Interview with my grandmother, born in 1939, about food and schoollife

I've interviewed my grandmother about school or eating habits at her household. This is what she said.

Before kindergarten, when the parents had to work, they could drop their child off at day care from the age of 1,5. This wasn’t done so often, since the wife often didn’t work and stayed home as a housewife. Then the child/children could stay at home during the day. Now, in most families, both of the parents have jobs and work during the day, so we use day care as an alternative.

You started school at the age of 3, instead of 2,5. You had 3 years of kindergarten, as we do now. From kindergarten on, boys and girls were put in different schools. There was strict control to avoid boys coming to the gates of the girls’ school, or the other way around, or they checked near tram stops in the environment of the schools. If you were caught doing so, you were punished. In kindergarten and primary school today, it is a habit to bring a treat to school if it’s your birthday. Back then, almost nobody did it. After school, there wasn’t pre/after school day care as there is now. Because, as I said in the first part, the mothers stayed home most of times to take care of the children. And if the mother did go to work, the grandparents came in handy.

 After kindergarten, there was six years of primary school. And instead of counting the years upwards, from 1-6, they counted down from 6-1, same in secondary school. Nowadays, there aren’t so much catholic institutes compared to the amount of community schools (GO). 60-70 years ago, all the schools were catholic. A couple of the classes were taught by nuns. There were uniforms in every school, and most of them had a cap, opposite to now, where caps or hoods are forbidden inside the school building. Girls had to wear their hair in a ponytail, or draids, or they wore short hair. They couldn’t wear it loose. The scores and grades were not in percentages, but like in America with letters: A was a 10/10,…  There were also less holidays. The only holidays were Christmas, Easter and the summer break, that started in mid july. People with dyslexia or any other limiting problem weren’t “being taken care of” the same way we do now. Now there are teachers that have the sole job of helping children to overcome their reading or math problem. Then they didn’t pay too much attention, and if you failed your grades, you didn’t pass your year.

Then there was secondary school. A lot of the children dropped out at around the age of 14, to work in the factories to help out the family financially. Nowadays, child labour is forbidden. The courses were the same, my grandmother followed modern languages with Dutch, French, English and German included. P.E. wasn’t that useful, since there weren’t that much devices to train with, eg. high vault. Even in secondary school, boys and girls went to separate schools. Children often went to school by tram of by bus. In primary school, mostly by foot or the parents that bring them to school. There were way more boarding schools compared to now.  Secondary school was  important to find a good job, and afterwards there weren’t that many studies necessary. Nowadays, you almost can’t get a decent job without a university degree. Though my grandmother had some extra classes of dactylus after secondary school, to go working in the banking sector.

Food:

The regular meal consists of soup, with the main dish being most of times meat, potatoes and vegetables. When my grandmother was a child, there were always 2 sorts of meat and vegetables on the table, since they were with 7 at home, and there were some picky eaters. Fish was being eaten once a week, on Friday at my grandmother’s house.

There weren’t that many desserts, like potato chips or pudding, because it wasn’t that popular back then. What they did eat sometimes was a sort of tiramisu with ‘boudoirs’ being drenched in coffee. Once every week, porridge was eaten, but this was seen as a meal itself.

Supermarkets weren’t that known, so most of the vegetables were bought at the weekly market in the village, or were home-grown in the yard. The products weren’t that influenced with chemicals. They ate the vegetables and fruits in season. This is why biological stores only came later on: people weren’t familiar with chemical manipulation of vegetables, almost every store was a biological store.

All meats and vegetables were of better quality, since they weren’t manipulated with chemical products, and since there wasn’t that much import, the variation was quite limited. Mangos, lychees, dragon and passion fruit… almost weren’t eaten in Belgium. Pineapples and bananas were one of the very few exotic fruits that started to enter the market. For the rest there were a lot of pears (doyenné) and apples. As for meat: almost all of the meats came from the local butcher, or from the weekly market. Back then, horse meat was at almost the same price as beef, or pork. 95% of the meats consisted of horse, beef, pork, rabbit or chicken. Beef was mostly eaten in the form of meatballs, stew, liver or a steak. Pork was used for sausages, the liver or cutlets. Families bred and butchered rabbits themselves, and had chickens for the eggs. For the meat itself, chickens were mostly available at the weekly market, where they were being sold as rotisserie chickens. Turkey was almost never eaten, and only became a regular dish 10-20 years later.

Pasta was quite rare: a normal spaghetti Bolognese that almost everyone of us eats once a week, was as rare as lobster. They did eat a sort of macaroni from time to time, or they put noodles in their soup. Spaghetti, farfalle, penne, spirelli,… came later on. The usual side dish was regular white rice, or potatoes. Also potatoes didn’t come in such a large variation as it does today. Or they were cooked, or they were handmade fries or croquettes. They didn’t come in the shape of little cubes, or small fried balls, because there wasn’t a freezer. There was but a fridge, and a tiny compartment to freeze ice cubes with. This is also a reason why all the food was much fresher back then: you could only keep it for a week max.

Nobody really paid attention to nutritional values or such thing. A reason for this is the middle class family: people didn’t have enough money to put all the food they want on the table, so they weren’t able to be busy with the amount of carbs or sugars in a meal. Special diets, or a vegan lifestyle, were only rose up the last 40 years. Vegetarians already ‘existed’, but were in smaller numbers than they are now. The ‘ancestors’ of such carb-free, or gluten-free diets, were Robert Atkins and Michel Montignac. Those ideas became popular in the late 70’s-early 90’s.

Zoals je wel gelezen hebt zijn de verschillen tussen vroeger en nu redelijk opmerkbaar. Vooral het schoolleven is verschillend met dat van nu. Dit komt voornamelijk omwille het feit dat jongens en meisjes naar aparte scholen gingen.
Ook was de kwaliteit van het eten beter: omdat de handel en technologie nog niet zo uitgebreid was, waren er niet zo veel exotische vruchten, of werden dieren niet zo chemisch gekweekt. Niet per se omwille van de technologie alleen, maar ook omdat alles op een kleinere (nog steeds redelijk groot hoor) schaal werd geproduceerd. Boeren waren boeren en geen fabrikanten van de producten die wij vee noemen tegenwoordig. Wilt dat zeggen dat we moeten streven naar de manier van productie van vroeger? Ik denk het niet. Ten nadele van de dieren jammer genoeg, leven wij in de periode waar wij ongelooflijk efficiënt produceren. Wie weet wat de toekomst zal geven...

Hier rond ik mijn gesprek met de bonma mee af.
And in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening and good night! (The Truman Show, 1998)