Читать книгу What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate - Joanna Blythman, Joanna Blythman - Страница 4

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.

But then there are foods that we are perfectly able to grow or farm here, at least for some part of the year, but which are routinely brought in from all over the globe via a convoluted cold chain: fruits and vegetables such as green beans, blueberries, asparagus; and meat and dairy products such as lamb, pork, chicken and yogurt. There’s no need to have such foods supplied from abroad and their air-freighting, shipping and trucking, with its energy-intensive cold chain, is undeniably environmentally destructive. They almost invariably taste inferior to the native equivalent too.

Companies involved in the importation of fresh produce argue that the air-freighted trade in premium fruit and vegetables gives producers a much needed source of income, but any jobs created are precarious ones, based on a trade that is utterly fickle. Foreign workers can, and do, lose their jobs in a split second, at the whim of a supermarket buyer who decides to cancel a contract, or because transport costs make it cheaper to source food elsewhere. And in many places, crops are being grown for export at the expense of local people. In Peru, for instance, the production of asparagus is depleting the water resources on which local people depend. From Bolivia, there are reports that local people can’t afford to eat quinoa, their staple grain, because foreign demand has sent the price shooting up. What’s more, the dividends from such trade are more likely to end up in the pockets of wealthy elites than to stay with the people who do the work.

So rather than buying into the supermarkets’ ‘the food world’s your oyster’ proposition, apply a ‘closest to home’ buying policy. Make locally and regionally produced food your first choice, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish your second, European and Middle Eastern your third and world your last.

When you do buy foreign foods, favour those with a Fairtrade label. It guarantees that producers get a more equitable, reliable price for what they grow and also means that their working conditions are better than most. Fairtrade allows us to build better relationships with foreign food producers, relationships that aren’t mired in exploitation and neo-colonialism. Fairtrade products aren’t prohibitively priced. You’re talking pence, not pounds, to support this more progressive type of world trade.

If you can, buy organic products too. The use of pesticides is less regulated outside the European Union and many workers have to apply them in risky conditions that would not be allowed here. They have to work and live in an environment contaminated with toxins to provide us with food. When you choose the organic alternative, you will know that the workers in distant places didn’t have to damage their health to produce it.

Get your food variety over the year, not in a week

Supermarkets have encouraged us to think that true variety is being able to buy every agricultural product on the planet 365 days of the year. This expectation is not environmentally sustainable. To add insult to injury, it is also extremely monotonous because the selection of food on offer doesn’t ever seem to change.

A more refreshing approach is to get your food variety over the course of the year, and let it be dictated by the seasons. This is how people used to eat. You feast on a glut of one thing when it is in season and eat it until it is coming out of your ears. Just when you are beginning to think enough is enough, it will disappear again to be replaced by some other food that feels refreshingly ‘new’ and this will often invigorate your cooking ideas. And so the cycle continues. This way, your diet is constantly changing and you will be eating food that suits the time of year and the weather: clementines at Christmas, asparagus in spring, berries in summer and sweet root vegetables in autumn and winter.

Don’t eat crops that trash the planet

Precious natural habitats all over the world are being cut down at an alarming rate to make way for large, intensively farmed plantations of soya and palm oil. Soya is used to provide the protein element in the feed of factory-farmed livestock. Both soya and palm oil are ubiquitous ingredients in thousands of common processed foods that we eat every day.

From the rainforest of Amazonia, through the Cerrado grassland savanna of central Brazil to the swampy tropical forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, these crops are powering massive habitat destruction. The impact on wildlife has been devastating. Magnificent species, such as the Borneo orang-utan and the Sumatran tiger, are now endangered because the habitat that sustains them is rapidly disappearing. These habitats are rich in biodiversity, not only in the form of animal and bird species, but also in plants. Such biodiversity is already alarmingly rare. We cannot afford to lose any more of it.

These vital habitats also act as massive carbon sinks, absorbing and storing potentially damaging carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When these habitats are dug up to plant soya and oil palm, this carbon is released into the atmosphere, accelerating the pace of global warming.

Many people feel appalled by the destruction of our natural world, but feel powerless to do anything about it. One contribution is to stop buying products that contain soya and palm oil. Environmental groups have tried to set up systems to identify more sustainably grown soya and palm oil, but these have been hijacked by powerful companies active in these industries. For the time being, there’s good reason to strike both soya and palm oil off your shopping list.

Understand the benefits of organic food

Don’t fall for the line that organic food is just a trendy lifestyle choice for the neurotic rich. There’s nothing new or modish about organics. Until 1950, all the food we ate was organically produced. It is organic food that should be considered as ‘normal’ not the Johnny-come-lately, factory-farmed, industrial equivalent.

These days, there are many compelling reasons for buying organic food. It will almost never contain the residues of pesticides that are commonly found in food grown with the aid of agrichemicals. Just six pesticides are approved for organic farming and these can only be used in extremely limited circumstances. Conventional farmers have over 300 at their disposal and use them routinely. The powers-that-be parrot the food industry line that we should not be the slightest bit alarmed that our food regularly contains residues of toxic pesticides because they are all below ‘safe limits’. But pesticides are poisons. They are designed to kill things. Surely the only truly safe limit would be zero? Why eat toxins if you don’t have to?

The list of additives that can be used in organic food is small – just 32 of the 290 additives permitted in Europe. Only additives derived from natural sources such as lecithin and citric acid are allowed and no artificial preservatives, colourings or flavourings are acceptable. Among the additives banned are those that have been linked to health problems. So if you are buying processed foods, the organic sort won’t contain any dodgy ones.

GM (genetic modification) is not allowed in organic food production and organically reared livestock cannot be fed on GM feed. Evidence is emerging to suggest that GM crops increase the use of pesticides, produce super-weeds and super-pests and compromise animal and, possibly, human health. When you choose organic food, you have a cast-iron guarantee that your food is GM-free.

As well as missing out on the bad stuff, you may be getting more of the good stuff when you buy organic food. Some research suggests that organic foods, such as milk and strawberries, have higher levels of vitamins, minerals and other healthy micronutrients.

Organic standards for raising livestock are the most humane, animal-friendly sort around. Organic farming methods encourage and protect wildlife. Chemical-dependent agriculture, on the other hand, has been shown to harm and deplete it. For all these reasons, there is a lot to be said for eating organic food when you can.

You don’t have to get hung up on eating 100 per cent organic though. There are many high-quality, wholesome foods around that do not come with organic certification – such as grass-reared meat, game, wild fish and hand-made cheeses.

Organic food is cheapest when bought direct from a farmer or producer, either via a box scheme, or at markets and farm shops. This sort of organic food will often cost less than the non-organic equivalent. But because most organic food costs more to produce and doesn’t come direct from the producer, it will tend to be more expensive than the basic non-organic equivalent. That said, it may sometimes cost less than premium non-organic products, so don’t always assume that organic will automatically be more expensive. Every now and then, compare like with like. You may get a pleasant surprise.

If you have to watch what you spend, and would like to buy more organic food but can’t see how to afford it, then you can prioritize your purchases. There are stronger arguments for some organic foods than others. It is more important to spend money on organic pork or chicken, for instance, than it is to buy organic lamb or beef.

The extra you will have to pay for some organic products is more manageable than for others. Items such as organic flour, milk, bread and butter can be quite affordable, as can fresh seasonal products, such as salad leaves and herbs. If you do compare prices, you may actually find that many organic brands are cheaper than their conventional equivalents and are often on special offer. Throughout this book, the foods that you might want to prioritize for organic purchases are flagged up.

Support small-scale producers and independent shops and food outlets

Supermarket chains’ commitment to small-scale foods and producers is skin-deep. At a structural level, these dinosaurs of food retailing are locked into bulk buying, globalized sourcing and centralized distribution, which favour the large supplier every time. Supermarkets just aren’t equipped to respond to fleeting availability or to handle foods that are produced in small numbers, even if they truly wanted to. What this means is that if everyone keeps shopping only in supermarkets, many of our smaller-scale foods will disappear because supermarkets do not deem them reliable, consistent or significant enough in turnover terms to merit stocking them.

If you love interesting foods, and want to ensure that you will always have real diversity in your shopping basket – items such as rare-breed meat, traditional fruits, distinctive local specialities with a sense of place, more unusual varieties of fruits and vegetables that keep precious biodiversity alive, artisan farmhouse cheese and naturally grown produce that haven’t been groomed to fit the big chains’ body fascist cosmetic grading requirements – then make a conscious effort to do some of your shopping in alternative outlets like markets, farm shops and independent shops. By shopping this way, you lend your valuable support to producers who are maintaining our food traditions and heritage and people who are offering something refreshingly different to the cloned supermarket offer. You also help keep your locality alive and more vibrant with shopping outlets that offer an alternative to the homogeneity and sameness of the over-dominant retail chains.

Recalibrate your attitude towards the cost of food

There’s lots of ‘cheap’ food on offer. Well, cheap that is, as long as you ignore its less obvious costs, such as its impact on your health, the misery of farm animals, the poor pay and conditions endured by workers in the global food industry, and environmental damage. Like clocking up debits on an out-of-control credit card, cheap food is stacking up a debt that we will have to pay at some future point.

Many people would like to buy something better, but feel that cheap, mass-produced food is the only type they can afford. More wholesomely and ethically produced food has a reputation for being expensive food, even though it usually represents much better value for money.

But there are a number of strategies that you can employ to keep down your overall spend, yet still eat higher-quality, more ethical food, simply by readjusting and rethinking certain strands in your diet. If, for instance, you cut out expensive, ready-made food, such as lunchtime sandwiches, pricey ready meals and pre-washed vegetables, you can free up a surprising amount of money to spend on something else: a free-range or organic chicken, say, instead of a factory-farmed one. By reducing the amount of meat you eat, choosing the less expensive, but arguably more delicious cuts, and bumping up the proportion of vegetables in your diet, you can afford to eat better meat and still be quids in. If you plan your meals in advance, you will almost certainly waste less and the money saved can go towards buying better ingredients. And of course, if you cut out sweet drinks, squashes, sodas and bottled water, and make tap water your default thirst-quencher, then you will instantly be awash with money that allows you to trade up on something else you regularly eat: a nicer hand-made cheese, some Fairtrade bananas, a special olive oil for salads. Throughout this book, ways to improve the quality of what you eat without spending more money overall are flagged up.

Save money outside the supermarket

Never assume that supermarkets are the cheapest place to shop. They most certainly are if what you want is processed food, say a bumper pack of crisps or a two-for-one offer on fizzy drinks. No corner shop or indie outlet can beat them on that stuff. They also offer bargain-basement prices on the handful of ‘known value items’ – such as bananas, milk and white bread. They price these products at an unrealistically low level to surround everything else they sell with a halo of value and convince us that they are cheaper than their competitors. But there’s one very important thing to understand about supermarkets: they aren’t cheaper places to shop for fresh, unprocessed foods. You will routinely pay more for fish, meat, fruit and vegetables in supermarkets than you will at the fishmonger’s, the butcher’s or the greengrocer’s. On some products, the mark-ups charged by supermarkets are astronomical. Try comparing supermarket spice prices with those in your average Asian grocery store. Or check out the cost of supermarket lemongrass, spring onions or fish sauce against the Chinese supermarket. Supermarkets routinely charge eye-popping premiums on any food that isn’t mass-market or industrialized. If you are looking for real fresh food, then take your business elsewhere.

Don’t become an ideological eater

A number of different considerations now influence us when we are deciding what we eat. This is a positive trend. What’s clever about swallowing mystery food without giving any thought to what it may be doing to you, food producers and the planet? But while some understanding of these concerns can undoubtedly inform and influence your choice of food, it is important not to become over-cerebral and to remember that, first and foremost, food should be a life-enhancing pleasure.

There’s no need, for instance, to cut out meat from your diet entirely just because you are worried about the depletion of the rainforest or the conditions of farm animals. Many species of fish are below safe biological limits, but don’t draw the conclusion that there is no fish left in the sea that you can eat. Nor is there any necessity to commit to eating only politically correct, right-on food. People who seriously suggest this are driven by ideological goals and you can’t assume that they have any inherent love for, or great understanding of, food. Similarly, it’s spirit-crushing and life-denying to sign up for an extremely limiting diet of 100 per cent healthy food. It’s only human, every now and then, to eat things you know aren’t that great, just because you like them.

It’s good to be a thoughtful eater, but if you are excessively ideological in choosing what you eat, it’s too easy to become neurotic and end up with a rapidly diminishing list of food you are prepared to eat. Instead, just try to head in the right general direction, but don’t make a fetish of it. Be led by the stomach as well as the head. Eating well can seem complicated, but, actually, it’s simple.

10 ways

to save money on

food without compromising

your principles

As your till receipts will testify, the cost of food has climbed alarmingly of late. And it looks as if higher food bills are here to stay, not just for years, but for decades. A series of global factors – climate change, a growing world population, shortage of oil, market speculation and a weak pound – are combining to drive up the price of food. The underlying trend is that food prices will continue to rise in real terms for the next 30 years. So we have moved into a period when food will become a much more significant item in the household budget.

It’s wearing having to worry constantly about the bottom line, but when money is tight there’s no need to abandon your ethical and progressive instincts and buy the cheapest (and potentially nastiest) food on offer, or fill up on stodge. Instead, look on rising prices as an opportunity to hone your ‘domestic economy’ skills – yet still eat well – by employing these strategies:

Waste nothing – use up every last bit of food you buy

Cut out waste by shopping as frequently as possible, and try to buy only what you need for the next couple of days. Never bin food that could have a further use. For instance, sour milk makes great pancakes and scones, old bread gets a new lease of life when made into breadcrumbs, salads and puddings. Eggs that are past their ‘use by’ date can be safely eaten in recipes where they will be well cooked, such as a cake or fritatta. Don’t throw away fat from meat or poultry roasts – use it for frying. Make old fruit into crumbles and compotes and tired vegetables into soups and purées. Save the leathery ends of Parmesan wedges to flavour soups and sauces.

Be super-suspicious of supermarket promotional offers

Three-for-two deals, buy-one-get-one-free, multisavers and more of that ilk need to be treated with deep scepticism. Their whole purpose is to get you to buy more food than you might otherwise do. With non-perishable foods, they might possibly represent a chance to stock up on products that you’ll get through in the fullness of time, although, if you’re controlling your weekly budget carefully, it might be better to buy only what you need, as and when you need it, rather than stockpiling potentially useful foods. But apparently good deals on fresh food rarely save you money. They not only coax more money than you had intended out of your pocket, they also encourage you to overbuy. Chances are that some of what you pick up will be wasted because it was more than you really needed. A promotional deal isn’t a bargain if it ends up in the bin.

Check out cheaper sources for foods you buy regularly

If you tend to shop for food on auto-pilot in the same place, compare prices in other outlets once in a while. For example, fruit and vegetables generally cost much less in greengrocers and markets than in supermarkets; certain products, like Parmesan, are often significantly cheaper in foreign discount chains; spices are much better value in Asian shops; nuts often cost less when bought in larger quantities in Chinese supermarkets; organic vegetables and eggs from a farmers’ market or box scheme may well be cheaper than the equivalent in supermarkets.

Stick with meat from free-range animals rather than switching to factory-farmed, but consider reducing the quantity you eat

In a typical stew or curry recipe, for instance, cut the quantity of meat specified by a half to a third, and make up the difference with vegetables or pulses. Bone up on how to cook cheaper, but delicious, cuts of meat such as beef shin, pork cheeks, neck of lamb and duck legs and make a little go a long way. Choose cuts of meat with some bone and fat. They may not look as neat and tidy, but they often have more flavour and richness than so-called ‘prime’ cuts, and cost much less.

Go for cheaper, less well-known types of fish

Forget the pricy premier league species like cod, tuna and halibut and concentrate on second division species like megrim, rockfish, coley, herring and mackerel. They taste good but sell for less largely because people are less familiar with them.

Cook more food from scratch and keep processed convenience foods to the bare minimum

Unless you’re prepared to live on bargain-basement, poor value, low grade processed food, then buying convenience foods, like ready meals, is an extremely expensive, not to mention unsatisfactory, way to eat. By doing most of your own cooking you will not only improve the flavour and freshness of what you eat, but also save a mint. Ready-prepared foods constitute rotten value for money. Most of what you’re paying for is packaging and marketing.

Take lunch to work

Buying your lunch from takeaways eats into your finances in an insidious way. A drink, a sandwich and a sweet bite easily clocks up £5 a day, usually for something that’s deeply inferior to what you’d make at home. For the price of a floppy sarnie filled with rubbery cheese, you could make an infinitely superior home-made one, using decent bread and your pick of the country’s finest artisan cheese. If it’s the planning that defeats you, just scale up what you cook the night before to make sure that there’s enough left for lunch the next day. Last night’s leftovers, however random and variable, often taste even better at lunchtime.

Drink tap water

Bottled water costs anything from 500–900 per cent more than tap. Quench your thirst with this and it’s as much of a drain on your financial resources as paying up a car loan, or signing up for a private club. Give up that pricy habit and you’ll feel flush in no time. If you don’t like the taste of tap water, drink it with ice and lemon, leave it to sit in the fridge so that the chlorine evaporates, use a jug filter, or make a one-off investment in a plumbed-in water filter.

Grow any food you can and make the most of cheap, seasonal, UK-grown produce

Even if it’s just a snipping of herbs from a pot on the window sill, or some cut-and-come-again salads grown in a container on the balcony, a bit of home-grown food can not only transform your meals, it can also save you a surprising amount of money. Buy fresh, UK-grown fruits and vegetables at the height of their season when they are cheapest, and at their nutritional peak.

Forage enthusiastically whenever you get the chance

Both in rural and urban settings, there is a free larder of interesting foods at your disposal. Sniff out wild garlic leaves in city parks in spring, pick blackberries from roadside thickets in late summer, and scour the woods for wild mushrooms in autumn. Get your revenge on the ground elder in your garden by eating it.