FAVOURING FLAVOUR OVER FAD
A food writer has built a following by calling out the ‘smug’ clean eating trend By Tejal Rao
Come January, everyone’s an expert on what you should, and should not, be eating, and in what quantities you should, and should not, be eating it. Not Ruby Tandoh, who is standing in her kitchen in South Yorkshire, England, sizzling plantains in an inch of oil until they’re a deep brown all over and tender inside.
Tandoh, a 24-year-old food writer with a cult following in Britain, doesn’t endorse a set of rules by which you should shop, cook and eat. Instead, she champions the miscellaneous delights, the quiet quotidian pleasures, of cooking without rules.
Tandoh lives here in Sheffield, a city once known for its steel industry, where locals never seem to tire of saying there are more trees than people. She came into the public eye a few years ago as a college student, when she competed on the popular television series The Great British Bake Off.
Since then, Tandoh has written two cookbooks; essays in The Guardian, Elle UK and other publications that tell complex stories about our relationships with food; and fastfood reviews for Vice UK. In her writing, she seems almost allergic to food snobbery.
Her second cookbook, Flavour: Eat What You Love, was published last summer in Britain and will arrive in the United States in February. It celebrates the repertoire of a skilled and enthusiastic home cook, as interested in the feminist concept of “shine theory,” which values female friendship over competition, and how it might apply to cake, as what Harry Styles of the band One Direction orders for dessert.
Tandoh’s paternal grandfather, who immigrated to Britain from Ghana, died two years ago, and since then, her interest in Ghanaian flavours has grown. She rolls up the sleeves of her oversized orange sweater to pull whole tilapia from a garlicky marinade, which she will pan-fry and serve with the browned plantains, a salad of raw onions, tomatoes and herbs and a homemade hot sauce. She warms groundnut soup on the electric stove until the windows fog up and the whole room is swaddled with the scent of peanut butter and chillies.
It’s an unshowy blowout of a l unch, alive with heat and depth, utterly delicious.
“The language of some of our most beloved food writers has gone from flavour and feasting to cleanness and lightness,” Tandoh lamented in an essay written for Vice UK last year. Taking a closer look at the trends toward gluten-free and sugar-free foods, toward clean eating, she sometimes found a moralising and restrictive message hiding between the lines, making unscientific promises about the benefits of certain foods and the damage caused by others.
Marian Burros wrote about the “clean food diet” in The New York Times in 1996, when it was just starting to gain steam. The diet was then packaged as a new standard for health food that went beyond the organic label. Followers were focused on maximising nutritional value in foods they defined as “pure.”
The term clean eating has since ballooned into a buzzword that describes tea cleanses, liquid detoxes, raw foods, superfoods and a variety of other wellness-related diets.
Tandoh is not interested in presenting her own counterdiet. She won’t play the part of a guru, or prescribe any single dogma.
“Some of the most delicious cakes I’ve had have coconut oil in them,” she said, “but I just don’t believe in the evangelism of ingredients.”
Tandoh grew up in Essex, the eldest of four children, with parents who often cooked burly soups and stews from the vegetarian Moosewood cookbooks. Her father worked for the Royal Mail, her mother was a school administrator, and the family subscribed to The Observer Magazine, which featured Nigel Slater’s elegant, almost poetic food column.
Tandoh worked for months in the kitchen of a youth hostel in Lisbon. Cooking daily for 30 people, on a budget of just 25 euros, she learned the value of one-pot meals that make the most of cheap ingredients and feed a crowd. She now cooks sweet and savoury at home, for herself and her girlfriend, every day.
Those recipes roam across the country: There’s a luxuriously creamy English fish pie, made with smoked haddock and peas, topped with a thick layer of mashed potato.
“Eat what you love” is the closest thing Tandoh has to a rule.
It is also a reminder that there are many ways to kick off good habits in the new year. One of them just may be to put all the voices of self-proclaimed experts on mute, and to turn up your own.