Opinion: The list of food we must eat gets ever longer
Joy Bowes © Joy Bowes According to the latest “expert” advice in the press, I need to add 30g of beans a day to my diet for the sake of my health.
Not just any old beans either; baked beans won’t do on account of the tomato sauce they are swimming in, which makes them an Ultra-Processed Food (UPF).
No, for maximum benefit I have to work my way through beans of the haricot, black, pinto, kidney, soya, fava, edamame, cannellini, butter and borlotti varieties.
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I can add them to the growing list of food which I absolutely must eat if I am not to condemn myself to years of ill-health followed by an early death.
Decades ago we were urged to “drinka pinta milka day” and, as for bread, “six slices a day” was advertised as “the well-balanced way”, but bread is now a UPF too unless you make it yourself or it’s an overpriced artisan loaf.
Nowadays what the media exhorts us to consume is getting much more fancy. Five portions of fruit and veg a day is no longer enough – it has to be 30-odd different plants every week.
There are trillions of micro-organisms in my gut, apparently all as hungry and demanding as Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.
If they are not fed a varied diet of precisely the right nutrients there will be dire consequences.
Fermented food is said to be essential for my microbiota so kimchi, kefir and kombucha must be fitted in to my diet somehow – things my grandparents would not have heard of. (I think they relied on Senokot).
I can’t pretend I take all this advice very seriously, not least because, astoundingly, beer, wine and gin don’t count as healthy despite being impeccably plant-based.
But two things always strike me. One is the sheer effort it would take to incorporate all of the recommended food into everyday life.
To eat a therapeutic portion of everything, I’d need to have seven meals a day and that would do nothing for my personal obesity crisis.
The other thing is that those who trill on about the health benefits of this assume ready availability but never seem to give any thought to their country of origin, which is mostly not the UK.
So far as I can discover, apart from fava beans, all the ones I’ve listed above are not grown commercially here.
Lofty aspirations
Fear not, though, the government has a “food strategy” – for England, at least. It’s a “proudly patriotic campaign” apparently, (hadn’t you noticed?), full of lofty aspiration but rather short on detail.
The vision is: “a healthier, more affordable, sustainable and resilient 21st-century UK food system that grows the economy, feeds the nation, nourishes people, and protects the environment and climate”.
It will probably also give everyone shinier hair.
The goal is “a transparent, stable and predictable policy environment [which] supports investment in the development, production and marketing of healthier and more environmentally sustainable great British food for everyone”.
Hurrah. I expect they will achieve this in the same way they are growing the economy by raising employers’ national insurance.
Farming doesn’t get much of a mention except as one of “the leading drivers of nature and biodiversity loss”, but “the UK is well placed to develop new products” by way of “alternative proteins and precision breeding”.
Perhaps we could start with beans.