‘Healthy eating’ is a modern cult – and it doesn’t come cheap
You’d think the insurance company, Aviva, would have its hands full, what with all the claims for burst pipes and bent fenders engendered by the Beast from the East. But between calculating the cost of the weather event formerly known as winter, the company has found time to publish a report on the state of the nation’s health. Among its predictably cheerless findings on obesity (rising) and stress (ditto), the survey found that more than half the 25 to 34-year-olds in its sample claimed to be “too busy” to prepare healthy meals, while more than three-quarters said they found healthy foods “too expensive”.
This might sound like a cue for an eye-roll emoji and a link to Jack Monroe’s admirable budget cookbooks. But there is no real need to search out recipes whose USP is good food on a shoestring. From Patience Grey’s classic Honey from A Weed – a celebration of foraging for food long before foraging became a cheffy fad – to the exquisite vegetarian recipes of Mira Sodha’s Fresh India, there is no shortage of evidence that healthy eating is as cheap, if not cheaper, than the highly processed alternatives.
The lack-of-time excuse is palpable nonsense, too. You can make an omelette, a bowl of spaghetti puttanesca, or even – if you must – avocado toast in scarcely more time than it takes to queue for a supermarket ready meal. So what is really going on with the time-poor, cash-poor millennials of Aviva’s survey and their uneasy relationship with food?
A salmagundi of nutritional pseudoscience is what – starting with the very definition of what constitutes a healthy diet. “Healthy” eating has become a 21st-century cult and, as with all cults, salvation doesn’t come cheap. With its Manichean narratives of food as “pure” and “natural” versus “wicked” and “indulgent”, and its arcane array of exotic ingredients and implements, the trend for “healthy” eating has achieved the remarkable feat of separating food from appetite, transforming meals from communal events into essays in Instagram solipsism. The restaurant chain, Belgo, actually tags the most photogenic meals on its menu with a camera icon.
On the one hand, a grim combination of guilt and misinformation that leaches all joy from the simple, celebratory act of preparing a meal; on the other, a connection with the origins of food that has become tenuous to the point of extinction. When a majority of people in the developed world lead urban, globalised lives, where cherries are perpetually in season and meat and fish come hygienically denatured in plastic vacuum packs, it is not surprising that that our relationship with what we eat is characterised by an overwhelming sense of anomie.
To this, the French documentary-maker Benjamin Carle has devised a novel remedy: a pan bagnat, or Niçois tuna salad sandwich, that took 10 months to make. Believing that his millennial generation yearns to regain the practical skills lost by their parents, Carle sourced his ingredients from first principles: growing the wheat, tomatoes and olives, catching the tuna, even boiling seawater to make the salt for a sandwich whose slow evolution he recorded for a documentary to be screened on Canal+. “I think, in some senses, we are voluntarily going backwards,” he noted. Backwards, that is, to a culinary utopia that never quite existed. Still, if it catches on, it could be progress, of a kind.
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