Further to my post yesterday I had a lot of wonderful response via my Facebook page which I would like to thank you all for. I hate to think I'm just stabbing in the dark so I really appreciate connecting with my audience and knowing that like myself so many of you are passionate about our relationship with food.
Since writing this blog I have been doing a lot of research, one of my favourite authors is Michael Pollan, a journalist, activist and intellectual. He writes: 'That eating should be foremost about bodily health is a relatively new idea, and I think, destructive. No people on earth worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than Americans-and no people suffer from as many diet-related problems. We are becoming a nation of orthorexics: people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.'
He's right, we now have the western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power-thirty billion pounds a year-used to sell us those products. As a direct consequence of our overindulgence, food companies had an opportunity to open up a 'health food' market. Pollan says: 'If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a strong indication it's not really food, and food is what you want to eat.'
The old adage of 'everything in moderation' has gone out the window. Corporate food chains have taken over from where our common sense and self regulation left off. We rely on food companies to help us decide what to eat, Pollan writes: 'Humans deciding what to eat without professional guidance - something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees - is seriously unprofitable for food companies.'
Unfortunately we are so brainwashed we can barely put the all things in moderation into practice. Our meat-heavy western diet is a typical example of our overindulgence, according to the FAO, every year each Briton eats 85kg of meat, roughly amounting to 33 chickens, one pig, three quarters of a sheep and a fifth of a cow. Clever marketing does little to tell consumers about the horrors of intensive factory farming and the true story of factory to fork.
Of course we all know that our demand for food is unsustainable, the future for our children doesn't look bright! Yet still we waste 7 million tonnes of food a year in the UK. We're governed by use by dates, another marketing tool, we haven't grasped that for generations people survived by using common sense and smell to discern whether their food was ok to eat!
Before massive supermarket chains, women like my mother would shop daily buying only as much as they could carry. We had a small fridge and one food cupboard which were rarely fully stocked. Cake was a treat we had for Sunday tea, snacks in between meals were unheard of and sweets were what you bought with your pocket money. Nowadays we don't even have to lift our backsides from the chair, we can order our food online by the bag full and have it delivered to our door. 50% of the total amount of food thrown away in the UK comes from our homes. My parents had one dustbin which was emptied once a week, it was never more than half full.
Interestingly in an experiment by Pollan, a group of Americans were shown the words 'chocolate cake' when he recorded their word associations 'Guilt' was the top response. French eaters to the same prompt: 'celebration.' The French, Italians, Spanish and Greeks have a much better relationship with food than Americans or us British. They still see the shared meal as a ritual, an act of culture. They don't consider eating in McDonald's or TV dinners as the norm. They will have a little of what they fancy, much as we used to not so many years ago.
In true Mediterranean style I like to do a cheese board for my family as a special treat for our Saturday evening meal. I like to add different things to the table to go with the cheeses, frozen grapes are a favourite as these become mini sorbets to cleanse the palette, marinated olives, lightly roasted nuts, sun dried tomatoes and celery are all lovely accompaniments. I love to use seasonal products and figs are in season, they are very delicious when baked and served with a blue Stilton or a Shropshire blue. I also made a relish, lovely with a mature Cheddar or a Wensleydale.
Baked figs
Recipe
6 fresh figs
Sea salt
2 teaspoons butter
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 glass wine
Preheat the oven 190c/gas 5
Halve the figs and place in baking dish
Sprinkle with sea salt and dot with butter
Drizzle honey over the figs, then pour the wine over figs
Roast the figs until the juices start to leak 12-15 minutes
Serve warm
Corn relish
Recipe
1 tin of sweetcorn, drained
1 onion, peeled and finely sliced
1 red chilli, sliced
1 small tomato, quartered
1 garlic clove, peeled and sliced
4 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 teaspoon turmeric
Simply blitz the ingredients for a tangy relish with a kick
'Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.'
- Jimmy Carter
'Fast food is as about as destructive and evil as it gets. It celebrates a mentality of sloth and convenience and a cheerful embrace of food we know is hurting us.'
- Anthony Bourdain.
Love Donna xxxxxxxxx
No comments:
Post a Comment