What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Vegetables

Asparagus

Aubergine

Peppers

Potatoes

Spinach and Swiss chard

Tomatoes

Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and other brassicas

Carrots and other root vegetables

Celery

Courgettes, marrow, squash and pumpkin

Green beans and runner beans

Herbs

Lettuce and other salad leaves

Mushrooms, cultivated and wild

Onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions

Peas, broad beans, mangetouts and sugarsnaps

Chapter 2 - Meat

Chicken and other poultry

Beef

Lamb and mutton

Pork, bacon and ham and wild boar

Venison

Veal

Rabbit

Sausages

Chapter 3 - Dairy

Milk and cream

Butter, ghee and buttermilk

Yogurt and yogurt drinks

Cheese

Ice cream

Chapter 4 - Fish

Cod and other white fish

Salmon and other oily fish

Prawns and other crustaceans

Mussels and other shellfish

Chapter 5 - Fruit

Apples

Avocados

Bananas and other tropical fruits

Cherries

Citrus fruits

Currants

Grapes

Nectarines, peaches and apricots

Pears

Plums, greengages and damsons

Pomegranates

Raspberries, blackberries and blueberries

Rhubarb

Strawberries

Chapter 6 - Larder

Eggs

Grains

Breakfast cereals

Bread

Pasta

Nuts and seeds

Dried and candied fruits

Pulses

Sugar and other sweeteners

Oils

Margarines and spreads

Soya foods

Chocolate

Salt

Spices and aromatics

Lists

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By the Same Author:

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

One night I was talking to a friend who was complaining about how hard she found it to shop for food. She was tight for cash, she explained, which made it difficult to afford the more ethical, progressive food she aspired to. She tended to shop on the way home from work, when only one smaller-format chain supermarket with a limited, overpriced selection, heavily skewed to convenience food, was still open. And that was only half the problem. Tired and uninspired by the dullness of the food on offer, she still had to dream up ideas for something to cook when she got home, then prepare it, and fit all that in with other activities, like going to the gym and doing the washing. Net result? ‘I’m not eating as well, or as healthily, as I’d like to,’ she said. ‘Food is just so complicated.’

This got me thinking. Is food really that complicated, or does it just seem that way? Surely there must be a clear, practical way to help people recognize and locate food that’s good in the broadest sense of that word: food that’s healthy, affordable, doesn’t trash the environment, exploit producers or cause unnecessary animal suffering, and, last but not least, tastes great?

So I wrote this book, a distillation of many disparate types of information about common foods that are not yet, as far as I know, brought together in any other place. Being impatient and, like many people, often short of time, I am a great believer in executive summaries, so any reader can cut to the chase, so to speak, by reading my 20 guiding principles for eating good food.

But broad generalities can’t answer many of the pressing food dilemmas of the day, so all the foods we eat commonly are then discussed in detail, either individually, or in their family groups. Each section is free-standing. What to Eat is a reference book after all, so you can dip into the section on breakfast cereals, say, without having first read the one on grains. This inevitably means that there is some repetition, but of course you can skip over that.

To steer readers in the direction of the best food – what to eat – I have dished up some unsavoury facts about the worst stuff – what not to eat. This isn’t meant to put you off eating, just remind you of why it’s worthwhile seeking out something better.

Food is a contentious subject, so as well as picking up lots of useful information and the odd flash of inspiration, anyone who reads this book will get a mini crash course in the live debates in this field. What to Eat looks at food from a 360-degree angle (or at least takes a few purposeful steps in that direction). I hope it will help anyone, anywhere, make the best possible all-round choice, irrespective of personal circumstances.

The 20 principles of

eating, made simple

Base your diet on real, unprocessed food

This is the bedrock principle of this book, and you can’t go too far wrong if you follow it. Nature is a very clever, intricate system and natural foods in their whole, unprocessed form have an intrinsic nutritional integrity. We know this because humans have been eating them for centuries. We don’t yet, and may never, fully understand all the complex interrelationships between the major and minor nutritional components that go to make up familiar foods such as eggs, meat, fruits, vegetables and grains, but we do know that they act in synergy, supporting and enhancing one another, adding up to one wholesome entity. If you choose mainly unprocessed, or only minimally processed food, and regularly eat a variety of different foods from all the major food groups, then you really don’t need to worry too much about being healthy.

See the value of cooking

Even if you can’t cook meals from scratch all the time, it is important to recognize that cooking from raw materials gives you infinitely more control over the quality of what you eat than if you rely on convenience foods. The more food you eat that isn’t home-made, the poorer your diet is likely to be, both in terms of nutrition, and the quality and provenance of the ingredients used. If you surrender sovereignty of what you eat by becoming dependent on convenience foods, the fatter you, and any other members of your household, are likely to become and the more readily your nagging concerns about not eating well can be exploited by food manufacturers selling you technofoods that make dubious health claims. Every meal that you take back under your control by cooking yourself, the better your health and your spirits will be, and the more pleasure you will get from the act of eating.

If you have got out of, or have never acquired, the habit of cooking, revisit this default setting. Cooking needn’t be arduous. If you are one of those people who only think about food at the last minute, you may find yourself in shops where your choice is likely to be very restricted, and therefore forced to buy a lot of expensive rubbish. To alter your habits, you will need to decide in advance roughly what you are going to eat, then make sure that you have the ingredients. Other more creative cooks get ideas from shopping in stimulating places with inspiring ingredients, such as markets and small food shops, and then just come home and throw it all together. Either way, you can make life easier for yourself by cooking more than you need so that you can have the same thing later in the week, perhaps in a slightly different form or with different accompaniments. And here, your freezer will prove to be a trusty friend. Cook once, eat twice, or even thrice.

Don’t be a sucker for processed foods

Here’s one thing you need to know: the more processed a food is, the worse it is for you. Food processing is the food industry’s way of making profit by taking apart natural foods and reinventing them in more lucrative form. Not usually to your nutritional benefit either, irrespective of what the label might claim. Commodity crops like wheat and corn, stripped of most of their beneficial nutrients, then loaded with sugar, salt and a sprinkling of synthetic vitamins, are presented as a nutritious breakfast. Industrially refined oils are chemically hardened, mixed with additives and water then reborn as ‘heart-healthy’ spreads. Who needs them?

Reconstructed, over-processed foods don’t have the trustworthy track record of whole foods in their natural form. They contain novel ingredients and obscure additives produced by hi-tech methods and have only been on our plates for a relatively short period of time. This is already long enough to suggest that they are significant contributors to the major modern problems of obesity, food allergies and diet- related disease.

OK, there are exceptions. Cheese, butter, yogurt and bread are all processed foods, and, let’s face it, few of us are going to get round to making these ourselves. But you can buy those that were made in the traditional way, using time-honoured techniques to alter primary ingredients.

Don’t buy food with ingredients you won’t find in a domestic larder

It’s a safe bet that you don’t have mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids in your storecupboard, nor high-fructose corn syrup, guar gum, partially hydrogenated vegetable fat, soya protein isolate, liquid pasteurized egg nor maltodextrin. The only people who have these, and other weird but not wonderful synthetic chemical food ingredients lining their shelves, are lab-coated food technologists whose job is to find new and ever more inventive ways to make even more money from the over-processing of food. And guess what? Your health is not their priority. So if you don’t know what an ingredient is, or it has a long, unpronounceable name that reads like an algebraic formula, then don’t buy any food product containing it. Every item you see listed on an ingredient label should be readily understandable and familiar. If it isn’t, avoid it like the plague.

Be sceptical about nutrition advice from ‘experts’

The dietetic establishment has led us to believe that food is merely fuel and healthy eating is just a straightforward matter of calculating the number of calories we need for our body weight and activity level. Grub in, energy out. That’s all there is to it. This mechanical approach plays right into the hands of the food industry. Following this nutritional script, it doesn’t matter whether we eat technofood or natural food because everything comes down to a simple arithmetical calculation. Common sense alone dictates that there is more to food and eating than that.

Don’t hold your breath for learned, silvery-haired nutritionists to spell out the universal magic formula for healthy eating. Research into what constitutes optimum nutrition is best thought of as a work in progress, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is being simplistic and misleading. So instead, use your common sense. Base your diet on tried and tested unprocessed foods, studiously ignoring fads and showing healthy scepticism towards everything from top-down government health orthodoxy to the latest trendy diet.

These days, many foods come with an abundance of nutrition labels and supposedly helpful logos to help you assess the healthiness or otherwise of their contents. Mostly this is a confusing waste of time. Sometimes it is a deliberate red herring used by the manufacturers to bamboozle you and make you think a low-grade processed food is better than it might otherwise seem. Ignore nutrition labels and logos, and cut to the chase by looking at the ingredients label. Basically, the more ingredients listed, the more suspect the product is.

Don’t dismiss traditional food knowledge

Certain foods – beetroot, celery, raw milk, ginger, suet, garlic, yogurt, cabbage and carrots, for instance – figure in traditional medicine systems around the world as having beneficial medicinal and nutritional properties. It is currently fashionable to dismiss any such collective wisdom on the grounds that it isn’t ‘evidence-based’ – in the narrow, western, medical sense – and so little better than superstition. This is blinkered thinking. There is much to be said for the quasi-medical, nutritional knowledge that has been built up by different cultures and tested out and observed informally in human populations over time. When your grandmother told you that a hot honey and lemon drink would do you more good than any cough medicine, she wasn’t making it up. She was simply passing on the accumulated wisdom and experience of the generations that came before her. That knowledge is like gold dust.

Practise vegetable-centric eating

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to shut your ears entirely to ongoing discussions of nutrition, and there is some overlapping middle ground where otherwise diverse researchers and would-be authorities can agree. There is, for instance, no argument that vegetables are brilliant for you. It’s not just all the vitamins, minerals and soluble fibre that are beneficial; research is gradually identifying a number of phytochemicals, or natural compounds in vegetables, that are both health-enhancing and protective against disease. The early twentieth-century view, that vegetables were relatively unimportant in the diet because they consist mainly of water, has been radically revised. Currently, putting vegetables more at the core of your diet seems to be a key strategy for being healthy. Think in terms of vegetable-centric eating, where protein, fat and carbohydrate-based ingredients play second fiddle to vegetables, not the other way round.

Eat some protein

Realistically, you aren’t going to live solely on vegetables. A bit of protein still has its place, whether it’s from fish, meat, eggs, dairy foods or from vegan sources, such as pulses. Protein is emerging in research as the macronutrient most capable of satisfying hunger. As your grandmother might have put it: ‘It keeps you going.’ If you do eat protein in the form of meat, poultry, milk and eggs, try to make sure that it comes from free-range animals that have been fed on grass and other natural pasture foods. It will be better for you.

Rethink what you have been told about fat and cholesterol

That big bad dietary bogeyman – saturated fat – is being rehabilitated. Contrary to what we have been led to believe, there is an absence of evidence to support the nutritional mantra that fat is bad for health, or even to back the assumption that the naturally occurring fat that you find in whole foods is intrinsically fattening. Increasingly, the health benefits of natural saturated fat are being acknowledged. Saturated fats are key components of cell membranes and essential for the production of certain hormones. They act as carriers for important vitamins, and are needed for mineral absorption and lots of other biological processes. The ‘saturated fat is bad for you’ gospel is likely to melt away in coming years. This is one to watch.

Likewise, while we were once told authoritatively that foods that naturally contain cholesterol, such as eggs and whole, full-fat milk, were bad for the heart, this nutritional script is being hastily rewritten to concede that the cholesterol we eat in food does not lead to heart disease, and acknowledge that some dietary cholesterol is actually essential for maintaining health. Cholesterol is a vital element in our cell membranes. It’s no accident that human breast milk is very rich in the substance. Is it likely that nature would design a baby’s first food that was a killer?

Saturated fat and cholesterol found in natural foods such as butter and meat have a place in an aware diet. Man-made fats manufactured from artificially hardened, hydrogenated polyunsaturated oils, on the other hand, which were once recommended as the healthy alternative, have now been shown to be pretty lethal. This just goes to show how the nutrition establishment cannot be relied on for sound eating advice.

Cut back on sugar, sweeteners and refined carbohydrates

All nutritionists whose salaries aren’t paid by the sugar industry agree that sugar is a nutritional disaster. The main problem with sugar is that in its refined form we can consume huge quantities of it, in products such as drinks and sweetened fromage frais, almost without noticing. Unlike honey or treacle, refined sugar has no redeeming nutritional features. It’s difficult, because many foods that contain sugar are enticing, but there’s a strong case for keeping your consumption to a minimum.

A body of research suggests that high-fructose corn syrup, also known as corn sugar and glucose fructose syrup, a very modern ingredient now found in many soft drinks and a growing number of both savoury and sweet processed foods, is even more damaging to health than refined cane or beet sugar. Deeply implicated in the rise in obesity in the US, it is best avoided absolutely.

Don’t imagine that artificial sweeteners are better because they contain fewer calories. There is already research that suggests that these novel chemical concoctions actively encourage, not discourage weight gain. It looks likely that they will turn out to be very bad for us indeed, even worse than standard table sugar. Why give them the benefit of the doubt?

Fresh fruits contain a lot of natural sugar, but they also contain a number of phytochemicals, similar to those found in vegetables, that are thought to be extremely beneficial. So the sugar in fruit is not something to get worried about, unless you eat vast quantities, or are trying to control your weight.

All carbohydrate foods have the capacity to disrupt blood sugar levels. In their whole, unprocessed forms they at least contain some useful amounts of vitamins. But over-consumption of refined carbohydrates, such as white pasta, flour, rice, couscous and sugary drinks, is increasingly coming into the frame as being more fattening than fat, another probable cause of the obesity epidemic that is sweeping through affluent countries.

Make time to sit down at a table and eat meals

Satisfying your appetite is not just about what you eat, but also about how you eat. Sometimes the pace and pressures of modern life make us overlook this. If you bolt down food on the hoof, on your lap, upright in the kitchen, in bed or at your desk, your stomach may feel satisfied, but your brain and your emotions most certainly will not. If you make time – even just fifteen minutes – to sit down and eat a meal at a table, taking long enough to appreciate what’s on your plate, then your brain has the time to register that your stomach is full. Rushing food inevitably leaves you feeling psychologically unsatisfied by what you have consumed. In this state, you will be much more tempted to eat the next thing that comes into view and graze your way to obesity.

In all food cultures and over thousands of years, a certain ceremony and ritual has grown up around the whole business of eating. This is no accident. The act of eating is about more than simply filling the stomach. Meals have the capacity to make us feel nurtured, to nourish us emotionally and promote a sense of contentment that goes beyond any purely physical measure of wellbeing. If you can share meals with family and friends, then the pleasure of eating is further enhanced. But if you can’t, treat yourself like a worthwhile member of the human race anyway, and sit down to eat a meal at a table.

Boycott factory-farmed meat, poultry, eggs and dairy

Factory-farmed meat comes from livestock kept indoors in cramped, insanitary circumstances that create huge animal suffering. Factory farms are also incubators for diseases that affect animals and which can, in certain circumstances, spread to humans.

Factory-farmed animals are fed on vast quantities of cereals. These feedstuffs could be used more efficiently and less wastefully to feed humans directly. The planet simply cannot continue to produce meat, milk and eggs by rearing livestock in this way.

The availability of cheap, factory-farmed meat has encouraged many people to eat much more meat, poultry and dairy products than is good for health and to see large daily amounts as some sort of democratic entitlement. An overabundance of animal-derived foods in the diet isn’t healthy and, unless you are prepared to pay a small fortune, insisting on such quantities will necessarily mean that you end up eating cheap, inhumanely and unsustainably produced foods from miserable factory-farmed animals.

If you want to eat meat, poultry, eggs and dairy foods, buy less of them but maintain your spend by trading up to buy higher welfare, more extensively farmed, free-range, grass-fed products.

Adopt a ‘closest to home’ buying policy

It makes sense to favour food produced close to home. Of course, just because a food is locally produced doesn’t mean it’s good. A local chicken can be factory-farmed. The local baker can make lousy bread. But all other things being equal – the product tastes good and it has been humanely and ethically produced – then your food will automatically be fresher and more seasonal, and considerably less trauma will be inflicted on the environment in its transportation. The shorter the distance that food travels, the less energy is used. Transport relies heavily on oil, which is a rapidly depleting, non-renewable resource. A reduction in transport also helps bring down carbon emissions. By eating more local food, you can substantially reduce your carbon ‘foodprint’.

The money you spend on local food will support and encourage our native food producers, which strengthens communities and the economy and helps build our self-sufficiency in food. At the moment, we produce only 58 per cent of the food we eat, not a great situation to be in when we face a future where there will be more competition for globally sourced food resources and the energy costs of bringing imported foods to our shores will become greater and greater.

The supermarkets’ policy of treating the planet like one big global shopping basket has created a bizarre situation where many of us eat little or no local or regional food, and surprisingly small quantities of nationally produced food, even though we live in a rich and productive land and ought to be more or less self-sufficient. With the world’s population set to grow by 50 per cent by 2050, and global warming and a shortage of oil putting pressure on the world’s ability to feed itself, this dependency on imported food looks increasingly reckless. There is something fundamentally unsound about relying on faceless producers in faraway places to keep us fed, people who owe us nothing. Instead we need to make the country more resilient by buying more food that’s grown here, not flown or shipped here. What on earth are we doing eating Brazilian chicken, Dutch carrots, Danish pork or New Zealand onions? Are we crazy?

Another bonus of buying local food is that the production process – everything from the welfare of animals to the treatment of workers – will be much more transparent than that of foods that have travelled thousands of miles through the multiple links in an opaque supply chain. Let’s face it, shining a light into the dark highways and byways of industrial farming and food production is hard enough even within these shores. Suffice it to say that factory farms and food-manufacturing plants here don’t go out of their way to welcome us in for ‘Doors Open’ days. So what chance do we have of knowing what’s really going on in similar operations thousands of miles away?

Of course, we have been eating imported foods for centuries, and only the most pleasure-denying, hair-shirt-wearing eco-fanatic would seriously suggest that imported foods have no place on the plate. No chocolate? Or lemons? Unthinkable. Obviously, there is a list of foreign ingredients that few of us would like to live without, such as spices, olive oil, avocados, citrus fruits, cocoa, bananas and rice. We can’t produce them, and they enliven our diet immensely. These foods are not usually air-freighted, but generally shipped or trucked. There is no need to forgo them. Even those that are transported by air – Indian mangoes or lychees from Mauritius for instance – can have a small place in the diet as an occasional, exotic indulgence.