My folks were the opposite. My mother was a good cook and my father made good box lunches, but we were allowed those erstwhile "forbidden" things on a limited basis. They didn't want to make us long for that stuff and feel we had to sneak them or something. It didn't take many scooter pies--a status symbol at my lunch table when I was 8--for me to learn that they were really disgusting and not want them anymore. :) OTOH, my mother has rules like no starch with starch and no fat with fat, so while she'd allow my father to make us cream cheese and jam sandwiches, she put an end to cream cheese and butter when we were very small, and I learned about the rule when the spaghetti sandwich in a novel I was reading sounded interesting and she stopped that too. Neither of these "noes" were the kind one sneaks out to savor, and the rule made sense. :) Those would have been scrounging sandwiches anyway--they were mostly tuna salad, egg salad, or chicken salad, sometimes turkey (but I refused to eat cold turkey without ketchup, so those were rare), occasionally salami. I remember a lot of cucumber spears as sides. :) But other than the standards of don't spoil your dinner, eat your vegetables, only two small cookies or one full sized, I don't think there were a lot of other rules.

My mother had some strange ideas of what I should and should not eat as a kid ....and my father's ideas were different from her's. Whole grain bread was frowned on because it was too "harsh"....and my father would sneak me a small piece of his wonderful pumpernickel. Baked beans only in very limited amounts. Raisins? Only a few, but prunes were encouraged> Nothing brightly colored, no blue frosting and certainly no Kool-Ade...but Jell-O was fine....and no soda....when I got into Jr. High, one 6 oz bottle of 7-up was allowed and root beer only if it was mixed half and half with milk.

I remember my father taking me to my grandmothers and giving me some navy beans that had been cooked and were going to be made into baked beans....and I remember how good a slice of raw potato, with salt, tasted when it was fresh from the garden.....my mother would have had a fit!
She frowned on Wheaties but encouraged Rice Crispies....never could figure...

agmss15, I think I know your brother.

My was also a good cook and we had well balanced meals. I grew up in the 40's and 50's. I remember taking my lunch which always included carrot and celery sticks. Some piece of fruit and a sandwich. Often we would come home for lunch and run back to school to play on the playground. I don't remember having any cookies or other sweets in my lunchbox. I remember oatmeal for breakfast, rice krispies and cheerios too. On weekends it was always bacon and eggs and toast.

I also grew up in rural Maine, there was a community in my home town like you mentioned I think it was called Home. Anyways I remember those fluffernutter sandwiches, loved them. My mother was a good cook , I always took my lunch to

School, usually a sandwich for desert usually a store bought it since my mom worked so much, I rember eating Needhams, funny bones and stuff like that. On the weekends homade pies and such

fluffernutter sandwiches on white … bread

Oh, a favorite for me and for anyone living north of Boston.

My grandkids love them now, here in Maryland.

We didn't have "forbidden" foods, but my parents, and a lot of parents in the 50's weren't very adventurous, especially with food. So McDonalds was a big deal. And pizza, when a local pizza place, Ledo's, opened in the mid '50's. And Amato's Italian sandwiches in Portland. That was about as ethnic as it got with us.

There were foods I wish had been forbidden, like eggplant and Brussels sprouts (mom didn't do those well).

No hippy parents here... Poverty set the table where I grew up in the middle of nowhere Kansas in the 50's and 60's, but we always had plenty of homegrown food. Summers filled with cucumber or tomato sandwiches on buttered white bread.

Food was influenced by parents who lived through the Depression and WWII in Canada. When my parents left Canada in 1951 and moved to Kansas (where my father was born and most of his extended family was still here), there were still food shortages in Canada.

Poor, though we were, my father had his pride - we didn't eat beans because that meant you were poor, and there was always someone poorer than you. A mindset that was leftover from the 30's and WWII with him. Once in a blue-moon mom would make Navy Bean Soup using a ham bone and we LOVED it! Dad wouldn't even eat baked beans, so they were never made either. When we had Navy Bean Soup, dad ate eggs. And NO pasta either, except homemade egg noodles in chicken soup or beef and noodles. On rare occasions we had macaroni with home-canned tomatoes and ground beef, but my dad didn't like it, and we had it when money was tight. I think pasta was also associated with "poverty" food from the 30's and WWII. The only rice we ate was in rice pudding (my favorite food to this day). I would ask for rice pudding instead of cake for my birthday. In other words, a basic meat, potato and white bread fare, with fruits and veggies that were home grown or wild-picked - fresh, home-canned or home-frozen.

We grew most our food in our 2-acre garden, picked wild fruits and berries for jam/jelly, and a lot of black walnuts we stored in the hayloft of the barn where my siblings and I would be engaged most of the late fall cracking them and removing the nutmeat. Mom made all our bread until she went to work full time, and then we ate LOTS of white bread purchased for 10-cents a loaf. Bananas sold for 5-cents a pound. We purchased groceries from a store that is still in business, and it's about the size of most convenience stores today, so not a lot of selection.

Meat was raised at home (chickens, rabbits and hogs for us - we got our beef from a cousin) or wild game from hunting. Our storm cellar (commonly called a fruit cellar) held our potato crop and home-canned fruits and vegetables. When we got a free-standing freezer in the late 60's, we did a lot more freezing than canning.

We purchased milk from a neighbor or from the store when fresh milk wasn't available. Gathered our own eggs.

We occasionally enjoyed "junk" food, usually for a special occasion. We had potato chips or Potato Sticks (shoestring potatoes in a can) at picnics or New Year's Eve. The rare treat of a Hostess snack cake was an indulgence with your own hard-earned money. The little town (2-blocks big) nearby was a 5-mile biking/walking distance from our home, had a black smith shop where we could buy candy bars, pop (soda) and chips. We would collect discarded pop bottles in the ditches to fund the trip (pop was 10-cents a bottle and candy bars were 5-cents) and off-set the high sugar intake with a 10-mile round-trip on a bike or on foot.

Cooked cereal (oatmeal and Cream of Wheat or Rice) was served more than cold boxed, but when you have your own fresh eggs, they were used for breakfast almost daily. If we got boxed cereal, it was in the summer and was a high-fiber type like Uncle Sam (with flaxseed in it), Raisin Bran, or Shredded Wheat (I think this was for my father's benefit - lol). My favorite cereal was Cheerios. At the ripe old age of 5 and 6 I could use a large darning needle and thread and string them on the thread and wear the Cheerios as a necklace. I would head outdoors for a day of fun and adventure on the farm, along with a quart jar of water to quench my thirst, and the string of Cheerios served as an edible snack. The other "snack" food available - soda crackers. We ate them plain, with peanut butter, or buttered with jelly/jam on them. Bread or toast and jam/jelly, or cinnamon-sugar. Only rarely did we have honey and I loved to make honey butter, and it wasn't unheard of to dip buttered bread in Dark Karo syrup for a snack. We also ate loads of radishes from the garden for snacks, as well as munching on the small tomatoes. In the winter we ate a lot of popcorn.

-Grainlady

I grew up the opposite of hippie life; my family was military through and through. We ate anything and everything, nothing forbidden, but we didn't keep sweets or soft drinks in the house, and we almost never went out to eat. When we moved back to her parents home state, and her parents too us out to eat, my sister always ordered the hot fudge cake, and I had a grilled cheese with pickles. That's as bad as we were? We loved living on the coast and all the fresh fruits, seafood, nuts... good food.

We had lots of fresh vegetables and meat. But we also had lots of junk. There was always a bag of Snickers. And we had one fridge set aside for Cokes. The only quirk was that Dad wouldn't eat Chinese food on the weekend. My sister and I never figured that one out and it was never explained. We were taken out to eat fairly regularly, but if we wanted Chinese food on the weekend, it was no-go. Steaks on Saturday? Sure! Moo goo gai pan? Nope.

I am probably the most "a close community of hippies, beatniks, bohemians," than most if not all of you.

I lived right in the middle where the whole scent started. The East Villiage, NYC, Thompkin Square Park, The Electric Circus Club ------- .

First apartment, a scence from "A Fine Madness " with Sean Connery was taken there. Second apartment, the apartment was on the front cover of a coffee table book "East 10th Street" . 4 Rock bands in the building rehearsing 24/7. Stuff were falling off the shelves from the deep base vibrations ------

I would frequently follow a strange guy on the street for blocks who was later very famous. The was Andy Warhol. Grass, LSD ----- everywhere.

Food? Pete's Spice was a block away. Just general cooking nothing special.

dcarch

I should add, I never heard of "fluffernutter" until I was grown, but I doubt my mother would have considered that proper food. Perhaps she would have allowed it as a sweet, like cinnamon toast (though I'd rather have cinnamon toast). We didn't have PBJ either. It's not that we weren't allowed--there was often a jar of peanut butter--but my folks never made us peanut butter sandwiches and we didn't learn to like them. Friends would give me a sample now and then but I didn't like it. OTOH, I loved the hummus and felafel and borekes and pirushki and blintzes, and tacos, enchiladas and quesadillas, tempura that Mother made, as well as other local favorites that weren't "ethnic" where I grew up, just food.

When I first moved to San Francisco in 1972, I lived in North Beach on Grant Avenue, just a block and a half from City Lights Book Store, where Allan Ginsberg used to give readings, and there was still a Beatnik vibe there at that time. In the mid 1970s I worked in a restaurant run by a commune of hippies. A friend of mine worked for the Timothy Leary archives, run by Michael Horowitz, and he gave me a pink satin jumpsuit studded with rhinestones (which I still have) that had been owned by Timothy Leary. I also helped babysit for Michael Horowitz's children, who were preschool age at that time - one later changed her name to Winona Ryder when she became an actress, but she was a quiet child, compared to her younger brother. I also met William Burroughs through Michael Horowitz in the mid 70s. I lived in quite a few communes myself in the early 1970s, but by 1976, their popularity had begun to wane, and I was making enough money doing freelance design that I could afford a proper flat. Anyway, I had my share of hippy food in the 1970s, but growing up in the 50s and 60s, I was living on a farm, and my father had a certain portion of land set aside for growing vegetables, and so we had plenty of those, which I liked very much. I found junk food repulsive when I was a child/teenager, partly because it was too salty, but I also did not like sweets, even though later I baked desserts for the restaurant in San Francisco. I also used to go to free concerts at Golden Gate Park, but paid for concerts at the Fillmore West and other venues. The Tubes asked me to be in one of their shows at Bimbos on Columbus Avenue, but they wanted me to shave my moustache and do a striptease in drag, and so I declined.

This is the first I've heard of Fluffermutter, and I've never seen one. I did not like peanut butter as a child, and I also did not like jelly, and so I never understood the appeal of PBJ - to me that was disgusting.

I admit, I had to google fluffernutter. I had seen that "serving suggestion" on the jars of marshmallow creme but never had it. We only bought the marshmallow creme for making fudge. I was born late '70s and the hippie lifestyle/ideals were not revered in my rather conservative household. I grew up on Shake n Bake, Green Giant canned veggies, instant potatoes and most treats in our household were junk food/processed. My mother was not much of a cook nor was her mother. To be fair, my mom was often doing her best just to survive. I did know good cucumbers and tomatoes from my grandfather's garden and I can still picture my grandmother peeling those tomatoes with a knife, which is something I do not bother with. My mother grew up drinking far too much soda and definitely has a sugar problem. Once I told her about a GF cereal that was pretty good and she said it was the first cereal in a long time she did not need to add sugar to. She did try to keep us from taking in as much sugar as she did. She often says one of her biggest regrets from when we were children was her lack of understanding/knowledge about nutrition. Granted, there is still a rather wide gulf between our understanding of what constitutes good nutrition.

The upshot of the lack of cooking skills growing up is that when I wanted to learn to cook, I had no preconceived notions and was free to strike out in whatever manner I wished as compared to say my MIL who says she never uses fresh garlic using the excuse that her mother never did. Now, I tend to gravitate towards some of those "hippie" ideals. While I do purchase processed foods from time to time, my older kids can look at a Chips Ahoy or Oreo and understand that it really just does not taste that good. Chips and soda they still like but those are not kept around often.

My mom tried to steer us away from junk foods, which I think was a good idea. Nothing extreme. But one food I remember always wanting was "Cool Pops" which they still make, which are tubes of plastic filled with sweetened sugar water artificially colored and flavored. You then freeze them and eat them by squeezing the icy sweet stuff out of the tube. I always wanted them!! Mom tried to appease us by making homemade popsicles with a Tupperwear popsicle set she got. Not the same! I would literally pitch a fit in the grocery store begging for cool pops! I still love popsicles, there are far worse things to indulge in. I was not allowed soda pop either, again I wouldn't call that extreme and was probably a good idea, but I always wanted it! Kool Aide was a rare treat for us and I always wanted that too. I never liked white bread, oddly, but we always had it for dad and my brother. I loved marshmallow cream sandwiches. I know my mom was not thrilled when that product came out but we had it sometimes, no biggie.

I was a sugar addict when I was younger. My mother was taught it was needed for energy. We never had the treats that other friends had such as powdered donuts, captain crunch but were allowed to put tablespoons of sugar on our Shreddies or cornflakes, in drinks, on fruit, etc and she always baked.

Confession time - I would steal change and/or bottles to cash in so I could get my candy fix every day at the corner store. I also had a job from an early age - newspapers and progressing to counter help as I got older and most of my money went to garbage food. I wish I was taught to steer away from it at a young age.

No brother but maybe a child of like minded people.

In a way rural Maine was a perfect setting for those interested in getting back to the land. Like someone else mentioned poverty of this area meant a lot of old skills had not died out here. Many local people still garden, forage and preserve as well as hunt and raise animals. And were very good at making very little go very far.

Most out of staters made a close relationship with locals who taught people the charms of dry firewood, fencing animals and preserving food etc… And any number of other practical skills. I cannot possibly express my dislike of babysitting in houses with no windows during black fly/mosquito season. Any lights go on and every insect in a three mile radius zooms in - shudder.

So in the reminiscing many people had in fact crossed paths in NYC. Including my artist parents. Another contingent were from Ohio and had witnessed the Kent State shootings up close.

Food wise - I was doomed to being an odd child. I think I wanted nori, halvah and maybe artichokes for my first day of kindergarten in a town where the local store had cabbages onions and potatoes for vegetables. I was also probably toddling about in a dress my grammy picked up on a trip to Greece or indian print clown pants.

Later when I was older home-made yogurt in a thermos was interpreted as melted ice cream because yogurt was magenta or neon blue at the store. And provolones sandwiches on homemade brown bread smelled funny.

Soda pop was the only "no" in our house. I preferred milk anyway.

Candy was rare for us. Getting a small box of Frango mints was a big deal at Xmas. Mother was an amazing cook, but wasn't over-fond of desserts so seldom made them. But when she did, they were phenomenal. Pineapple upside-down cake, strawberry shortcake, the most delicate caramel custard ever.

Being a barbaric little monster, I loved Twinkies and my sister loved red licorice strings, when growing up. Grew out of that in our teens, though!

Interestingly, I'm part of a film group that meets regularly but am the only Boomer, the other women are Millennials/Gen Xs. We do potlucks and when I make caramel custard, they totally freak. NOBODY they know makes a baked custard at home. They think it's strictly restaurant food and are so impressed I make it myself, LOL.

I grew up in the "boonies" and I grew up poor. Our usual snack if we were hungry between meals was a cold boiled potato, well salted. If there was fruit on the trees, then it was an apple or pear or a handful of gooseberries from Grandpa's bush, although he guarded those jealously for jam. A big treat was a cold pancake with butter and sugar, similar to my Mother's childhood snack of a piece of bread with lard and sugar. Supper was often whatever my brother could shoot, so we ate everything from porcupine to venison, plus whatever we could get from the garden or forage, like wild blackberries.

Desserts were not common, and when we got them they were usually fruit based, like dumplings with those wild blackberries, or pie from the apples. Grandma would occasionally make molasses cookies, that was a huge treat and I still love them today.

I don't remember anything forbidden, we just didn't have them. I remember Mother buying Root Beer fizzies for a special treat, but we seldom had anything other than milk or water. I also remember Grandma buying Big K pop at Kroger's and splitting a can between the three of us kids, LOL.

I didn't have pizza until I was a teenager and there were no fast food places. I was in my 20s and living on my own before I ever had snack cakes or pastry that wasn't home baked, although I do remember Grandma buying a spice cake kind of thing at the local A&P for "special occasions". I wouldn't eat it, but I did peel off the white frosting, I think it was probably pure sugar and lard. We did splurge sometimes, when the strawberries were ripe we would have strawberry shortcake for supper and nothing else. Same thing when the first sweet corn was ready, just a big meal of sweet corn without having to eat anything else.

Grandma did bake all our bread and I remember just wanting the squishy white WonderBread like the other kids got. Now I look back and shake my head at my foolishness. Then again, she also made fruitcake at Christmas and I still won't touch the stuff!

Annie

I was a latch-key child and pretty much ate whatever I could find. I would scrounge beer and soda bottles from the alley where teens would go at night to party because it was dark and not patrolled by the police. I would buy a Coca Cola or ice cream with the money from my findings... and sometimes a grilled cheese at the café counter in the local drug store.

My Mom was a really good cook when she had the time and taught me while she was at it. I was cooking simple things by the time I was six and making full meals by 12. The meals we ate were well-balanced and healthy. Mom went back to school and became a dietitian, and healthy food preparation became paramount.

When I was old enough to dig I planted my first garden and have to have one ever since. Today I still have my fresh herbs and veggies growing next to the garage in the biggest pots I can find.

Now that I'm cooking for one it is harder to be motivated to make a meal, but I try to always do it just the same. Extras get frozen for a future meal. I rarely make a dessert because there's no one to eat it but me and I only ever want "one piece". But then, desserts weren't a very important part of any meal at any time of my life... just a bite of something yummy will do.