Which food tribe are you?
Know your paleos from your plant brigade
‘Hi, I’m Andrew, and I’m a flexitarian.” So goes a scene from the support groups for former food fad addicts that will surely take place in the notso-distant future. We will wake up, smell the organic oat milk coffee and realise we have been conned. Conned by shiny, beautiful Instagrammers, bloggers and TV chefs extolling the virtues of plant-based, Paleo and freefrom diets; of five-minute meals and 25-ingredient dinners; of dirty food, clean food and whole food.
But until that blessed day comes, the only way we’re going to survive is to make like the Hunger Games and pick a tribe. Helpfully, there is an almost infinite number to choose from. In fact, there have never been so many synonyms for “fussy eater”.
According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, plant-based diets are merely a passing fad and veganism remains a “minority interest” – in spite of the diet’s apparent omnipresence. “By claiming their credentials as a vegan, young people believe this shows they are ethical, healthy and environmentally aware… the growth of veganism has partially been fuelled by the growth in Instagram,” their report reads.
Only one in 10 vegans has followed the diet for more than a decade, they add, while British meat consumption has risen from 62kg per person per year to 73kg since the mid-eighties. The Vegan Society, unsurprisingly, has lambasted the “obvious bias” in the report, and continues to advocate the pulling power of plants.
But how does a novice get involved? Flexitarianism, most likely, the lifestyle one in five of us now follows, which sees worshippers spend a few days every now and again (ie, when they remember/it suits them to do so) as vegans. Instagrammers such as Fat Gay Vegan (a Hackney-based, plantespousing foodie) and Deliciously Ella have made veganism cool, steering it away from images of eccentric academics with shoes made of lentils.
Flexitarians have the best of both worlds – they are able to speak about environmental issues with a degree of smugness, but with the benefit of being allowed to sink a bacon sarnie or a wedge of Brie whenever they please.
How, though, do you pick your tribe? First, do your research. Work out which crowd suits you best – assess what they wear, what their children are called, what their kitchens look like, what sort of “merch” they’re selling, start following key figures on social media, and before long you will be a fully paid-up member of your clan.
A spotter’s guide to 2018 food tribes
The plant-based brigade Two words: coconut bacon. This sort of delicacy that awaits the committed plant eater who can also be found tucking into “vegan fish and chips” or marinated banana blossom. They are a perky bunch who can be identified by the yoga mats gripped permanently under their arms, kitchen cupboards overflowing with nut butters, and fridges stocked with an obscene amount of kale. They are not, I repeat NOT, vegans. In fact, a plant-based diet could include the occasional helping of meat, but most of the time, your diet will be 85 per cent chickpea. They worship at the feet of… Deliciously Ella (Ella Woodward), queen of the plant eaters.
Desert Island Dish… A Buddha bowl. Not something Bridget Jones would smuggle back from Bali, as the name suggests, but rather a dish of grains, topped with various chopped vegetables, sprinkled with seeds and drizzled with tahini or coconut yogurt.
The Paleos
Followers of the Paleo way of life believe our bodies have not evolved to properly process most of the foods we now consume. Refined sugar, dairy, salt, root vegetables, grains and legumes are all verboten. Instead, protein is the name of the game, with lots of fish, meat, fruits and vegetables making up a diet the cavemen would apparently have approved of. A glance at a Paleo Instagram account would suggest the cavemen were scarfing rather a lot of wild salmon wrapped in prosciutto with grilled peaches.
They worship at the feet of…
Michelle Tam. With 435,000 followers on Instagram, Tam is the undisputed leader of the Paleosians (NB: not a real term), creating menu plans for mums on a mission to feed their little cave children.
Desert Island
Dish… Turkey bolognese on a bed of courgetti. Spiralizers were very big in the Paleolithic period, apparently.
The uber foodies
They may not be slaves to their waistlines, but they are addicts, just like the rest of them. They have a series of dealers – there’s the Middle Eastern shop where they get huge packets of sumac, za’atar and ras el hanout; the butcher who can get them a few pounds of merguez at a moment’s notice; and the expensive grocer where they go for Amalfi lemons and heritage tomatoes. They spend weekends marinating Wagyu beef, and then going on about it.
They worship at the feet of…
Ottolenghi. Oh, Yotam. You have brought us so much joy. But you’ve also made us unspeakable snobs.
Desert Island Dish… Anything which features an ingredient most of your friends won’t have heard of, and will take you three weeks to source.
The free-from crowd
They are perhaps the most entrenched of the foodie tribes. Slightly fragile folk who have demonised normal human reactions to food, so that a touch of bloating becomes a gluten intolerance, a spot is a clear sign of a dairy allergy, a sore left foot the result of too many sulphites in the bloodstream.
They worship at the feet of…
Amelia Freer. Nutritionist to the stars, Freer has a diet free from gluten, dairy and refined sugar and is an expert in various things, including “gluten sensitivity” and “adrenal dysregulation”. Nothing some bone broth and a green juice can’t solve.
Desert Island Dish … Raw sweet potato brownies. More vegetable than cake, but the free-from crowd go mad for them. They’re #vegan and #glutenfree, don’t you know.
Embarking on a brisk walk last December, it wasn’t my flimsy sundress or even the 15ft Christmas tree twinkling on the beach that brought home the fact that I had swapped life in my native London for a delightful four months in Los Angeles. It was the mobile phone I was carrying in my right hand without a hint of trepidation.
It might sound like a minor detail, but the relief of being able to answer a call while pushing my infant son in his buggy as I walked down the street, without worrying that I was turning us into a target for crime, provided a stark contrast to the preceding months in London. Thanks to a seemingly unrelenting surge of moped muggings across the capital, walking around certain parts of the city carrying an iphone these days is tantamount to standing outside a bear cave wafting a pot of honey.
In just three years, moped-based crimes in London rose from 1,053 in 2014 to 16,000 in 2017, and I found myself reduced to checking my phone furtively behind a bus stop or from the safety of a café. The inconvenience was the price I felt I had to pay to avoid handing over my phone, with its trove of irreplaceable photographs, text messages and personal notes, at knifepoint.
That is why, when heiress Petra Ecclestone recently revealed that one of the reasons she was moving to Los Angeles was because of “how unsafe the UK has become – so much more than 10 years ago”, I found myself vociferously nodding my head in agreement. Despite the security at Ecclestone’s disposal (she employs four full-time bodyguards for herself and her three children), the 29-yearold admits she no longer feels safe in her swanky enclave of west London. “Talking with mums at school, there have been so many incidents, so many attacks, robberies, knives during the day,” she said. “You don’t feel safe walking around the neighbourhood.”
And I was unsurprised when I read yesterday that London is at a dire number 48 in The Economist Intelligence Unit’s list of most liveable cities in the world. Criteria considered include crime rates, overcrowding, terrorism threats and infrastructure. Even Manchester ranked higher (35).
It’s the same story all over the capital. Earlier this summer, the comedian Michael Macintyre was accosted by two hammer-wielding thugs on scooters while picking his son up from school and instructed to hand over his £15,000 Rolex. The incident took place just minutes from the north London suburb where I grew up and now live with my husband, a producer and creative director, and our toddler son.
Last year, as we were preparing for our temporary move to Los Angeles for my husband’s work, the situation seemed to reach fever pitch. Every week new victims took to our local community Facebook page to share their stories, which ranged from split-second snatch and grabs that left the victim shaken but otherwise unharmed, to the truly menacing. One woman posted that despite being prepared to surrender her phone, the muggers punched her in the eye. Another was dragged along the pavement after the moped thieves grabbed her handbag and it got caught on her shoulder. Among the most horrifying incidents was the storming of a local café by two masked men with hammers. They smashed a window, ran inside and stole a laptop while customers – predominantly mothers and children on the school run – barricaded themselves in a loo. Then, just days later, a woman posted that her elderly relative and two nurses had been mugged outside our local hospital by men carrying acid.
While the moped muggers were running rampant, with apparently scant fear of repercussion, police and local politicians seemed to do little more than convene endless meetings in a futile attempt to reassure residents. By the time we boarded the plane at Heathrow last November, some members of our normally law-abiding community were suggesting vigilantism might be the only option.
I have lived in London all my life, but it wasn’t until our fourth-floor flat was burgled in 2011 that I first became frightened at the prospect of continuing to do so. We were in bed when I woke up at 3am in the middle of a rainstorm and heard the unmistakable creak of footsteps next door. My husband thrust open our bedroom door and confronted the man who, mercifully, didn’t have a weapon. He had entered through a tiny bathroom window, which looked on to a fire escape. Ignoring my husband, the burglar casually strolled past him, without a word, and let himself out the front door.
It was only later that we realised he had walked off with my Blackberry and my husband’s wallet. The police officers who arrived 10 minutes later told us they had received calls from at least two properties across the road that had been burgled that night.
The steady litany of incidents has compounded my sense that our once peaceful suburban bubble has burst. The post office, which is housed inside a church alongside a children’s play area and crèche, has been the target of three armed robberies over 18 months. And last month a mother published on Facebook a photograph of a serrated knife with a 10-inch blade that she found in the bushes of the playground behind our house.
By contrast, those four months in Los Angeles felt positively idyllic, despite the violent reputation the city garnered following a spate of gang-related shootings and race riots during the Eighties and Nineties. It can’t claim to be crimefree, but thanks to gentrification, changes in policing methods and an influx of tech money, certain areas have more in common with the Britain of the Fifties than London does now.
When I visited a friend of mine in Hermosa Beach, a wealthy suburb on LA’S southern coast where Maria Sharapova is rumoured to own a house, I found the front door wide open, to beat the heat. Most of her neighbours left their doors unlocked, she informed me nonchalantly. Strolling to a café for lunch, we passed row after row of million-dollar beachfront homes with children’s toys, garden furniture, even televisions set up in the front gardens without an owner in sight. Yet rarely does anything get stolen.
Even in more built-up areas such as Beverly Hills, near to where Petra Ecclestone owns a home, street crime is rare, and I never felt unsafe walking around in the evenings. On the local mothers’ Facebook group – which boasts tens of thousands of members – the most serious posts are usually about stolen Amazon packages.
I can’t deny, either, that with both terrorism and anti-semitism sadly more prevalent than ever in Britain, Los Angeles is beginning to look like a safe haven. Which is why, like Petra, my husband and
I are now seriously weighing up a more permanent move to the sunshine state.
It would be a wrench to wave goodbye to the city we both grew up in, where our families and friends still live; but with increasing police cuts and a justice system that appears to favour criminals’ rights over victims’, we have realised that if we want any hope of giving our son the same unspoiled childhood that we enjoyed, leaving London might be our only option.
Los Angeles felt positively idyllic, despite its violent reputation