Lets talk about good food, and that '5 a day' target.
We all know that we should eat five handfuls of fruit and vegetables a day to protect our immune system, but in Scotland, very few people achieve this simple Public Health target. Why?
Let's explore the proposition that many people have forgotten how to cook and have no idea what real food should taste like.
When I was born in 1953, working class people knew how to cook: our Mums and Aunties had lived through rationing and WW2: they could turn potato peelings and a few scraps of mutton or rabbit into a palatable meal.
Nowadays, many people cannot cook, won't cook, and need an App to boil a flipping egg.
If you gave them a whole fish, or a pheasant, they would freak out.
Too posh to cook? Too dim to cook? Too busy to cook?
I have no idea: but all I know is that the majority of people in the UK today do NOT eat their five a day, and there is no excuse for eating crap.
I don't eat very conventionally, but I do eat quite well.
Today:
Waking up:
Fresh home squeezed Jaffa orange juice: I wait for the 'best before date' discount so I pay about 15p an orange. (one of my five a day) =1
Breakfast:
Home made Kefir yoghurt, sprinkled with nutty muesli and some foraged home made blueberry jelly and a few blueberries. (another one or two of my five a day) = 2.5
Lunch:
A local, free range fried egg , black pudding, mushroom and potato scone.
(Mushroom scores another one of the five) = 3.5
Dinner:
Pasta and prawns in tomato and basil sauce, peas, sping onions and green beans, with foraged wild garlic butter roll and home grown flatleaf parsley.
(Thats at least another two of the five, maybe three) = 6/7
This does not cost a bomb: nor does it take much time to cook: it is all about unleashing the imagination and loving good food.
The green beans and peas come frozen from the Co-operative and Lidl: they taste fine, are very cheap, and are just as good as fresh.
When I talk about foraging wild food: I am deadly serious: there is hardly a day in this house when we do not eat some wild food or other: frozen, pickled, jammed, jellied or dried. This is not a chore, this is a treat.
Chanterelles and Hedgehog mushrooms…
Excellent topic to discuss.
I grow wild food in my backyard as well as go out foraging as my grandmother taught. Interesting her kids didn't get that memo!
Because of all the diseases and environmental decline I also don't eat for 18 hours a day as I want to reach autophagy every day.
No sugar, no large fruit, plus a long list of others, everything else in moderation, a steady drip of phytonutrients every day.