How roast beef , flour and tea no longer tickle our tastebuds

Health concerns have helped chicken overtake red meat as the dinnertime choice.

And the staple meal of meat and two veg enjoyed by our grandparents has gone into decline to be replaced by more varied choices such as pasta and curry.

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Flour sales have also fallen off as millions of women who would once have spent time making cakes and pies for their husbands and children find their working lives allow them little time in the kitchen.

The turnaround in the country's eating habits has been charted by the Office for National Statistics, which today releases the 50th edition of its annual Expenditure and Food Survey.

It shows that the British diet has altered dramatically since the dull 1950s. The beef-eating habit - which persuaded the

not the only regular feature of everyday life to have declined.

The cup of tea, once unassailably the nation's favourite beverage, now comes second to coffee.

Tea, which remained the biggest seller until the 1990s, has failed to keep up with the popularity or prices of Starbucks and its imitators.

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Health and fitness concerns have also led to a decline in consumption of fatty and sugary foods.

One way in which our diet has become worse is that many more of us skip breakfast, but the decline is not a new one. In 1958, the year in which the Government launched its Food and Expenditure Survey, more than nine out of ten of the population ate breakfast.

By the mid-1970s fewer than one in five had a cooked breakfast and one in six ate no breakfast at all.

A national diet moving steadily upmarket is one of the strongest indicators of how Britain has grown wealthy compared to the 1950s, a decade which began with food still rationed.

In 1951 the majority of Britons ate out only at fish and chip shops. But, by 2000, even poor families were spending a tenth of their income in cafes and restaurants.