I was raised in communist Europe too (and still live there, fortunately communism died:)). The food was bad, but for different reasons than now. Now food is very cheap compared to the food during communism, even in absolute terms, and people got more wealthy as well. And food is cheap mainly because there's a price/quality trade-off that just wasn't there. You can get great food now, and it's not much more expansive than food during communism was, but nobody buys it, because you can also buy stuff that seems OK and costs 70% less.
Back then there was "a butter", or "a pig meat" and you bought it. No point in having 2 different butters, right? Same with most of the stuff. If particular factory happened to make a good butter - you eat good butter, if you could buy it at all - that is.
And then there was secondary market - more important than the shops. People made stuff for themselves and family/friends, or for barter. And that food was good, because people did it for themselves mostly. Yes the Salmonella scare, etc - you cook your eggs and there's no problem. The salmonella scandals mostly happened with ice creams, and very few people did icecreams by itself. The cold cuts were a lot better than most of the stuff people buy today (99% meat, not 50% meat like the cheap wędliny of today). And no insane amount of various sugars in everything. Yes there was the problem of no vet control over the meat, but the only reason you could possibly want such control was a parasite, that was very rare anyway (and small farmers with 2 pigs and a cow each wasn't a good einvironment for the parasites to spread). Of course if you had vet friend you took the meat to him/her and gave him a few cold cuts for checking the meat for you. It was a whole secondary (hidden) economy.
Also now food is cheap so you can eat meat and sweets every day. And modern processed food is carefuly designed so you can eat it non-stop and want more. Natural food usually has some secondary tastes that make you stop after a while. The end result is - people eat much less healthy now, despite having more money, and better food available.
Of course widespread alcoholism and lack of modern drugs during communism nullified all the statistic benefits of better diet, except that there was no obesity.