAverageJoey2000 only if you are an ignorant American. Traditional British regional food is tasty and much of it goes back to the Middle Ages
@@averagejoey2000 probably a bad example because bubble and squeak is fucking delicious - it's just fried colcannon, which is an Irish dish anyway...
@@ruthmeb the presence of curry is when the ages stopped being so Mid.
@@averagejoey2000 Sorry did you mean Chicken Tikka is Britain's national dish? I dare you to go to India and ask for one they wont know what you're talking about. It was invented in Glasgow in the 60's to satisfy a Scots pallet that considered a curry without sauce to be uneatable.
Imagine living in this Boomer's version of the 1950s and thinking "Yeah, this is something I want to go back to."
Boomers in the 50s were children
@gavinreid2741 No wonder they didn't know decently common things existed if they were like two at the time.
I don't think that's the point they try to make, I think it's more on the line of "we improved things a lot so you should not complain of underemployment, housing crisis, lack of welfare"
@@rainpooper7088 That is exactly why this meme exists.
I'm American so my 50s and the British 50s were probably different anyway, but I was lucky enough to spend a winter in a town on Route 66 which apart from a Thai restaurant that merged with one of the three diners in town and a Chinese super buffet off the main road was still pretty much exactly as it had been for 80 years, so I've gotten to experience a slightly modernized version of the 50s. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't something I'd give up modern computing, for example, for either. Also I drank at the bar and tried all the diners and restaurants of course, but most days lunch was the Thai place. Some of those modernizations had become the soul of the town, at least for me.
whenever older generations complain that my generation doesn't go outside, it's frustrating to remind them that they created the reason why none of us go out - concrete and supermarkets and shopping centres and literally no where that isn't industrial to an extent
I have a buddy who is a single dad and pretty hands-off with his daughter, lets her play by herself in the park about a block from where he lives. One day, the police found his daughter unaccompanied, dragged her back to her dad, and chewed him out for letting his daughter play by herself in the park. We're literally not even ALLOWED to let our kids play outside anymore.
Theyre the ones that call the police whenever anyone younger than 40 is outside.
Most old people don't go outside much either. Throw that back at them.
The near-elimination of non-commercial public third spaces, outsourcing of manufacturing, continuous suppression of wages against inflation, the structuring of our transit system around personal cars, - the subsequent communal dislocation and widespread deprivation and social isolation, the subsequent climate crisis and its impacts on optimism and mental health, eschewing shorter work weeks, the ever-increasing monopolisation of children's lives by a results-crazed school system... I'd happily give up oily takeaway curries if they could give us back a halfway viable society, but it's a bit late now.
Poor you
Of course there where no phones at the table in the 50's, but there where newspapers, books and other distractions!!
Imagine dragging a rotary phone to the table in the 50's...
You spelled "were" incorrectly. So your argument has automatically become invalid. (This comment contains irony)
It's like when people talk about how people 'used to talk to each other!' when any image from the 40s-60s of a bus or train will show almost every person with an entire full sized newspaper open, reading it instead
Yes. Kid during the 90s, not 50s, but I had a book with me all the time before cell phones.
Also, TV dinners were invented in the 50s, so television was also something "at the table"
64 year old man here. I recently dropped a "humor" group from my Facebook feed because it was top-heavy in posts yukking it up about how soft today's kids are because they didn't ride in a seat-belt-free car with a steel dashboard while Mom 'n Dad chainsmoked, and their Dad doesn't flog them with a razor strop on a daily basis, and they didn't experience the joy of eating lead paint flakes, etc, etc, etc. Yeah, we survived that crap, but a lot of us didn't, and a lot of us don't find it particularly funny today.
It says a lot about someone that they think things like that truly make them superior. It's very strange behavior
"a lot of us didn't" LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK. This about so many things, in every decade.
Most of those points just prove the absolute ignorance of the poster. The OP might have not heard of have any of those things due to his insular upbringing, but that surely doesn’t reflect the real world.
I've been in few life threatening situations as a kid (and later), some were closer than others. At some wedding I run into place where there were guard dogs (I didn't know that) and owner of venue scolded me and said these dogs might have ripped me apart. I was almost in car accident when I was biking as teenager, I was almost in car accident again later in life when I was crossing the road. Not gonna lie I do prefer the safety over those scenarios
yes, children today are too soft because they are no longer getting unneccessarily poisoned on a daily basis while we needlesly beat the shit out of them. 0o
"You elders didn't think you were respectful. That's why they hit you" Absolutely savage. Gonna steal that one next family Christmas
That was an absolute sucker punch, but so true and such a destroyer of the "you have to physically abuse kids so they respect their elders" arguments. like "If you had respect for your elders why were you getting hit so much? Sounds like you only want people to respect elders now that you are one. Either they weren't hitting you for a reason and you're lying that it's justified punishment for bad behavior, or you didn't listen to them anyway and you're lying about that approach working on you."
"If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me?"
The amount of hate and resentment some people had towards their parents that would hit them (hands, belts, sticks etc) turned out to be a lot more than a screaming match that “you don’t hit MY children” Like you don’t expect your mother to start yelling at and threatening to not only throw out your grandmother but also report her to the police if she does it again. She ended up limiting contact even more later on but not for a lack of trying to get along after she became an adult. On dad’s side it was slightly different since his father had realised that this was indeed something that he should never have done and it should be illegal. I always had tons more respect for that side of the family, they’re the generation that were young during WW2 and had to go to war. You can get people to respect you and listen to you without needing to hit them, and they won’t grow up to either secretly or openly resent you. It’s very difficult to heal that rift between you if you did do it unfortunately, you noticed it sometimes, that it was difficult for dad to trust that his father really had changed for the better. Still, much respect to someone that can accept that they were in the wrong and change, even more so now as an adult than a child that didn’t want to disappoint someone they looked up to so listened to him and grandma I’ve heard similar stories of adults that go no contact and even keep their own children away from their parents, but here it was made illegal sometime in the 80’s to physically abuse children and it didn’t make everyone grow up to be a disrespectful rebel that hates authority figures. Spoiling kids and never teaching accountability, that actions have consequences, those parents are the worst offenders, entitled parents that raise entitled children and then they get into trouble with the law since they were never taught that your parents can’t protect you forever, and the parents whine about it because they’re still convinced their children are perfect little angels that can do no wrong. Sucks for the kids too, they don’t know any better and need to learn before it gets worse for them
Tldr; my grandmother never learned not to throw stones in glass houses. My grandmother went on a rant about how promiscuous kids are these days. For some perspective, she got knocked up and then cheated on my grandfather with multiple other people. I am 27, and still single. Now, I didn’t say that to her (I just thought it very loudly) and asked her if any of _her_ friends waited for marriage. There was a pause before she said “I don’t know, we didn’t talk about it”. I told her _that’s_ the difference. Your generation didn’t talk about it. Except of course that was bs. Her friends didn’t wait and she knew it. They just had couples in separate twin beds on TV. Meanwhile, if you look at the records of a medieval doctor, every third person had syphilis 🙄
Note on the last one as well: Rotary phones, which HAD TO BE PUT ON A TABLE, absolutely existed during the 1950s and 60s. There were absolutely phones on dinner tables in some households.
they sold phone tables, the line was usually in the hallway in UK and these 'tables' had a seat part, part the phone sat on and usually somewhere like a shelf for the phone book and your own contacts book.
I think that phones were typically kept in hallways back then.
Many restaurants were set up to allow phones to be brought to your table and plugged in before WiFi and mobile phones. Some were set up to facilitate dating. You would go to the restaurant and look about the room. Each table was easily identified so you could call it on the phone at your table if you wanted to talk to someone you were interested in at the other table.
This is correct, I hadn’t seen it when I posted below. Also my grandfather was “Greatest” generation and he took calls at the table and during meals.
I used to work with a woman who said 'children have no respect these days, they just run amok'. She followed this up by explaining how she and her friends would regularly steal from a local business and even reminisced with a colleague of a similar age that they essentially had a scam set up where they would steal bottles from the backs of shops then sell them back to the shop to get the few pence a bottle refund. Now, all of us as kids did things that were 'naughty' or 'broke the rules', but to have a dig at all modern children whilst also saying that you were actively breaking the law for large parts of your own childhood seems to be at best comical and at worst to be a kind of self deception verging on delusion.
They said exactly the same thing in the 50s. 😂
Reminds me of my dad. Super strict disciplinarian, constantly talks about how he is self made, "kids just aren't the same these days," etc. Came to find out: he was a literal car thief during his teenage years, but was essentially never punished because he promised to take a career his future mother in law handed to him. His father then bought him a house. Absolutely absurd.
@@NucularRobitit's amazing, isn't it? Just completely wrong headed hypocrisy
bit daft to use the law as our moral or ethical framework though innit? Just cos a bunch of old people in a building wrote something down on a piece of paper it's bad now? Sounds a bit like Church to me, to be quite honest. Just do good things, don't do bad things, and teach your kids the difference.
children today are all medicated and have no energy to steal.
No pasta in the 50s?!?!? 1957 gave us the Legendary 'Spaghetti Tree' April fools prank on the BBC. This neatly demonstrates that people knew what pasta was, but not how it was made.
Omg the pasta tree ad!! Thank you for reminding me about that delight!
Reminds me of a sketch (from who, I don't remember) from the 80s that took the piss out of Brits not knowing how their newly fashionable coffee was made. A customer orders an espresso and the "barista" (in reality a greasy spoon chef) disappears behind the coffee maker. He obviously has no idea how to make an espresso so he just bangs the coffee maker with a spoon and makes various other noises while he makes an instant coffee out of view 😂
Not The 9 O'Clock News, with Rowan Atkinson as the coffee maker, I believe. He also added a squirt of washing up liquid to froth it up a bit. @@jmckendry84
I saw an Americanized version of this shared on Facebook and immediately questioned its accuracy too. Sadly so many people were responding like “That was my childhood! Everything was more delicious and healthier too.” Side note: my grandma born in the 1920s loved Chinese take out and pizza!
Same with my father. He loved his prawn curry (which I, by the way, detested).
Oh I wish I saw these thing in childhood. I lived from birth to 14 in rural Texas. My parents were silent generation and I'm GenX, just barely. Anyway we only had spaghetti when Dad worked late. I got my first taste of pizza at about 8. Never heard the word curry until I was in my mid 20s. Ate asian food for the first time in Asia. You get the idea. Though flvored potato chips were a thing.
Especially if it is about USA… it is not correct. Europe might still be kinda on edge, but surely USA had loads of stuff in the 50s, only thing maybe it was more exotic and less people ate it
My understanding is that the quality of produce was actually higher back then.
I'd argue that they probably didn't have so many conservants in their food, but I wouldn't know if that made them more delicious.
In the mid sixties we moved to California where yogurt was a staple in the supermarkets; may grandmother came for a visit and had yogurt before, tried, liked it, and when she returned,asked her milkman why he never had any yogurt. His reply was no one asks for it. It turned out, they had it all along, but didn't advertise it. After my grandmother started buying, soon everyone in the tiny village (maybe 150 people) was putting yogurt on their list.
A woman after my own heart
She is truly a great woman, importing the idea of eating yogurt in a small village, that's a great point to add in your family history dude
I'm particularly fond of the ones like "We didn't wear cycle helmets, or insist all our food be washed, or learn about survivorship bias"
Exactly! The people that learned about survivorship bias all died young so we don't hear much from them.
To be fair, bicycle helmets are less useful than helmets for kitchen step stool climbers. Meaning that the risk of getting into an accident in which the helmet would save your life is higher for a person climbing a kitchen step stool than for a person riding a bicycle. Yet I see no calls to always use a helmet when climbing a kitchen step stool, or condescending posters about helmetless kitchen stool climbers probably not having anything to protect anyway.
My Mum was told she'd eat a tonne of dirt before she died.
@@jannepeltonen2036 There's plenty of people who survive without a helmet on and go on to live horrible lives with severe brain damage. Riding a bike is very rarely fatal, the helmet protects you from crippling brain trauma by lessening the G forces on the head as it slaps into the ground. Having been a kid who fell a lot, it's pretty clear that falling on the ice while walking is WAY more harmful to the head than falling on a bike when wearing a helmet. Remember falling as a child and then seeing white for a short moment? Yeah, that's not great... You have to fall EXTREMELY hard with a helmet on to see white.
My grandfather worked in the fields as a farmer as a child. They sprayed pesticides on the fields as he and his brothers worked. He died earlier than he should have from lung related illness after having a cough my whole life. If you didn't wash your produce before, please start now boomers.
"Seaweed was not a recognised food" - This is so written by someone far younger than they pretend. Laverbread has been arround since the 1600s
And samphire has been eaten a long time
What blows my mind is the idea that an island country surrounded by the sea wouldn't have seaweed related recipes. Like what? People ate what was edible in their natural environments? Crazy. 😅
Or far less intelligent.
Is it very popular outside of Wales?
Yeah this person has clearly never been to a coastal town
If I hadn't been able to get pizza before the 80s, I'd be happy about having it now, rather than nostalgic for when I couldn't get it.
The first proper pizza restaurant in the UK made with a pizza oven was Pizza Express in the early 60s. There are some good videos of it on KZhead.
How stark would be a world without pizza!
Ha! My take on this was that this is what a young person today thinks of old people.
Regarding adults complaining about ill behaved children (beyond pointing out the fact that parents are responsible for teaching their children good behavior) I am reminded of a wonderful English teacher I had in high school (can you guess I am American?) She read a quote about how terrible the young people were, how the ran wild in the streets, disrespected their elders, drank to excess, etc. etc. She the asked who we thought wrote it. We were first surprised then amused to learn it was Plato. The more things change, the more they stay the same. 😊
Yup! You can find quotes like this from every generation complaining about the younger. I remember reading a quote from a man in the 20s or 30s complaining about young women having short hair and wearing pants 🤣
@@advisorywarning and some of them arrested for it for wearing pants. I think it was till in the law in France in 2015: women can't wear pants, but somehow people forgot about it, after they recognize it they withdraw it. If you are french and reading this please correct me if i am wrong.
My grandma once told me how she wished I would know what it was like to play on a jungle gym. I am 35. She use to take me to parks with jungle gyms on them ALL THE TIME. But now she's convinced they were considered 'too dangerous' and were removed from all parks around the world by the time I was born....
Sounds like my mother.
It's really distressing how the propaganda from cable TV and online pundits slowly supplants their actual memories. It forces us to face just how unreliable and easily manipulated our own memories are...
I will admit to a slight truth in the idea that jungle gyms were considered “too dangerous”, as I remember as a kid being severely disappointed when all my old favorite wooden playgrounds were systematically replaced with smaller, less exciting (to my child mind), annoyingly heat-trapping plastic jungle gyms. Not sure when exactly this was happening - 90s probably? But there certainly still ARE jungle gyms, and they ARE probably safer, and just because none of my splinters ever got infected or poisoned me with wood preservative or whatever doesn’t mean it wasn’t a real issue. 🤷🏼♀️ My mom probably appreciated not having to pack the tweezers as essential playground gear.
My dad does the same thing with us and my nieces and nephews. It’s so concerning that they believe this propaganda over the lives they lived for real. it’s frustrating, sad, and not a little bit scary.
I'm just slightly older than you. We had jungle gyms when I was quite young, but I remember them all getting roped off and pulled out when I was still in elementary school. Along with the see-saws! It was quite a disappointment.
Not peeling potatoes? What about baked potatoes? I'm a boomer. They definitely existed.
There are some varieties of potatoes that you can eat raw, like apples. But most are just too starchy and ghastly. Got to watch not to eat ones near the surface where the sun has got to them, turned green. They are poisonous, gives you awful stomach ache cramps. Better to well cook them.
I remember Bonfire Night baked potatoes in the 60s!
@@huwzebediahthomas9193 ... that... doesn't have anything to do with peeled or unpeeled potatoes?
In the UK, they are often called Jacketed Potatoes (cause the skin is a jacket 😊) a quick google search found me a reference to them from 1915, so I would say they pre-date the 1950s 🤣🤣
Skin on chips are just disappointing though 😁 (not a boomer)
Y'know, between the obvious rage the author of this "meme" felt while making it and the lard and sugar paste that apparently makes up most of their diet, I'm surprised they didn't have a second heart attack while creating this
🤣
This comment gave me a second heart attack. From laughing 🤣
lard is healthy, there's new research sugar is the issue
@@seabreeze4559there’s even newer research just in, sugar is great for you, a single tablespoon of lard could kill 20 elephants.
research insulin resistance, kid. I was trying to help you all. @@Prince_Luci
My maternal grandfather (who died years before my birth and whom my mother barely spoke of) hated salad and referred to it as rabbit food. Flash forward to my early/mid teens and I make the same reference to salad in front of my mother who was aghast upon, “hearing the ghost of [her] father speak through her child’s mouth.”
Barely knew my maternal grandfather...he died when I was 7 and we were only around him briefly after I was born and again for a few months when I was 4. But I grew up hearing my uncles talk about him incessantly, especially his beliefs on food. Chipped beef on toast, colloquially in the military called S.O.S, was referred to as "one-horse cavalry". He would only eat white corn meal, never yellow, which he held to be fit only for slopping the hogs.
@@Fred_Lougee I'm kinda with him on the white cornmeal tbh. But I won't refuse yellow cornbread if given it.
This meme can be pretty much summed up as xenophobia with classism sprinkled in between.
Based.
Typical boomer sh*t, in other words... I wish more boomers called out the bad boomers... It just never really happens, because the bad boomers bullied the hell out of the good ones, so they're just silent... The loudest voices amongst boomers are the most hateful and stupid. I'm sure there are good boomers, but much like good cops, they're never keen to speak up against the bad ones. Also, the generation who told everyone to not talk about politics at the dinner table are now talking about politics non stop 24/7... And they also told everyone to eat their vegetables, and now they're at war with salads and root vegetables and brown bread... What a generation.
And a dash of ableism as well! 😂👍
A disgusting modern adaptation of an old recipe, that most people wouldn't want to swallow today.
If this you on the picture, you're really ugly.
About that meme: Imagine being so xenophobic that you hate pizza and kebabs. Good lord.
I'm 77. I grew up with my grandparents, who were lovely people, but had a xenophobic attitude towards foreign foods. Fortunately, I grew out of that and love all kinds of foreign foods (I draw the line at sheep's eyes, though).
And apparently pasta?!?!
@@michaeljohnangel6359I don’t think any of us fault you for being a no on the eyes 😂
@@Ella35222 H.P. Lovecraft, a man so racist he had a year-long nervous breakdown after discovering he was a 16th Welsh, and had to write an entire novel to work through the trauma, famously ate spaghetti for the first time in his 30s, and loved it, despite his belief that Italians were subhuman. If you're so xenophobic you hate pasta, then you're officially out-racisming that guy.
@@Hositrugun I knew he was infamous for being racist, but holy shit. Having a nervous breakdown because a great grandparent was slightly west of the rest of your grandparents…
Inspired by this I did some research in my own local papers (Leeds) and here's the weird thing I found out: the city's first Indian, Chinese, Kosher and Caribbean restaurants/cafes all predate the city's first Italian restaurant. I haven't managed to find anything in regards to Japanese other than one cafe offering tea "in the Japanese style".
I fell out with most of my extended family (20+ people) after calling the oldest member out on this, I researched every point and linked articles to the proof and it was like they had sic'd the family on me for about a month. It was insane.
Is your family full of narcissists? 😬
I’m sorry, the oldest family member shared this xenophobic and blatantly untrue list of ‘facts’ and people call YOU the trouble maker for pointing out how incorrect it all is? You deserve better
@Shakes-Off-Fear I appreciate the kind words. My mother still has to deal with this person and the extended family and I think even she's at the end of her tether with them.
I think the narrowness of this meme writer's experience is really shown in the 'no seaweed' point. Even Wales is too foreign to count as a 'normal 1950s' experience. Laverbread is a very old, but very regional.
Similarly, muesli is mostly oats(hence the comparison to cattle feed) and oats were popular in Scottish cuisine.
I think there's an Irish song about seaweed too?
@@justforplaylists Dúlamán! kzhead.info/sun/h7CDnd2NonynqI0/bejne.htmlsi=2Z1XWEHd_ZX8mFYs
Aye in Ireland we have dulse.
@@GraemeMarkNI Yes, it's also Irish but I can see why an English kid (of the 1950s or today) would consider Ireland more foreign than Wales.
One of the most disingenuous thing about 'boomer memes' complaining about the current younger generations is that they set the stage for it. Examples of things they complain about (from an American perspective): Participation trophies, mobile phones, liquid bath soap, etc. They invented, marketed, and sold those ideas and items to younger generations and get upset when they're now a thing. Do they think the kids invented participation trophies, went to a company and had them made, and gave them out? No, they did that.
And they build the current Car centric envrioment and complain that current children are dependent on their parents and rarely leave the House.
The one that pisses me off is the “We were doing recycling when we were kids, you didn’t invent it” as if they weren’t the ones who abandoned it in favour of fast and disposable.
@@FranziskaNagel445 Nope. You're several generations off. The car-centric culture was built in the 1950s, when Boomers were children. You can thank the so-called "Greatest Generation," and the half-generation after it that was born in the 1930s,
@@kirkmt Everybody's talking in too-broad generalizations of age groups. It's ridiculous. Boomers started the recycling movement and worked to get it instituted in towns and cities. But not all Boomers did it, just like there are lots of Boomers still doing it. Same as every other generation (please don't imagine that in subsequent generations, every person recycles).
@@Historian212 fair enough. I stand corrected.
I laughed so hard when you listed off the Indian restaurants and said "huh they server curries." I felt the silent "how awkward for you" you were probably thinking.
Really enjoying this one - on the Seaweed point, Laverbread has been eaten in Wales since the 17th century so even if people didn't commonly eat it by itself, as an ingredient it was definitely well known here!
Whenever I see this one on Facebook I scream about laverbread!
In Ireland, they have "dulse" which is red seaweed... I think this author is also implying that Welsh and Irish food are too foreign as well
as a boomer I love this one, hated this meme as soon as I saw it.
It is written by someone who does not remember the 50s and 60s. Probably a young conservative
@@julianshepherd2038 I mean it's possible, but as a Millennial, I grew up hearing people that generation waxing poetic about the 1950s - which they're too young to actually remember - like it was really the way it looks on TV shows of the era. Grew up bemoaning the idiocy and inaccuracy of it with my silent gen dad, actually. One of the few things I do miss about the old curmudgeon.
It seems to have little to do with Boomers only what little Millenials and later Gens know about social norms that pre-date Them. Boomer is just used as a dog whistle for "old timey" stuff from before the current youth existed.
@@oceandrew’boomer’ has become shorthand for intellectually lazy, reactionary people, for reasons that should be fairly self-explanatory. in the 70s they were called the “me generation”, and “yuppies” in the 80s. so long, and thanks for the housing crises.
@@oceandrew The irony of your response being exactly what we mean when we use boomer as an insult is palpable. Telling young people we're wrong and the REAL problem all the time is childish and we're sick of it. Grow up.
I was going to point out that the seaweed one only works if you pretend Wales doesn't exist, but of course these are probably the same people who say "when I was young everyone in BRITAIN spoke ENGLISH"
We do this in America, ignoring the fact that in 1914 a quarter of Americans spoke first language that wasn't English, which only became taboo because of the First World War.
Yes! Wales has a traditional stewed mush made of seaweed. I Saw it on antiques roadtrip.bbc❤
@@SamAronowYup. My granddad grew up speaking German even though he was the 3rd or 4th generation born in America. English was his 3rd language. In the town he grew up in, half the families spoke German and half spoke Spanish. His own grandfather ran the general store, and my granddad spent his time in the shop from the time he was a toddler. So he picked up Spanish from his grandfather and the store customers. When he started school, apparently they would whip the children on the back of the legs for speaking any language other than English. It sounded brutal. Apparently the US government didn’t want these little pockets where German (or even Spanish) was still spoken to continue to exist. So they brought teachers in from other areas to teach them English by any methods they saw fit. It sucks because now that particular dialect of German is dying out.
@@Annie_Annie__ just another example of American cultural genocide
Very true, but It's ok, you also have to forget about Norfolk and the rest of the East Anglian coast line where Samphire has been eaten for centuries!
Oooh you need to do one on the bread scandals! Bread was at one point sold by weight. Bakers were found to be padfing the weight by adding such things as plaster. This was a real and prevalent thing in that industry for awhile. They often excused the additives as necessary to make the bread "white." 😂
Which is one reason why the brown bread was supposed to be healthier for you (my parents didn’t want us eating that nasty white stuff)
This reminds me of a tiktok meme I saw made by a young person that said something like "I want to go back to the 1990s when sweets were made, not bought ❤" and the imagery was very cottagecore and it's extremely wild bc the 90s were not that long ago and also mass produced candies have existed for at least 100 years I think. So I kinda wonder if the person who made this meme was even alive in the 50s to be getting all this wrong.
Curry was well enough known in 1892 for it to form an important point in a Sherlock Holmes story! (Curried mutton disguised the taste of opium used to drug the stable lad in Silver Blaze)
Yup! And that was served to a stable lad; i.e. curry wasn't just for rich people. (Though presumably people not employed in large establishments may not be so familiar with it.)
Coronation Chicken.... from 1953... a curry chicken for the coronation of a Royal... something most of the populace would absolutely have heard of and copied to try it.
They also eat curry and talk about the "curry houses" in London in Vanity Fair, the runaway bestseller by Thackeray that just hit the shelves
if you think about when the boomer generation was actually born (during the late 40s/early 50s) a mostly incorrect list of "food from the 50s" kind of makes sense -- boomers were mostly children during that decade. if someone asked me right now to recount food culture through the early 2000s i probably would give pretty skewed answers, on account of being about 5 years old. edit: got to the end of the video 😂 my point exactly. the list reads like someone reverting to being a picky kindergardener (who is also racist)
This is largely where the myth of the "Conservative 1950s" comes from. If it's literally the starting point of your life, you'd assume it was conservative.
I am, according to the definition, a boomer as I was born in 1957. My childhood was mainly spent in the 60s, so it is not only those born in the 'late 40s/early fifties. I am, however, glad to be left out of this discussion as I hate these American labels that are foisted by one group of people onto others. The life experiences of people born at one end of a 'generation' will be very different to those of people born at the end. They don't really make very much sense. My theory is that now that the US has run out of countries they are willing to go to war against (for now) the corporate-owned media has decided that having an inter-generational war is just what is needed to distract the populous from their social problems.
Makes more sense if it was written by someone too young to be a boomer or they might have remembered spaghetti being popular in the 60s. We got spaghetti out of tins at school.
@@jeankennedy5445This has gone on every generation. It’s not some government-foisted conspiracy to keep our mind off the corporate elite🤦♂️ On top of that, this was an English list of anti GenX/millennial traits, not American. And I believe it sounded more ‘anti foreigner’ than anything else.
Food in the 1980s was mostly pasta and sweets (source, me as a kid)
I remember watching Ian McCollum from Forgotten Weapons eat nothing but English Ration era food, and I'm like 99.9% sure he said all the bread was brown because it was a waste to put more effort into making it white and they didn't want to run out of bread, so it was almost all brown bread until the end of rationing
That does offer a bit of insight into where the anti-brown bread snobbery may have come from
Loved this debunking! It is quite true that not everyone had exposure to international foods at the same time. I grew up in rural Australia, and remember we were studying China in school in 1978. We were to have a Chinese banquet one lunchtime and all the mums (yes, I know, it was always the mums) were asked to cook a Chinese meal to present to the kids. At lunchtime, all the casserole pots were spread out, and as the lids came off we saw that every single pot held nothing but plain boiled white rice. With one exception: one pot held tinned sliced pineapple.
i felt psychic damage from this
did they at least wash the rice first
Thanks, Ms Draper!! I'm a 77-year-old Brit who lives in Italy, but was brought up in Manchester during the 1940s and '50s. There is such a lot of stupid nonsense written about what it was like back then, and it's irritating.
I hope 2023 is treating you better sir
@@acakecat7581 Thanks!! That's lovely of you. I hope you are doing well, too!!
I had the pleasure of living in Manchester in the mid-90s and the choice of restaurants available was paltry outside of Chinatown and Rusholme curry mile. I can't imagine that things were any better in the 50s.
My Pre-K teacher in New York in the mid 1980s was from England and she always complained about us putting our elbows on the table. She said "you can't even reach your food that way" and demonstrated with her forarm straight up and showed how her fork didn't reach. At age 5, several of us responded by showing her how, of you put your elbow a little further our, reaching your food was quite easy. It is among my oldest memories.
gods yeah no elbows on the table was a big thing when i was a young kid in the UK in the late 80s, at least at family gatherings. But very soon my parents realised how silly and pointless it was and dropped the idea completely
@@J.U... K is an abbreviation of kindergarten.
@@J.U... K is Kindergarten, age 5. Pre-K is typically the year before that, about age 4 (I said we were 5 in the comment, but that was an error). Some schools call ot nursery school. When I was in school, and my kids too, pre-k is the year before Kindergarten, which is the uear before 1st grade and everything before that os nursery school. But some schools in the US use different naming conventions.
@@J.U...”K-12” is how Americans refer to the complete range of levels in primary education. Kindergarten through 12th grade.
It’s quite funny how your teacher thought she could win in a roomful of kiddos by just being an adult and expecting everyone to immediately take her flawed example as law. “No elbows on the table” has got to be the most pointless practice of micromanagement in existence anyhow, really just doesn’t serve a point beyond the extra yelling
I was so confused reading out this meme. it was digging at tons of foods that seemed completely mundane and I couldn't even figure out what they were trying to complain about.
I adore this meme because it essentially boils down to "I miss when our food was garbage". Like i'm supposed to read this and reminisce about the good old days of not eating pizza in favor of jellied eel. Yum.
Late to the party here, but I thought someone else might enjoy this. The comment about "muesli" reminded me of the first time I heard that word. It was in a BBC show called "Wartime Kitchen and Garden". In episode 7, the host mentions people during WWII eating something "more commonly known today by its Swiss name" and goes on to describe making muesli. I dug around based on what I could see on screen and I found it! In the Ministry of Food Leaflet No. 15 "Breakfasts", published July 1944. A recipe for muesli as "Swiss Breakfast Dish". So there we go! Muesli pre-50s, and not as cattle feed.
Ooh this is interesting! Also, strictly speaking nobody would ever feed muesli to cattle anyway, because of all the other ingredients (it's not just a bowl of oats!).
I was looking for this comment:) i google it and Müesli was devel8ped in switzerland around 1900. Actually by a vegitarian Doctor very much focused on developing a health diet^^
Bumping this in hopes it's seen b the channel
Oh the potato skin thing is so strange to me. My mom, a boomer, always made a big deal about how the skin is the part with the most nutrients so whenever we had baked potatoes (or jacket potatoes depending on your region) she wouldn't allow us to eat only the meat of the potato and leave the skin behind. So this meme is exactly the opposite of what I would expect from a boomer.
Depends if they knew a damn about gardening or cooking. Most poor/resourceful people did know a lot about both as they were a way to keep kids healthy and make money go a lot further. And in many places there were backyards for gardening.
Skins are the best bit🥔🥔
My boomer parents were hippies, so all the health food stuff the meme writer is sneering at is exactly what I grew up on! (Though to be fair, their cooking style was an explicit reaction to the white bread and canned veg they were raised with.)
Agreed! In addition, it was from my granny, that I learned that potatoes are supposed to be scrubbed, not peeled and it was at the ripe old age of 6.
Curry was well known to the soldiers of Queen Victoria’s Army. Brought back from their time in India, it was very popular with the Soldiers and also for reusing the meat from the day before or indeed had started to ‘go off a bit’. There are Army Kitchen manuals with recipes for curry, kebab, flat breads from the 1880’s that I saw in the Royal Logistics Corps museum making the exact same point as you did😊. Some of the best curries that I have personally eaten were in the Army! Thanks for your channel. Always entertaining AND educational. Ian
I am grateful they spread to America also. Kebab is fantastic.
Thank you for this: as a man born in 1962, I sometimes have an overly sentimental attitude about how we did things "back in my day", and this video strengthens my resolve not to try to smugly impress my comparative judgement on today's world, or at least try to be judicious and more fair in doing so. Honestly, some things are far better today than back then: I am grateful for the reduction of institutionalized racism and the curbing of public tobacco smoking amongst other things. We "Boomers" should relax and let the kids who are running things now do it their way, just like we wanted to do when we were their age.
To be fair to the sugar point: my parents are both boomers and they were literally this morning complaining how *their* parents refused to believe sugar wasn't good for you. The sugar industry put a lot of effort into blaming fats for all health problems. But both of them eat with their elbows on the table and get their phones out in the middle of conversations.
I love how boomer humor can be summarized to single sentences: "Old good, new bad" "I hate wife" "Kid no book, kid phone" "Sustaining preventable injuries are manly and macho" "Child ab*se is great (Spankings and beatings)"
I remember when boomer humor was "young people these days are too conservative; they don't even have sex or smoke weed!"
Do you know any boomers?
@@SamAronow wait what?
@@SamAronowit was like that at some point?!
@@blakksheep736 Yeah, the stereotypes were reversed back in the 80s. Lots of counterculture resentment toward the hardcore conservatism of Generation X that helped elevate Reagan to the Presidency. Bill Bryson had a whole bit where he visited a professor at Iowa State who said "these kids don't even smoke weed or have sex! They have long-term relationships and wear Laura Ashley dresses and go see Donny and Marie in concert!" To be fair, at this time AIDS was an untreatable automatic death-sentence that hardly anyone understood. I have a lot of friends in their 50s who complained that their older siblings got to have lots of sex in college but when they got there everyone was too afraid. And in the same book Bill Bryson explains that it'd become much harder to buy marijuana in the US because the Reagan Administration had raised the minimum sentences for dealing weed to be equal to that of dealing cocaine and heroin, which was more profitable and thus incentivized dealers to sell way harder drugs. But mainstream culture was also definitely _into_ bashing boomers for being pathetic leftists who had too much freedom, and that's the backlash to that generation that I grew up with in the 90s.
"Seaweed was not a recognised food" Ireland: *record stops*
Wales, too.
I'm guessing for the seafood one that the person who wrote the meme assumed a pint of whelks or a jellied eel were raw just because they were served cold. My mother, who grew up in Essex in the 50s, used to be sent out for a pint of whelks for her father. On the other hand, oysters used to be food for the poor, and some of those were eaten raw (presumably only by people near enough to the sea to be able to eat them quickly). Dickens says "poverty and oysters always seem to go together”.
This is really excellent. When your nostalgia is centred around xenophobia, you end up with a modern nationalism problem.
It's almost inevitable a country based on imperialism and racism that still laments any of its subject peoples just demanding a referendum on their future. Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and to a lesser degree Belgium and Portugal all have far right problems now. More so than most countries do, and more so than a lot of the countries they colonised eg. Ireland. We're still moving forward (which is fairly easy given how backward we were in the 20th century) while they're looking backward.
The problem with nationalism is a lack of it.
@@TheAnthraxBiologyWhen you're "progressing" in the wrong direction, you're supposed to go back, commie.
@@NotSure109not enough Internationalism I say. WORLD GOVERNMENT FOREVERRRRRR
@@joshuaspaulding2978 You sound Jewish.
As someone over 50 with a functioning memory… THANK YOU for this. I’m so sick of people my age and older posting nonsense memes like this and not expecting the much deserved pushback.
Yes, we have this same thing going on in the USA. I am in my 50's as well and I can tell you, very few push back. People are exhausted. I have seen tons of articles about how younger folks don't go to bars anymore or fast casual restaurants. They don't have the money to. The Baby Boomers here say nobody wants to work even though most workers have several jobs. Truth is, employers don't want to pay a living wage. If anything, I think that this nonsense will stop within the next 10 years. I can already see the threads coming apart. I doubt many 30 year olds want to live like people from 80 years ago.
@@jerrimenard3092Thanks for having your own thoughts. It is so bizarre that folks act like younger people are just lazy idiots :(
@@jerrimenard3092 Just recently an older gentleman I know pulled "nobody wants to work" to me in the presence of a sweet young man. (I'm further from Spring Chicken than Old Cluck) I replied, "No, no one wants to work themselves to death for practically nothing." immediately followed by a quiet "Yup" from the sweet kid, & a short, equally quiet grumbling from my old dude This same guy was lamenting some improvements in recent years (abouuuuuut? Don't recall, sorry) & how bad it was in his day, like it's not fair...pout, pout. I gently asked, "Don't you Want things to get better? Isn't it Good when things improve?" Changed the subject lol
@@echognomecal6742 my exact response every time I hear this BS "complaint". Nobody wants to work for poverty wages to enrich the already disgustingly wealthy? Good. Labor has supply & demand too. How do folks call themselves capitalists & then expect welfare from labor & the government to subside their already wealthy lives??
@@jerrimenard3092 & OP you guys are actually Gen X & I don't see as many of you all being jerks to us younger folks🤗. But keep challenging the BS bc older folks still don't listen to us millennials even though many of us are over 40 now 🤦🏼♀️
Plus restaurants had telephones that could be brought to your table, starting in the early 1900s.
Food was anything edible. Except for: Curry, Pasta, Pizza, Muesli, Seaweed, Kebabs, Prunes, Sushi, Yoghurt, Sugar, Fish Fingers, brown Bread (Unless you're poor) Rice, Crisps or indeed Potato Peels
Thank you for making 1950’s Britain sound slightly less terrible than the meme made it sound.
I think the existence of celery chrisps only confirms that things have only got better.
Celery-flavored crisps sound good; the perfect companion to your Bloody Mary at Sunday Brunch!
@@SamAronowI've never had a Bloody Mary, or, come to that, alcohol, but like, does anyone actually _like_ them? Cold, alcoholic tomato -sauce- juice sounds... unappetising.
I mean I use Celery Salt in cooking and it's pretty good
@@blakksheep736 It's very difficult to get right, so I just make them myself. And it's not tomato _sauce,_ it's tomato _juice,_ plus vodka, hot sauce, garum, and celery. When done well it's very refreshing and spicy.
Now I want to try them! Celery salt is good. However, not sure they’d help with “rheumatics” (even though celery seed is a traditional anti-inflammatory)
9:37 when I see older people bragging about not having their phones with them 24/7, I always think of how weird this statement is. Of course you wouldn't, because not only phones were pretty much only landline phones, but all they would do is make calls. What they should think about is: if I had the chance of having a device in my pocket that was a phone, a camera, an encyclopedia, a videogame console and many other things combined, would I have used it?
I was born in 1994 and remember being told off for having elbows on the table by my grandma. But the idea that no one ever did it in the 50s is hilarious
Curry was definitely around: Holmes and Watson ate it on a number of occasions in ACD's stories in the late Victorian era.
This reminds me of the people that try and make it seem like allergies didn't exist when they were a kid and that it's somehow a new thing. Despite the first written mention of allergies being from over 2000 years BCE.
It’s only the _word_ “allergy” that’s fairly new (coined in 1906), not allergies themselves, or even the concept that someone would have what we now call an allergic reaction to food, animal dander or insect stings.
Wait people think allergies are new? What the heck, I'm learning so much random stuff in this comment section, it's great!
I used to have a book on coastal foraging that said that all seaweed on the UK coastline is edible but most of it "isn't worth the effort" 😂
8:26 to 9:04: Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary includes the definition: "Oats. n.s. [aten, Saxon.] A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." Moreover, James Boswell reports, in his biography of Johnson (specifically, the entry for Wednesday, October 13, 1773): "I ate some dry oatmeal, of which I found a barrel in the cabin. I had not done this since I was a boy. Dr. Johnson owned that he too was fond of it when a boy; a circumstance which I was highly pleased to hear from him, as it gave me an opportunity of observing that, notwithstanding his joke on the article of Oats, he was himself a proof that this kind of food was not peculiar to the people of Scotland." So not only the eating of oats in general, but (at least upon occasion) that of dry oatmeal in particular, has been practiced in England since at least the early 1700s. If one _does_ consider oats as food more generally, one can also add Boswell's further remark (in the section for 1776, which (at least in the edition that's on Google Books) isn't conveniently divided with headings for each day, unlike 1773) that in Lichfield, "I saw here, for the first time, oat ale; and oat cakes not hard as in Scotland, but soft like a Yorkshire cake, were served at breakfast. It was pleasant to me to find that "Oats," the "food of horses," were so much used as the food of the people in Dr. Johnson's own town."
Regarding curry: in Agatha Christie's 1957 novel "4.50 from Paddington", curry is mentioned, with the context making clear that it refers to a dish, not a spice. Christie didn't feel the need to explain what curry was in that book, so she apparently presumed her readers knew what she was talking about. So not only did curries exist in 1957, they were not even a novelty anymore, to the extent that the most popular author in the UK could write about them without additional info.
Ironically curry is so central to British cooking that many Asian countries like Japan learned of curry though boxed British curry spice brands, and by copying British-style curry recipes, before ww2 cut off the easy transportation of spices. Japanese curry and rice is literally a dish copied from the British Navy in the 1920's to solve malnutrition in the Japanese Navy at the time.
Your (Agatha Christie) reply is more literate than my footnote, but, watching this, I recalled a discussion of curry in the 1946 movie Terror by Night
I would assume that the colonizing of India is what made curry popular in England, Queen Victoria herself was a big fan@@falstaffswims
Mrs Beaton gives several recipes for curry in her cookbook in the 1880s (as well as kedgeree, using both curry powder and rice, which i'm sure would baffle our meme creator!) Plus, dishes very similar to modern british curries are listed in *medieval* cookbooks. If you had a time machine, you could serve a restaurant style korma or tikka masalla to richard II and he wouldn't think there was anything particularly unusual about it apart from the inclusion of tomatoes, which weren't imported from the americas until the 1500s!
Let's not forget that coronation chicken was a dish inspired by curry as well. And Japanese curry rice, currently popular in Britain, was created by British expats in 19th century Japan who couldn't get a good curry anywhere.
My grandfather was orphaned in WWII and grew up in poverty and with rations. He's a whole foot shorter than his younger brother, who he dropped out of school to help feed. He's handed down some eclectic recipes and he's not a person who changes his habits easily - if curry and muesli weren't available back then, he wouldn't be eating them now. He ate what he could get and he could get most of what was on that list! Especially fish and chips, the oilier the better. Thank you for help illuminating a time in history that still has a huge impact on the present day, and also giving the bigots a lesson.
Hope your grandfather had/has a full life regardless and a loving family and grandkids to live the rest of his life. Condolences if he's passed on already, wishing him the best if not
@@jonahandthewolf Oh, thank G-d he's alive and kicking with more grandkids than I can count! He worked his way up from an entry level internship to being an expert in his field, and still gets to tinker with it even after official (legally required) retirement. He rides a moterbike and travels to spend almost half his time in the country where all my cousins live. He's busy telling this generation how good we have it, and quietly working behind the scenes to make sure we continue to have it better and safer and with more opportunities than he did. Thank you for your kind words.
@@missl1775Thank G-d he is here and enjoying his life ❤ I truly wish I could meet him! Wishing you all the best
We all misremember our childhood, does that make you a bigot?
@@seabreeze4559 I think there's a difference between misremembering things and being self-righteous about how you survived without any of the modern fast foods that are actually British classic foods and have been since 100 years before the person was born. Bigot may not have been the right word, but it kind of feels like if I told my younger sister chewing gum didn't exist just because I didn't have any during school
I love the articles you found! Great work! It’s almost as if this person lived on a little island their whole life, eating beans and eel gravy pies, and never opened a book, was never told a story from a loving family member, and was clearly not protected from lead and arsenic poisoning. Exposing themselves as having had a sad, empty life😢 we should not hate the haters.
In my family (in eastern Canada) There was "white bread" made with white flour, and "whole wheat bread" made (at least partly) with whole wheat, but "brown bread" was made with white flour only and _molasses_ for the sugar content, which turned it brown. A real treat to have with baked beans.
Yes, that was my understanding. Brown bread was white bread dyed brown, basically. Wholemeal was pretty rare until much later. I’m in the UK. I’ve not researched this, it’s just my experience. The taste difference between white and brown was minimal, if any. It took me years to get my mum to buy wholemeal not brown (and she’d worked in a bread shop!).
You know it's peak British cuisine when celery flavor counts as spicy.
Except it doesn't say that?
No it implies no-one wants Celery crisps. We had curries in the 50s including very hot ones for those that wanted it. The Victorians were eating curry Troll off
@@ImmortalAbsol Isn't "piquantly flavored" a fancy way of saying spicy? Serious question, maybe I'm just being stupid 😅
@@necasperaterent29386it can be, but doesn't have to. Used to mean the exactly same thing, "food with lots of spices", but both, especially "spicy" went through a shift 8n meaning towards ...hot? food. Gods, english really needs a more specific word for 5hat flavor
@JonaxII I've thought that for a while. Lots of spices are not what people regard as "Spicy". Fenugreek, coriander seed, nutmeg, etc, not a trace of heat. I know people who won't try anything with spice in because they think it will be hot.
I have some of my Grandma's cookbooks from the 1950's and I can confirm that pasta and rice are pretty common ingredients (though pasta is always referred to as macaroni for some reason). There are also curry recipes and one book has a section dedicated to vegetarian cooking.
"Macaroni" was used instead of "pasta" in Britain for a long time. It's a much more generic word in Italian than modern English, and is often used there for any long noodle with a hole in the middle.
Macaroni is simply what they called pasta for hundreds of years. This is true until quite recently.
My grandfather ran an Italian deli in Swansea in the 50s. Pasta was very much a thing. And because it was Wales, they also ate laverbread which is made from seaweed. 😄
This popped up in my feed a while ago! I sent it to a friend and we were both gawking at the comments, most of which were "A better time!" and "Back when things were simple and good!" You mean *immediately following the deadliest war of all time?* When food was still being rationed? Like, of course it *felt* simpler - the people posting this were children at the time, so they were too young to fully grasp what their parents were dealing with. Very interesting to see it be properly deconstructed!
A curry plays a key role in a famous Sherlock Holmes story published in 1892. (The Adventure of Silver Blaze, the same one "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" comes from.)
Right? Like Britain full-on colonized India. You can't colonize somewhere without, y'know, colonialism. Plenty of people would have spent time in India and taken with them back to Britain a predilection for curry, basically the signature dish of India in the same way pasta is for Italy.
I sent the original meme to my Dad who was born in '42 and we had a right laugh at it together. He was a teenager in London the 50's, so he remembers those days very well. All the people who exoticise those days and use their imaginary picture of the 50's to fuel a culture war have no idea what it was like to actually live then.
So many young boomers born in like 55-59 think they remember it with the clarity of a memory savant. It makes no sense. I don’t pretend to remember the 80s, I was born in 86, how the hell could I? 😂 God I hope this never happens to me. Your dad sounds awesome though!
there is little else so enlightening and humbling as looking up records of cherished childhood memories.
You are so very much the professional guide. It's a pleasure to listen to you. You inspire confidence in the information. You shift personal styles so well.
Loved this! My mother trained as a high school cookery teacher in the late 40's and some of things she cooked for us at home were curries, kebabs, spaghetti bolognaise, and kedgeree - she even sent us to school with salami sandwiches for our lunch, which horrified the other kids in my small village near Manchester as they had never heard of any of these things. I took O level cookery at school in the mid-'70's and when we did yeast breads, my teacher suggested that as I was an 'adventerous' cook, I make a pizza, from an authentic Italian recipe with anchovies and olives - I vividly remember taking it home on the school bus, and all the other kids thinking it was the most horrible thing they had ever seen 😄
Wow, sounds like you had some delicious food at home! Was your mother Italian or just a big Elizabeth David fan? Also love the sound of your authentic Italian pizza!
Kedgeree was exactly what came to mind when they claimed that people didn't eat rice. It was a relatively popular dish long before the 1950s and even includes curry powder as an ingredient!
my mum did O Level cookery in the 70s too (I guess the modern equivalent would be GCSE Home Economics?) and the stuff she made was so much more adventurous than what I remember from secondary school in the early to mid 2010s. Russian fish pie, all sorts of stir fry dishes... I legitimately just remember making basic cakes and chicken nuggets once. 😂
@@newcamomile For those young people (just teazing!!) who don't know who Elizabeth David was, she brought the idea of foreign cooking to Britain in the '50s.
Did you let them have a taste of the pizza? I reckon that would have changed their tunes.
I think the originators of the meme might have been seriously alarmed by the discovery that kedgeree was popular as a breakfast dish in Britain in the 19th century and well into the 20th, and involved both rice and spice. But the meme itself has much of the same flavour as "my parents beat the stuffing out of me when I was a child, and I turned out all right".
Indeed, the oldest known recipe for kedgeree goes back to 1790 in Dumfriesshire...
I've become so used to your shorts - this was really fun, thank you!
Not knowing much about foreign food seems to be common amongst boomers, and I believe I have an explanation. Admittedly the source I'll present is just something I was told by a boomer, so make of it what you will. A couple years back I asked my boomer stepfather that grew up in 1950s and 60s London (Hackney, I believe?) what he ate back then. He explained the winkle man coming through the streets in his van, eel pies and all the other famous examples. I asked him what Indian food was like back then, because I'm a big fan of it now. His answer was that white parents typically chose not to take their families to foreign restaurants out of mistrust or general xenophobia, in particular he mentioned the KBW (keep Britain white) movement of the 1950s playing a big role. He told me that he did see Indian restaurants but never really knew what they sold there.
The whole "I got hit and I turned out alright" thing blows my mind. You demonstrably did not turn out alright, because you think its okay to hit a child!
I'm 65 and entirely opposed to hitting. On the other hand, the people in my neighborhood who hit their kids have kids to hit because they're young enough to have young kids. They're certain that hitting is the most effective way to teach respectfulness. They also think that Jesus died for your sins, but I think like Ricky Gervais. If you don't sin, Jesus died for nothing.
It's okay to discipline children.
@@NotSure109 Hitting a child is not disciplining them, especially if they don't understand what they've done wrong. All it's teaching them is to fear the person hitting them and to try to avoid being hit (perhaps by lying or concealing things).
@@hannahk1306 I didn't claim it was.
@@elizabetholiviaclark To clarify on "Jesus died for your sins", I believe the more common interpretation for most people should be more like "Jesus died for your sin", since in Western Christianity, it is believed that Jesus died to cleanse us from ORIGINAL sin (a tainted nature inherited from Adam and Eve, who chose to turn away from God; See this verse: Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned), which means that Jesus died so that even IF we fall to the "desires of the flesh", and sin, we can still rely on his death (and ressurection) to give us grace again *if we turn back to God* . Jesus' death does not atone for personal sins constantly commited in defiance against God. Extra fun fact: in Eastern (European) Christianity, there's the concept of Theosis, where Jesus (who is God by the way) became man to allow us men to participate in the Uncreated Grace of God, His Essence. For many Church Fathers, theosis goes beyond simply restoring people to their state before the Fall of Adam and Eve, teaching that because Christ united the human and divine natures in Jesus' person, it is now possible for someone to experience closer fellowship with God than Adam and Eve initially experienced in the Garden of Eden, and that people can become more like God than Adam and Eve were at that time. Some Eastern Orthodox theologians go so far as to say that Jesus would have become incarnate for this reason alone, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned.
We older folk need to make kinder memes more common. Some better Boomer meme ideas: "Every new wrinkle makes my wife more beautiful." "I wasn't forced to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle and I got a fractured skull. (image of helmet sizing and maintenance)" "When I was a kid no one heard of a peanut allergy. If we did little Jimmy wouldn't have died." "Other grandmas: (refusing to learn new technology) Me: (coding a website about knitting)" "Share this if you love and support your nonbinary grandchild" "(picture of Elvis) (picture of an old lady swooning)" "(photo of a child watching the Apollo 11 moon landing) (picture of an old person watching the first Mars landing with the grandkids)" "Back in my day we paid artists to paint pictures instead of having a plagiarism machine generate them." "(Handshake image with 'bingo' and 'Fortnite' that says 'hardcore gamers' in the middle)"
You Sir are a gem, thank you for the good laugh 😁
This is a hoot, especially that last one with the hardcore gamers ❤
These are some really good memes, I'd be delighted to see them in the wild !
This is so wholesome and lovely!
I love these!
9:05 Ooh I know this one, I live a stone's throw away from the world's first commercial bottled water plant, the holy well, in malvern, Worcestershire It opened in 1850, and the water was definitely more expensive than petrol, because the spring water of malvern was believed to have magical healing properties at that time
9:31 in my area of Northern Ireland (and I'm sure much of it is the same) we referred to fizzy drinks as "minerals" largely because of the Maine drinks company (est. 1949) who are/were known as Maine Minerals, and have little lorries like milk floats that deliver crates of glass bottled minerals to your door.
"I guess potato peeling is now part of the culture war." Can whoever is waging this war please stop trying to draft people into it with these random things nobody is even fighting about omg nobody has generational beef over peeling potatoes, this is ludicrous!
The Nazis attacked Cultural Bolshevism which meant everything from actual Marxist Leninism to modernist art and buildings, "Jewish science" and jazz.
@@julianshepherd2038 So basically the people who are waging the culture wars today. Are just rehashing the same BS the Nazi's originally spewed out back then. & adding one or two bits here & there to try to make it 'relevant' to today.
My grandfather fought in WWII and called baked potatoes lazy potatoes. He wanted to have mashed potatoes with every evening meal because he liked them so much. He also hated the Japanese because he served in the S. Pacific and saw what they had done to POWs and the indigenous people.
Come on show some self awareness, you've literally just seen a boomer meme throwing generational beef at potato Peel. 😂
No one is going to take away my curry with unpeeled potato bits in it frankly, over my dead body
In Ireland, it's still pretty common to hear soft drinks referred to as "minerals"
In Glasgow, it's known as ginger. Or simply juice. I love hearing what different regions refer to different things as
I'm American. When I hear "mineral water," I think it's going to be bubbly too.
In mother Russia soft drink is beer.
Aye but only very old people anymore.
My mother definitely still calls a fizzy drink a mineral, but most young people wouldn’t
As a student of English and history, I’m surprised every day by the things that are a lot older than we realize. I’ve just found that keeping an open mind and not being an asshole about it is the best policy. On the other hand some things are a lot newer than we give them credit for, or have changed in interesting ways and that’s cool too.
fun note on the kebab thing - kebabs are described in Dracula! Bram Stoker doesn't use the word, but he describes Jonathan Harker enjoying meat 'in the form of that sold by the cat meat sellers of london' which meant trimmings from other cuts threaded onto a skewer, which people would buy as a treat for their pets. So Bram Stoker, at the very least, knew what a kebab was in 1897!
I cook for a boomer sometimes. It's the dullest task - he only eats fried or boiled eggs, sausages, corned beef, potatoes, and carrots, peas and green beans. I suggested I make him a pizza once, he was visibly alarmed. He looked as if I'd just suggested we have a cyanide curry or something. I always want to share fun flavors with people I cook for. I couldn't even convince him to try quiche, even though it was made with 99% of his favourite things.
I got my boomer father to try a bunch of different foods I enjoy during lockdown and he loved most of them. The deal was he had to take at least three bites of each item and if he didn't like it he didn't have to eat it. He always ended up eating the food. I hope your boomer gets a little more adventurous someday.
@@AvrysatosI use the same tactic with my 4-year-old!
My boomer relatives aren't quite this bad; but it is a bit alarming how any dish they aren't familiar with (especially 'exotic' vegetables, for some reason), freaks them out so bad. Eggplant parmesan is like speaking Chinese to them.
@@Niclaas1999 my mother and her family... I'd mention going out for Indian food and she'd fall to pieces.
Here we see the modern version of the meme.😑
In the United States, there was an advertising slogan used by the sugar industry in the late 1960s - early 1970s: "Sugar, it's not just good food, it's good nutrition!" Yup. It happened.
Corporate interests gotta interest corporately...or something more elegant than that.
I mean if you count nutrition as calories per gram then yeah 🤷🏻♂️
@@GraemeMarkNIwhich is exactly how that word was used for the longest time. Only recently have we gone to apply it to stuff with particularly healthy micronutrients
In the early 60s, my mum would try to get me to eat lettuce by putting sugar on it.
@@cecilyrose8433 That’s a good idea. I might try that.
Boomer here, born 1956. Good research, but as a US native, not a lot applied to me. Certainly, my childhood memories did not include pizza or curry, but we did eat rice. The Big Mac came in the 60s, as you identified. I remember the first MacDonalds in our town. Eating out was a big treat, not a regular occasion. My first memory of pizza is in the early 70s, maybe the late 60s, with frozen pizza.
The curry thing is especially hilarious given that it's a key ingredient in Coronation chicken. The dish invented for the coronation that happened in 1952.
This is wild to encounter as an American. The implications of Xenophobia and anti-Americanism especially- rare was the person who didn't have an immigrant grandparent in the 1950s, and we'd been eating Japanese and Italian food in California since before World War I!
Yeah, italian immigrants over here on my part of the east coast too. Not so many Japanese as we're much farther away from Japan than California, but my uncles grandparents were Japanese immigrants. They came over in the 50s. (His father is still alive even.)
Even if the 50s was that xenophobic then, I don't get the point of someone today acting like a world without pasta was the golden age
But what about after the war? I could image anti Japanese sentiment to be even stronger. (even though both Italy and Japan were part of the axis)
It took Japanese food so long to make it to the South. I'm from South Carolina and we didn't get a Japanese restaurant in my small town until the 90s! We all went nuts for it like it was the most unique thing ever and it quickly took off as a staple.
Here in Iowa we didn't have that many foreign foods, though. My dad never had a pizza until after he married my mom in 1962 and she made him one. Before that he had only eaten German style food that his mother made. My mom opened him to Asian, Italian and Greek cuisine that she learned out of magazines.
Jeez, this reminds me so much of my ex's insistence that greens were only worthwhile as "his food's food". He was very insistent that I learn to love meat, because there was something inherently wrong with me having different preferences from him? And I'm not even vegetarian; I just happen to like the flavor and texture of vegetables and fruits more than steak, or whatever.
And a meat dinner wouldn’t be nearly as good without good vegetables.
i'm so glad he's your ex!
This reflects my dad's dietary experience (or lack of) in childhood. He still has a thing about not eating foods he didn't encounter in childhood (totally different to mum of the same generation). I grew up in 80's making dad's cuppas with loose leaf tea in a pot, he only submitted to trying teabags when advised to go decaff and only available then in bags. He still will not eat pasta, rice is only in pudding and whilst a stew in gravy based sauce is fine, he wouldn't touch anything cooked in a tomato based sauce, whilst tomatoes fine to eat in a salad. He would be agreeing with this list .... But thank you for debunking it. After deployment in 2 world wars, not to mention civil servants working through the 'colonial Office' , the generation(s) before the boomers had a wide exposure to worldwide cuisines. Maybe that had contracted somewhat for the boomers (esp with lower income) in the UK born into rationing, the releasing of colonies and not being called to war service in distant lands. The Indian restaurants may have existed but for those who never ate out they may not even be on their radar, and as for takeaways (excluding fish and chips) the idea of paying someone to cook for you, and not having that served in the restaurant would be strange for many. if eating someone else's food then make it a full night out. Agree the list feels like anti immigrant; anti 'kids these days' and anti healthy eating .
Videos like this are the reason I come to this channel. Keep up the good work! ❤️✨
I remember one where they talked about recycling glass bottles in shops and getting groceries in paper bags, etc when they were young and complaining about kids today using plastic while talking about environmental concerns. I felt the need to point out that if it happened when they were kids and doesn't happen now, it changed because they changed it when they became adults. Young people today didn't change it, they are living in the world they way it was created before they were born just like the boomers were when they were kids.
This one I feel is unfair. Glass bottles have become a luxury rather than a containment mechanism and in my opinion this is due to ( supply-side ) market forces that 90% of us don't have have a say in whatsoever. This is a valid complaint imo and one I've had as a guy presently in his 20s. There's been a few times I've bought drinks in glass bottles, but they're not commonly available for purchase and often more expensive, sometimes considerably so if the glass bottle is part of the brand prestige. ( e.g. Perrier )
I remember that one too. There was a lengthy post that started out as a rant against the younger generation saying it's a good idea for customers to bring their own bags to the store instead of using the plastic ones. There was a long list of "In my day...." followed by the paper bags being used as book covers, refillable fountain pens, laundry dried on the clothesline, and yes, glass bottles instead of plastic. One thing that the author seemed to overlook was the fact that her generation did so many things that are environmentally friendly, but they're also the ones that dropped them the first chance they got and made those options much less accessible to the next generation. Then they scoff at their children and grandchildren's age bracket for being so silly as to put money and effort into seeking out reusable, recyclable, sustainable materials when disposable plastic is so cheap and readily available now. The ones that make those comments can understand living without modern conveniences, but they don't get why anybody would do it when they don't have to.
@@Soitisisit But if glass bottles we're properly reused they would be functionally free, you pay a deposit when buying the product, when you return the bottle you get your deposit back.
@@tvsonicserbia5140 I know. Glass is much easier to recycle than plastic and has less environmental harm too. I hate that they're not more common. Edit: Also the infrastructure for glass buyback is just not there in my area. It's hard enough to recycle cans and the amount you get is hardly worth the effort unless recycling other people's cans is your only source of income. Even that is usually not viable because you have to compete with prison labour.
@@snowangelnc Thanks. Good to know I wasn’t going crazy and misremembering it 🙂
Gen Xer here, My boomer parents were always telling me to get my elbows off the table. To this day I don't understand why it's a bad thing. I do occasionally tell my mum to take her elbows off the table when she's eating a meal with us nowadays, just for a laugh.
I learned from another channel (Tasting History with Max Miller) that "no elbows on the table" goes back to the middle ages. Back then, tables were often trestle tables, meaning just a board balanced across a couple of supports, which would be dismantled between meals so the room could be used for other purposes. Since the tabletop wasn't nailed down, putting your body weight on it could flip the whole thing over and send all the food flying. So there was originally a really good reason not to put your elbows on the table, but nobody remembers it anymore. They just continue passing down the rule like it's the 11th commandment or something, without realizing it's no longer relevant.
@@mirandarensberger6919 that makes so much sense! Like that experiment with chimps! Scientists put like 6 or so chimps in a room with a ladder and if one climbed it, sprinklers came on. So they learned "dont climb the ladder". They then slowly switched out the chimps so eventually none of the original animals that got wet were in the room and they all still avoided the ladder but didn't know why. Just the "we've always done it this way" mentality.
The fact that so many people were fooled by the BBC T.V. April Fools Day joke news segment about spaghetti tree picking, lends weight to the lack of knowledge about pasra, and that it was not commonly eaten in the 1950s. A relative of mine told me the story. I was delighted when that exact prank news report was posted on the BBC Archive channel!
Also on the seaweed, dulce was a long-term regional food in Ulster, it was a big part of the Lamas Fair in northern County Antrim - the Welsh also had larverbread
I’m a sixties boomer (and German to boot) I understood the elbows thing only applied while eating. This is evidenced in your photos. The grown-ups shown with elbows on table sit at post dinner tables. In Germany there was no curry that I knew of, but thats not a surprise. But we had rice and pasta. My mother intensely hated pealing potatoes, so she much preferred giving us mashed potatoes from a bag or pasta. Her potatoes were always cooked in the skin and peeled afterwards. Loved your list and the fun way you dispelled most of those clichés.
I'm also German (born in the 80s though) and my grandma would always cook unpeeled potatoes that you had to peel yourself when eating. Apparently this was very common in former times.
@@deniseb.4656 German here, born in the 90ies Same! Haha But i hated peeling the hot potatos so much i started eating them with the skin.
Czech here. "Brambory na loupačku" - potatoes cooked with skin on, especially new potatoes - are _still_ something of a... homemade delicacy? Comfort food? Something in that general area. 😅
@@deniseb.4656 well currywurst in Germany was invented in 1949, so you apparently we're aware of what curry powder was at the time already. But apparently currywurst was invented by British soldiers who were stationed in Berlin after the war. So it's similar to how the UK introduced curry to Japan in the Meiji era, brits introduced curry to Germany too, in the 1940s.
If memory serves, the elbows on table thing is an old classist practice. Basically sailors used to use their elbows to stop their plates from moving around on ships as they ate. So it became associated with enlisted sailors and thus a lower-class thing.
On the topic of glace cherries and table jellies, it's probably referencing turning the seaweed into agar-agar (or carrageenan, depends on the type of seaweed), which can be used much like gelatin.
There's 1940's recipe books that mentioned Irish Moss, a seaweed used for its gelatin. Was integral to make blancmange.
Irish Moss/seaweed was used for carrageenan for ages, and agar agar as well, marmalade bars can only be made from agar agar, so yeah, they definitely knew about it
Your point above them assuming everybody at the time had the exact same knowledge base as they did is spot on. I wish I understood why it's so hard for so many people to accept that they simply don't know most things!
Whenever I hear a boomer say "well back in my day", I just hear it as them saying "did you know time passes and things change"