Ground Rules, Guiding Principles, call them what you like

How I (Try to) Eat Now

I’m not much one for rules but I’ve been trying to distil my principles of eating over the past few years. I have chased angels, gone down blind alleys and got lost in many mazes in pursuit of them. Navigating the food system with so much conflicting data and an inordinate amount of choice can make how you eat seem complicated. Gah! It makes me mad. Eating should be such a simple pleasure and eating well should be a right not a privilege.

So this is where I’ve got to - still a work in progress but getting there. It’s unrealistic to think I can hit all of them every time but I’d like to think I could to touch more than one in any plate of food.

1. Cook and Eat with others - your family, your flatmates, your friends

Shared food tastes better. Eating in company is in the very nature of our being. The root of the word ‘com-pan-y’ means ‘with bread’. When we dispense with the bother of gathering to eat, when we rush through lunch solo, wrapped up in our separate screen worlds, not attending to the miracle of each grown thing, we lose our connection with the earth under our feet, with the world around us; with each other, with ourselves.

2. Know where your food comes from, try to put a face to it

The closer you can get to the actual source of your food, the more you can know about how it was grown. If you know who grew it, then you know whether chemicals were used in the process, what that has done to the soil, whether it has travelled very far to get to you. Not all carrots are equal.

3. Plants at the centre, as wide a variety as possible; meat or fish on the side.

By and large, we are still stuck in the meat and two veg mentality in this country. (A generation into having one of the most interesting food and restaurant cultures in the world, how is this possible?) The expectation around a hunk of meat with starch and veg arranged around it, as taught to children in schools in the form of the ‘Eatwell plate’, has not helped. Why does protein have to be separate and animal derived? Why does it even have to be the main dish? The miseducation around what a balanced day’s eating looks like is a juicy topic and you can count on me to return to it, and often.

4. Waste not. Buy thoughtfully; be smart with leftovers

My own personal obsession. If “Food Waste” were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest emitter of CO2 after China and the US. Sometimes I think about weighing our food waste. It would be messy and wouldn’t really work as an indicator, but I have thought about it. There are several different points at which you reduce waste: how you shop; how you store; how you cook; what you do with leftovers. With practice, you get better at it. Helpful ideas to follow.

5. Cut Ultra Processed Food.

I have chewed over whether this should just be ‘reduce’ UPF but how long is that piece of spaghetti? This is not food at all, it is matter masquerading as food and we have no idea what it will do to us. Avoid it as far as you possibly can. It’s impossible not to fail at this all the time because it is so clever, but try.