I can understand not allowing a 5 year-old to have food in their room, but when the kids were 15, were they still not able to take something to eat into their room as long as they were responsible and cleaned up when they were done?
Did you (the parent) ever take a snack into your bedroom?
For most families up until modern times teens would not have had a bedroom to themselves.
Greater affluence and modern small family sizes would allow a kid to have a room of their own.
(And rich families of yore that could afford it would have had domestic help to clean up after them.)
My mother’s family once lived in a two room shack for 8 people total. It’s now a very small one-car garage. Even one person being messy was intolerable. (They even lived in a tent for a short while before that.)
I think the “luxury” of being a messy teen is for the most part modern.
I certainly wasn’t allowed food in my room at any point growing up. I suppose I could have snuck food up there and then cleaned up really well but it was certainly easier to just eat straight out of the refrigerator.
I didn’t care about cleanliness until I was 25 or so and had just bought a house and I wanted to keep it in good shape so I hired a weekly housekeeper. Really there is no benefit to cleanliness aside from maintaining your home. The little bit of good feeling I have coming home to a clean house is completely erased if I’m the one who has to do the cleaning. When I was a kid I only cleaned as much as my parents made me and once I was in college I didn’t clean until I had a reason to.
We eat at the kitchen table, or less often, in the dining room. Not in the family room, and never upstairs in the bedrooms.
The mess, the smells, the potential for bugs, ugh.
We were allowed “stuff you eat” but not “meals”. Your midafternoon sandwich, yes, if you were capable of eating it without the room looking like Hansel and Gretel just went through. Your drink, yes, again so long as there hadn’t been any accidents involving liquids since we could remember. But not anything you’d eat out of a bowl or plate. I think we’ve actually yelled at Mom more often for leaving candy wrappers and yoghurt containers in the living room than at any other family member for leaving food debris anywhere.
I’m trying, but I can’t for the life of me remember ever eating anything in my room, either. Certainly not a meal. Maybe a bag of chips, but I don’t remember that, either. I don’t remember it being expressly forbidden, though. I just don’t think it occurred to me to eat in my room. (Unlike now, when I eat in my “room”/office quite frequently.)
Both of my kids had sloppy rooms when they were teenagers. Clean and dirty clothes on the floor drove me nuts. My daughter was the worst. She’d clean it after she was threatened - no going out with friends unless your room gets cleaned up. But it was back in all its glory within a couple of days. I just learned to keep her door closed so I wouldn’t have to look at it and realize that I didn’t have to sleep in there (thank God).
She now had her own home and it always immaculate…except for the kids’ rooms. Haha - payback stinks!
I too think it’s a more modern thing. I always shared a room with a sister (60s -70s). Our room would get messy but not too horrible. We’d be told to clean it on occasion. But another thing is our mom did not work outside of the home for most of our childhood. Which was much more common back then. Mom had the time to keep the house clean. These days, parents barely have time to make meals.
And going back further in time, kids didn’t have the number of toys and clothes they have now. Look at the closets of an older home. They were the size of a broom closet (if that’s even a thing anymore!) People only had a couple of changes of clothes. It’s pretty hard to leave a pile of clean clothes mixed with dirty clothes and wet towels when you only have one outfit for school/church and one for play and probably only a couple of towels for the entire family.
My son and daughter each had their own bedrooms and they kept them pretty neat. They also would periodically want to “remodel”, changing the theme of their room, color of the walls, etc. I played along.
Another tale about how different things were.
In order to have a messy room you need to have things. Kids 100 years ago generally didn’t have enough stuff to make a proper mess.
One specific example, again from my mother: I was scanning and tagging family pictures years ago. One was a grade school group picture. I asked her when that was taken. She knew it was 6th grade. Why? She was wearing her 6th grade dress. The only dress she wore to school that year.
It’s hard to leave a big pile of clothes on the floor when you only have a handful of items.
This also reminds me of a related thing. The junk on farms. All the old family farms, their neighbors, etc. had a bunch of junk just lying around. Old farm equipment that hadn’t been used in decades. Rusting out trucks and cars. Just random crap.
I wonder if pre-industrial age farmers kept around so much stuff.
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With these two quotes in particular , I can’t help but wonder if you are strictly talking about meals. I’ve certainly known people who restricted small children’s eating to the kitchen/dining room, but I can’t say I’ve ever known a family where the older children and adults sat at the kitchen table to eat popcorn. Nor can I really imagine what “clean up really well” means if you’re talking about eating a candy bar.
My mother had a great solution when I started wanting to put up posters: large cork planks. We could do anything we wanted regarding reorganizing stuff in closets and shelves, and on the corks. If we wanted to go beyond that… where’s the money? No money? Well, when you have the money I’ll call the painters. The corks in my old room got removed a long time ago, those in my brothers’ old room are still there and now get reorganized by the grandkids.
For the first, I’ve never known a family which ate popcorn in the house. For the second, allow me to introduce you to my mother and her mother, and to their trails of wrappers (mom) and fruit peels (both).
What 
You’ve never heard of people eating popcorn in the house?!
I’ve heard of it, and seen it in movies. I’ve never met anybody who did, AFAIK. Some of my American coworkers may have, I guess.
“Clean up really well” strikes me as being more involved than throwing a fruit peel or wrapper in the trash. That seems like it would be ordinary “cleaning up”.
If you know any Americans at all, I assure you know a lot of people who did it. Where do you think people eat most microwave popcorn? About 70% of popcorn in the US is eaten in the home. And Americans have done that since forever. We made Jiffy Pop since the 1950s. And most popcorn consumed at home is probably eaten in the living room while watching TV.
No popcorn or chips in front of the TV? Seriously? I keep a bottle of water beside my bed, in case I get thirsty at night.
The only proper way to eat popcorn is with a fork.
When I was small enough that my parents supervised me eating candy at say Halloween or Easter it would be eaten at the dinning room table once I was old enough to procure my own candy (16+) I really didn’t eat it any more or if I did it would be at a gas station while I was running around I certainly wouldn’t save it to bring back to my room.
As far as popcorn, I wasn’t watching movies in my bedroom so that was done in the living room where food was ok. Heck, most of our dinners were eaten in front of the TV. I guess i have the opposite problem, why would you bother to carry something small to your room instead of eating it where you got it from and if it is something like ice cream or popcorn why aren’t you sitting some where with a table so you don’t drop any on the floor? I’ve got a coffee table that has a top that lifts up to a comfortable eating height in front of my tv for exactly this reason.
Just about all manner of snacking is done in the living room in front of the TV at my house. Same when I was a kid. I don’t think I could watch a movie without eating some kind of snack. Popcorn, chips, pop, pizza rolls, ice cream, Twizzlers, and hard to believe, but sometimes… even fruit!
It’s just me and my husband at home now so we even eat our dinner while we watch TV unless it’s something overly messy like sloppy joes or tacos or something that involves cutting like steak or pork chops. Pizza is the best thing to eat while watching TV.
Born 1961, always had my own bedroom [except for the couple of years I was in boarding school, that is.] We were never allowed to eat in our bedrooms unless we were bedridden-sick, though a glass of water was OK. We had a ‘playroom’, my brother and I each had a toy chest and bookshelves of our own - and not the plethora of toys that kids of the 70s and 80s seem to have had. We were raised to pick up after ourselves, and we also didn’t have huge wardrobes - 3 or 4 dressy sets mainly for holidays or formalish occasions like out to fancy dinner. We had school clothes - most of my years I had specific uniforms, and typically 5 sets of uniforms and 3 sets of athletic gear for phys ed classes and team uniforms for sports. I had 4 or 5 sets of 'play clothes; for hanging around being a kid, and 3 or 4 swimsuits. I started doing my own laundry when I was 10, and kept my room tidy though Mom did the vacuuming and dusting. To this day I can clean just fine, I simply hate to do it. Mom had maids off and on over the years, but I still had to keep my stuff picked up. We turned the play room into a tv and hang out room when we grew out of toys.