The rise and fall of clean eating
Sarah Caden meets ‘Deliciously Ella’ Mills
‘IWOULD probably find me annoying as well,” says Ella Mills with a laugh, concluding a riff on how the clean-eating backlash became very personally directed at her.
The effect that Ella seems to have on people appears to entirely contradict this, funnily enough. On the shopfloor in SuperValu, where the food writer and entrepreneur has been meeting and greeting and sharing nibbles of her Energy Balls, there is a slightly star-struck air to many of those who line up for selfies. Young women in particular seem thrilled to meet Ella in the flesh, slightly dazzled in a manner you’re more likely to observe around a pop or movie star.
But that’s the Deliciously Ella effect.
Now 27 years old, Ella — originally Woodward — was, at the age of 23, the author of the “fastest-selling debut cookbook ever”. She is regarded as spearheading the whole clean-eating craze of this decade, majoring in home-made nut butters, abundant use of dates and avocado, alternative sugars and coconut oils. Not to mention quinoa and butternut squash.
She is also an entrepreneur to be reckoned with, having turned a food blog born in 2012 into a major food-development business, with four cookbooks to her name, a slightly shaky venture into the cafe business and now a gentle testing of the frozen-food game.
Ella Mills is big business. She is part of a foodie phenomenon that could be described as the Brit Pop of this decade, but it has not all been good vibes. Last year, the BBC’s Horizon dedicated an entire programme to discrediting the “clean-food” phenomenon, and Ella was up-front and centre as a proponent.
When I suggest that the backlash was more inevitable than personal, Ella becomes animated.
“Well, I disagree with that actually, if I’m honest, though I probably shouldn’t say that,” Ella says, over peppermint tea in a Dublin suburban cafe. “There wasn’t a single man held up for the critics. We were held up as at the forefront of the whole thing, even though it wasn’t a term we’ve ever used. You’ve never seen that term on the back of our books, the front of our books, on any of our products. Have you seen it on our Instagram? No.”
The “term” is clean-eating, though she never says it.
The “we”, when I check if she means women in general, is specifically Deliciously Ella, which is a business now run with her husband, Matthew Mills, son of the late former MP Tessa Jowell.
“It was frustrating,” Ella says when I ask if it was upsetting, “because it was based on misinterpretation. And because we’ve done something and been successful at it, we were pinpointed by it.”
When Ella first caught the public imagination, with a blog begun in 2012, her father warned her that the backlash would arrive in three years’ time. He wasn’t far off.
“Until the media found out who my parents are,” Ella says, “that my mum is [an heir to] Sainsbury’s and my father was an MP, it was fine. But as soon as that came out, everything changed, everyone had a judgment.
“As soon as that came out, everyone’s opinion changed. There was an automatic negative opinion of me. And that made me feel very nervous. And, yes, that’s what you get when you stick your hand up and go into a public space — but I wasn’t prepared for how big that would become.
“I appreciate that I’m from a privileged background and I was very lucky growing up and Deliciously Ella was very successful, very quickly, and I understand it all,” she says, adding that she’d probably find herself annoying too.
Of course, the backlash was possibly merely a three-year thing, as her father predicted, rather than entirely personal. Though social media can make anything feel personal.
When Ella came on to the scene, her personal story of ill health to rude health was an inspirational novelty. Three years later, there were a lot of young, attractive women with similar stories and similar food journeys and recipes and blogs and websites and books.
The Deliciously Ella story that first engaged people, along with her recipes and vivid food photography, was of her experience of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a disorder that can cause everything from extreme dizziness to digestive issues, chronic pain and fuzzy-headedness.
The narrative that food brought her back to health, primarily a plant-based diet of no processed muck or sugar or what we now consider all the bad stuff, caught the public imagination. Ella, however, is keen to say that it wasn’t all down to food.
“At a certain point I just had to push,” she says of her improvement, “I had sat for a year going deeper and deeper into a very dark hole and actually it wasn’t the right way to do it.” A range of things made her better, she says, among them a shift in how she ate. Before she changed her eating and starting the blog, she was “basically eating cereal” and both the eating habit and the blog were healing, along with other conventional therapies and interventions. She felt healthier, but she also had a purpose.
She is keen to say that she believes that “there’s too much emphasis on our plate, solely” as the key to well-being. She may not, you might say, have been so careful to clarify that a few years ago, but Ella is not the innocent girl she once was.
Ella’s thing, to an extent, became a modern-day cliche of millennials and even snowflakery. Ella’s endurance, however, is probably built on her personal resilience, which suggests she is more stiff upper lip than delicate flower.
She says her husband Matthew is the business brain, good at spreadsheets and 25year projections, but Ella can’t deny that her own drive has seen them turn Deliciously Ella into big business.
Her Energy Balls are a steady business, her two remaining cafes out of a onetime four seem to be doing well and she has just published a fourth cookbook, Deliciously Ella: The PlantBased Cook Book, which she says features 100 most-loved recipes from the cafes. She is also about to launch a range of no-preservative, no-additive frozen foods in small shops in the UK. It’s all a bit more grown-up, but not without heart.
And while the power of veganism and the importance of becoming plant-based in a “delicious but easy” way all feature prominently in conversation, “the term” never arises.
Ella has emerged from the hurricane, but she has also, perhaps, weathered the stormy backlash.
‘Ella’s endurance, however, is probably built on her personal resilience, which suggests she is more stiff upper lip than delicate flower’