Friday 3 October 2014

On the war against modern healthy eating

Here's the thing.

Modern healthy eating should not be very difficult. There's a strange perception that eating healthily now is much more difficult than it used to be. This perception is true if we consider the way modern society and marketing works.  The only natural barrier is that it may be a little expensive and take a little effort.

This is because fresh food is often more expensive than mass-produced, easily storable food that can be kept for long periods of time.

The 'effort' I'm referring to is simply checking when foods are in season and buying them at the right time of year. Strawberries in January, even though they all look red and delicious and uniform(which is actually quite a scary comment on the way farming works nowadays) taste like nothing. Strawberries in July have their own notes of flavour, like vanilla and wine. They taste incredible. Every summer when I taste my first delicious ripe strawberry I'm shocked by how good it is; I feel exactly like Remy in Ratatouille when he takes a bite of strawberry in the farmer's kitchen and there are pink explosions and music plays.

Branding creates an artificial barrier between the healthy food we should be eating and the bad stuff. Isn't it bizarre that unhealthy things considered bad for us are usually heavily processed foods that can be kept for long periods of time (chocolate, biscuits, crisps, ready meals, dried pasta, rice, etc)?

It shouldn't be difficult to eat healthily; with the miracle of transportation we can literally buy fresh produce from all over the world down at our local supermarket and not blink an eye if we're eating plums from Morocco one day and tomatoes from Tanzania the next. (that is certainly its own problem but we can take it as a kind of blessing at the same time)

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