Much healthier than the way we eat now, that's for sure.  The only objectionable item I see is the Crisco, but in the context of this diet I doubt that's a huge negative.  This looks like a pretty ideal diet, though it has the obvious downside of shackling mom to the kitchen for her entire life.

If you want to see a really shocking portrait of how our diet has degenerated compared to the rest of the world, check out the gorgeous photojournalistic book Hungry Planet - What the World Eats Today.

I don't want to live in a world in which I am only allotted 1/2 a watermelon and 5 lbs of cheese per year!

This looks like the phase when Americans were still good about eating whole produce, but were increasingly eating meat, and refined flour and sugar products. Not perfect, but I doubt the 'perfect' diet ever really existed.

There is a nice variety of fruits, but there's really not much in the way of vegetables.  The main one is the 690 pounds of potatoes.  "Lettuce" is likely iceburg, which has almost no nutiritional value.

It is also really heavy on meats.  300 pounds of beef.  144 pounds of ham.  132 pounds of pork loin.  Probably all cooked in that 72 POUNDS of shortening.

So while it is amazing to see how few processed foods they ate, I think the diet is still not great.

Back in the 1800's, the church paid the minister a small salary as well as a share of crops/staples.  It was a great list - flour, meat, potatoes.  The amount of flour seemed huge, until we realized they made their own bread back then.  

I'm still waiting for the 2008 supply of potatoes to arrive.....

Fruit is just vegetables, only sweeter.  Potatoes were a staple of a polish diet.  And there's nothing wrong with iceberg lettuce (though I can't stand the stuff myself).  The nutritional benefit comes from the diversity of fruits and vegetables, not the selection of individual foods based on their presumptive "nutrient" content.

I hadn't noticed the quantity of meat, which is high but is still less than our current daily average (about 200 pounds per person per year).  Plus we eat way more cheese today - healthy for a vegetarian, but not a great addition to a meat heavy diet.

Sugar is harmless in and of itself.  This family obviously has no problem with excess caloric intake.

Crisco is hydrogenated - IMHO should be treated as toxic waste.  Ditto for the margarine.  Still, I really wonder if 72 pounds of Crisco would be worse than totaling up all the hydrogenated crap hiding all over our food chain today.  (I just found it in my calcium supplement, for heaven's sake.)  Plus we consume a diverse and abundant array of mystery chemicals absent from this diet.

So maybe calling it ideal was a bit of a stretch, but it's still an enormous improvement over the typical American diet circa 2008.  Check out this excerpt from Menzel's book, showing the weekly food consumption of 15 families (2 are American):

http://www.time.com/...

Other than crisco and the margarine, these are all whole foods. Also, the meats were likely raised on a natural diet in the 50s. Bit low on wholegrains, nuts and vegetable oils. Love the absence of processed foods other than corn flakes.

I believe this is confirmed by some census info - there are a sizable number of African-American women who live to very old age- 90 to  100 range. I think that the simple diet there, which was heavy on the foods raised in one's own garden, gave a lot of these women a good foundation in life,despite the beef, pork, wild game, and Crisco-fried everything. My two grandmothers lived to 90, a great-aunt lived to 100, and I have female relatives three generations back who also lived a long time, but I found it interesting that the people I knew as very very poor seemed to live pretty healthy lives. It is recent years that the processed foods have come in and along with it, diabetes, but living someplace where one can grown a big garden or  buy a lot of local  produce. When my mom was a girl, they only went shopping one day a week! They grew corn and many vegetables and raised chickens, cows,(milked their own), pigs, and butchered them, and hunted and fished.

This article reminded me of the NPR story and article/book from Michael Pollan.

http://www.npr.org/...

He argues that we should relax a bit about food, pay more for fewer calories, and focus on whole foods. I'm trying to follow his advice.  I've tossed out flavored yogurt in favor of plain yogurt with fruit.

Compared to the 1/4 of their income the above family spent, today families spend less than 10% of their income on food.  Of course they also have health care, child care, and transportation costs that were unheard of long ago.

Sigh, I can't wait until the farmer's market opens up again.

I have to say, we probably eat healthier. We probably eat 160 pounds of meat or fish in a year. They ate 144 pounds of ham alone. That's crazy. In the past 8 years, I doubt I've gone through a bag of potatoes, and they ate 690 pounds. Since DS is so picky, we mostly do broiled meat and fish with steamed veggies. We eat tons of fruit. Tons.

Our cereal consumption is probably the same or higher. Our bread consumption is less.

I don't know, looking at this, I'm not that impressed with the good old days.

Those are no oven-stuffer roasters there!