Every January must include, even for the shortest period, a common preoccupation with healthy eating and abstinence from all things chocolatey, cheesy and chippy. This year has been no exception particularly if, like me, you have gorged yourself to the point of nausea on Quality Street and goose fat roast potatoes over Christmas.
Back in Cambridge, a friend and I carried out some research in to how we could make a New Year’s diet as guilt free and carb loaded as possible, hoping to steer clear of any traumatic memories of the cabbage soup diet I once tried aged about 16. In light of some recent articles about how bacon, sausages, ham and probably all porky goodness gives you pancreatic cancer, we decided to embark on the “non-processed diet” – a diet advertised as wholesome, tasty and a great way to “get creative” with fresh food. So far, so good.
It soon became clear that like post-modernism, “processed food” defies definition. A purist article by a strange vegan included pasteurized milk, honey that isn’t “raw” (??!) and tinned tomatoes as processed. Neither of us were prepared to forsake the most basic of commodities, so we created some principles to guide us in our quest for health:
- Anything with a word you can’t pronounce in the ingredients is forbidden.
- If they sell it in Holland & Barrett, it’s legit.
- No white bread.
- An exception is to be made with white rice and pasta.
The breakdown of our experiment was as follows. I shelled out an incredible amount for non-salted peanuts, cashews and birdseed and snacked like a squirrel for 2 days. I mourned the loss of cheese and white bread, and was sorely disappointed when an apple
replaced my cheesy chips when I got home from Cindies. In short, it was not a wholly successful foray in to the unknown, and I ended up a quivering and dribbling wreck at the sight of a toasted sandwich in a very short space of time.
What the idea of eating non-processed foods really did give me however was some important insights in to people’s attempts at healthy and wholesome eating. Firstly, it is substantially more expensive and probably time consuming if you properly want to avoid preservatives and packaging. However much celebrity chefs wax lyrical about the joy of making your own tomato ketchup and pasta, it is clearly not for the faint hearted.
More importantly, it got me thinking about whether having a proper interest in food and eating precludes the consumption of processed foods altogether. To hear food writers, bloggers, restaurateurs and anyone for who food is a living, the emphasis is quite clearly that the more natural, homegrown and homemade the better. But as my father readily pointed out, show me the man who can resist a can of really cold Diet Coke and a packet of Walker’s ready salted in their white bread ham sandwich. Although it may not be as health beneficial as homemade ketchup, I think processed food does have a respectable place in the food lover’s repetoire which is clearly why it is so hard to shake off.
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