Healthy eating doesn’t have to be expensive, complicated

Nutritionist Sarah Britton dismisses notion that clean eating has to be time-consuming, expensive

If you can’t find it at your local discount grocer, you won’t find it in Sarah Britton’s latest cookbook, Naturally Nourished. Although she lives in Copenhagen with her husband and their son, the Canadian holistic nutritionist and author used the discount supermarket chain as her model.

“I had to call my mom from time to time and ask, ‘Can you go to (Maxi) and check that they have these 10 ingredients?’” she says. “It was a really fun creative challenge for me but, amazingly, not difficult. In the end, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to make a whole book based on grocery store staples because there’s a lot of good stuff in those stores.”

Bucking the trend of timeconsuming and pricey clean eating, Britton set out to prove that healthful food can be made simply, with everyday provisions. Fans of her first cookbook My New Roots and her blog of the same name will know she occasionally uses obscure ingredients (chaga mushroom, manuka honey, chlorella algae). But in her new collection of 100 vegetarian recipes, it’s all familiar faces with the likes of cabbage, chickpeas, brown rice, carrots and lentils.

“I will admit I shop at health food stores for the most part, and farmers’ markets … As much as I love fancy ingredients, it was also really fun to see that you don’t need them to be healthy. Health is found at the supermarket,” she says.

Reader feedback inspired Britton to take a more pared-down approach in Naturally Nourished. She says that although she’s happy to spend an hour in the kitchen each day, because it’s her “happy place,” she recognizes this isn’t true for everyone. She heard from time-strapped readers on a budget, including students and single parents, and decided to write a book with these concerns top-of-mind.

Each of the book’s five chapters (soups, salads, mains, sides and small plates, savoury and sweet snacks) follows the seasons, starting with spring. Britton includes a note in many of the recipes to illustrate how “intentional leftovers” can help with meal-planning throughout the week. She shares tips on how to simplify weeknight cooking by viewing ingredients as “building blocks” — mixing and matching, and adding layers as time and resources allow.

“I really believe we all have the right to be healthy and we can’t discount the fact we have really good food in a grocery store,” Britton says. “And it might not be organic but my whole point is, let’s get more people to eat more plants and they’re going to feel better. Eventually, if they want to invest more money in organics or local food, that’s fine. But I think we have to get to a place where you can really feel the difference in your body, and then it sells itself.”