Talk to anyone of my generation (born in the forties or fifties) about their daily meals and you will get a remarkably similar answer.
We all ate very much the same food.
Breakfast was porridge or cornflakes with toast ( a fry at the weekends maybe) lunch (dinner as it was called then) was the main meal of the day.
This meal was provided from a certain and limited repertoire of dishes.
On Mondays and Tuesdays we often ate reheats from the remains of the Sunday roast, like Shepherds Pie, Curry (at least my mothers notion of same) or what were called Rissoles -these were a strange combination of leftover Sunday joint, minced, mixed with mashed potato and onion, coated in egg and breadcrumbs and fried.
(Come to think of it those were pretty darn good .)

Otherwise we ate a certain amount of stews,Steak and Kidney ,or Irish. We frequently ate Lamb or Pork chops (with Mint Sauce or Apple Sauce), Boiled Bacon and Cabbage, the odd offal fix from Lambs Liver and the ubiquitous Friday meal of Plaice (always bloody Plaice) which was produced penitentially, with offers of a fried egg as an alternative if you felt it was just too awful.
This main meal was usually followed by a pudding. Let us not be coy about this, it was not a sweet or a dessert, it was a rib sticking , high density, glutinous, farinaceous pudding. This could have been Marmalade Pudding. Queen of Pudding, Apple Pudding and some that I have spent a lot of time trying to forget like Tapioca, Semolina, or Rice Pudding.

The tea or supper, as the evening meal was then known, was a much lighter and more informal affair, not surprising after that lunch.
For this there were two basic alternatives.
During the winter, we would have variations of what would be now seen as breakfast food.
This was frequently a “Fry” but at lean moments could be eggs (boiled, fried, poached or scrambled) and was always accompanied by as much as you could eat of bread, butter and jam, with it you drank tea, but only when you got to your teens, before that age the compulsory tipple was milk.
In the Summer any thoughts of change or variety were abandoned and from some time in May to late September we faced the inevitability of “The Salad”.
This, largely unvarying concoction consisted of ; a few slices of cold ham, (shop) 4/5 leaves of lettuce (undressed), 2 tomatoes, maybe a scallion or two, maybe a tablespoon of pickled beetroot (shop), often a hard boiled egg but always a tablespoon of a strange and acid and pale sauce known as “Salad Cream”.

Weekends were variations of the same except for the sacred Sunday Lunch. This was usually a roast of Beef, Pork or Lamb. The odd boiling of Chicken and Ham with parsley sauce was also OK as well as that forgotten meat Mutton which came boiled with Caper Sauce.

The entire repertoire of the cook, inevitably the Mammy, was about 30 to 40 recipes of meat and vegetables. Her principal failing was that the vegetables, meat and fish were usually overcooked.
But please don’t think that we didn’t enjoy it.
It may not have been what we would now see as great cooking but all meals were anticipated with relish and devoured with appetite.

Nowadays the choice of fresh foods are infinitely better.
In our own local shops , supermarkets and markets we have choices of fresh foods which our mothers would have died for.
So what are our young people eating today?
They are eating pre packaged, over processed, over seasoned and sweetened
factory produced convenience foods.
Anyone who has watched Jamie Oliver’s couragous “Jamies Dinners” over the last weeks will know the effects such a diet has on childrens digestion, health, and behaviour. For all its inevitability we were ,as children, eating a healthy mixed and well balanced diet.
What we ate was full of the requisite balance of protein, carbohydrate and fat and, as is obvious today, perfect for creating citizens (like me and you) who are healthy, wealthy and wise .
These flawed, but real, meals were eaten by a family together around a table -this being the very cradle and hearthstone of civilization.

To digress back to these cradle days, man the hunter became civilized when he started to form packs and hunt in groups. The next steps of shared cooking and shared eating led to the the communal meal and, the theory goes, from that moment came the birth of language. With language man was to attain a level of intellect which placed him in a special position above other animals.
The present time offers a threat which other, perhaps less sophisticated ages never offered to this very cradle of civilization.
Man, due in no small part to our busy modern affluent lives,is, paradoxically, moving back to that moment of prehistoric time when he grazed, hunted and, therefore, dined alone.
When we permit our children to make their own choices of what they eat they will head unerringly for the easiest and most immediate taste hit.
Our taste buds, like all our other senses, need education. It was not for nothing that we spent such a long time trying to encourage our toddlers, spoon in hand and mouth (ours) wide open, to eat what we felt would be good for them. What a shame then if we let that groundwork be wasted by letting them , once they get big enough to operate a microwave, have free rein over what they eat.
Appetites educated on the high sugar, high flavour foods which hide under the label of convenience will never will never enjoy the gentle subtlety of crunching into juicy asparagus, or relish the mouthful of the ocean which is an oyster.
I am sure we all remember the initial reaction to certain foods, enjoyed by our parents, which seemed revolting to us. For example one of my favourite treats today is a glass of dry red wine and some strong cheese after a meal. As a child I was horrified with my parents for eating anything so disgusting, but, anxious to please and emulate, I learned over time to appreciate and love these flavours as well.

Question: In what academy of culinary arts did I make this breakthrough?
Answer: The Dining Table.

It can only be thus that we educate our children to appreciate the finer tastes in life. By supervising what they eat and encouraging them to try new and rewarding tastes and textures.
So can we all, within the privacy of our own homes, strike a blow against the dumbing down of food and the arrival of multi national food factories and short order cafes whose only ambition is to get our children’s tastes developed to a controlled predictable uniformity so that they can become the sole suppliers of their food.
Lets start a revolt against this in our dining rooms.
Lets get back to eating together at the table.