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What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate
Joanna Blythman
Covering all our pressing food dilemmas, the award-winning food writer leads the way to sensible and practical choices about what to eat.Food should be one of life's greatest pleasures, yet increasingly, the choices facing consumers have become increasingly problematic. As well as having to think about what food may, or may not, be doing to you and yours, twenty-first century eaters have to think about what impact the food we eat is having on the environment, farm animals and food producers, both in far away places and back home. Globally, the world is running low on food and water, so we can no longer rely on a steady supply of cheap food. Meanwhile on the home front, many of us are watching our money like never before.Armed with this comprehensive, easy-to-navigate reference book which covers all common types of food, you can simplify your food choices, be aware of environmental and food security issues and quickly identify the best and most ethical food to eat.Answering the most frequently asked questions such as 'Is farmed fish better than wild?'; 'Is red meat bad for you?'; 'Could GM food feed the world?'; 'Is it better to drink bottled or tap water?'; 'Is saturated fat really so bad for me?' and 'Are organic foods really worth the extra expense?', Blythman will help you choose what to eat, guiding you to everything you need to know to eat well.




Contents
Cover (#u17899a97-8659-5289-b0ab-e0f259c82fd1)
Title Page (#uc7c7a79b-8ec0-52d7-865e-0c8f9f42c361)

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Vegetables
Asparagus
Aubergine
Peppers
Potatoes
Spinach and Swiss chard
Tomatoes
Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and other brassicas
Carrots and other root vegetables
Celery
Courgettes, marrow, squash and pumpkin
Green beans and runner beans
Herbs
Lettuce and other salad leaves
Mushrooms, cultivated and wild
Onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions
Peas, broad beans, mangetouts and sugarsnaps

Chapter 2 - Meat
Chicken and other poultry
Beef
Lamb and mutton
Pork, bacon and ham and wild boar
Venison
Veal
Rabbit
Sausages

Chapter 3 - Dairy
Milk and cream
Butter, ghee and buttermilk
Yogurt and yogurt drinks
Cheese
Ice cream

Chapter 4 - Fish
Cod and other white fish
Salmon and other oily fish
Prawns and other crustaceans
Mussels and other shellfish

Chapter 5 - Fruit
Apples
Avocados
Bananas and other tropical fruits
Cherries
Citrus fruits
Currants
Grapes
Nectarines, peaches and apricots
Pears
Plums, greengages and damsons
Pomegranates
Raspberries, blackberries and blueberries
Rhubarb
Strawberries

Chapter 6 - Larder
Eggs
Grains
Breakfast cereals
Bread
Pasta
Nuts and seeds
Dried and candied fruits
Pulses
Sugar and other sweeteners
Oils
Margarines and spreads
Soya foods
Chocolate
Salt
Spices and aromatics

Lists

Acknowledgments
About the Author
By the Same Author:
Copyright
About the Publisher (#ua708356f-247a-53f5-8209-b92c43826eaf)
Introduction
One night I was talking to a friend who was complaining about how hard she found it to shop for food. She was tight for cash, she explained, which made it difficult to afford the more ethical, progressive food she aspired to. She tended to shop on the way home from work, when only one smaller-format chain supermarket with a limited, overpriced selection, heavily skewed to convenience food, was still open. And that was only half the problem. Tired and uninspired by the dullness of the food on offer, she still had to dream up ideas for something to cook when she got home, then prepare it, and fit all that in with other activities, like going to the gym and doing the washing. Net result? ‘I’m not eating as well, or as healthily, as I’d like to,’ she said. ‘Food is just so complicated.’
This got me thinking. Is food really that complicated, or does it just seem that way? Surely there must be a clear, practical way to help people recognize and locate food that’s good in the broadest sense of that word: food that’s healthy, affordable, doesn’t trash the environment, exploit producers or cause unnecessary animal suffering, and, last but not least, tastes great?
So I wrote this book, a distillation of many disparate types of information about common foods that are not yet, as far as I know, brought together in any other place. Being impatient and, like many people, often short of time, I am a great believer in executive summaries, so any reader can cut to the chase, so to speak, by reading my 20 guiding principles for eating good food.
But broad generalities can’t answer many of the pressing food dilemmas of the day, so all the foods we eat commonly are then discussed in detail, either individually, or in their family groups. Each section is free-standing. What to Eat is a reference book after all, so you can dip into the section on breakfast cereals, say, without having first read the one on grains. This inevitably means that there is some repetition, but of course you can skip over that.
To steer readers in the direction of the best food – what to eat – I have dished up some unsavoury facts about the worst stuff – what not to eat. This isn’t meant to put you off eating, just remind you of why it’s worthwhile seeking out something better.
Food is a contentious subject, so as well as picking up lots of useful information and the odd flash of inspiration, anyone who reads this book will get a mini crash course in the live debates in this field. What to Eat looks at food from a 360-degree angle (or at least takes a few purposeful steps in that direction). I hope it will help anyone, anywhere, make the best possible all-round choice, irrespective of personal circumstances.
The 20 principles of
eating, made simple
Base your diet on real, unprocessed food
This is the bedrock principle of this book, and you can’t go too far wrong if you follow it. Nature is a very clever, intricate system and natural foods in their whole, unprocessed form have an intrinsic nutritional integrity. We know this because humans have been eating them for centuries. We don’t yet, and may never, fully understand all the complex interrelationships between the major and minor nutritional components that go to make up familiar foods such as eggs, meat, fruits, vegetables and grains, but we do know that they act in synergy, supporting and enhancing one another, adding up to one wholesome entity. If you choose mainly unprocessed, or only minimally processed food, and regularly eat a variety of different foods from all the major food groups, then you really don’t need to worry too much about being healthy.
See the value of cooking
Even if you can’t cook meals from scratch all the time, it is important to recognize that cooking from raw materials gives you infinitely more control over the quality of what you eat than if you rely on convenience foods. The more food you eat that isn’t home-made, the poorer your diet is likely to be, both in terms of nutrition, and the quality and provenance of the ingredients used. If you surrender sovereignty of what you eat by becoming dependent on convenience foods, the fatter you, and any other members of your household, are likely to become and the more readily your nagging concerns about not eating well can be exploited by food manufacturers selling you technofoods that make dubious health claims. Every meal that you take back under your control by cooking yourself, the better your health and your spirits will be, and the more pleasure you will get from the act of eating.
If you have got out of, or have never acquired, the habit of cooking, revisit this default setting. Cooking needn’t be arduous. If you are one of those people who only think about food at the last minute, you may find yourself in shops where your choice is likely to be very restricted, and therefore forced to buy a lot of expensive rubbish. To alter your habits, you will need to decide in advance roughly what you are going to eat, then make sure that you have the ingredients. Other more creative cooks get ideas from shopping in stimulating places with inspiring ingredients, such as markets and small food shops, and then just come home and throw it all together. Either way, you can make life easier for yourself by cooking more than you need so that you can have the same thing later in the week, perhaps in a slightly different form or with different accompaniments. And here, your freezer will prove to be a trusty friend. Cook once, eat twice, or even thrice.
Don’t be a sucker for processed foods
Here’s one thing you need to know: the more processed a food is, the worse it is for you. Food processing is the food industry’s way of making profit by taking apart natural foods and reinventing them in more lucrative form. Not usually to your nutritional benefit either, irrespective of what the label might claim. Commodity crops like wheat and corn, stripped of most of their beneficial nutrients, then loaded with sugar, salt and a sprinkling of synthetic vitamins, are presented as a nutritious breakfast. Industrially refined oils are chemically hardened, mixed with additives and water then reborn as ‘heart-healthy’ spreads. Who needs them?
Reconstructed, over-processed foods don’t have the trustworthy track record of whole foods in their natural form. They contain novel ingredients and obscure additives produced by hi-tech methods and have only been on our plates for a relatively short period of time. This is already long enough to suggest that they are significant contributors to the major modern problems of obesity, food allergies and diet- related disease.
OK, there are exceptions. Cheese, butter, yogurt and bread are all processed foods, and, let’s face it, few of us are going to get round to making these ourselves. But you can buy those that were made in the traditional way, using time-honoured techniques to alter primary ingredients.
Don’t buy food with ingredients you won’t find in a domestic larder
It’s a safe bet that you don’t have mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids in your storecupboard, nor high-fructose corn syrup, guar gum, partially hydrogenated vegetable fat, soya protein isolate, liquid pasteurized egg nor maltodextrin. The only people who have these, and other weird but not wonderful synthetic chemical food ingredients lining their shelves, are lab-coated food technologists whose job is to find new and ever more inventive ways to make even more money from the over-processing of food. And guess what? Your health is not their priority. So if you don’t know what an ingredient is, or it has a long, unpronounceable name that reads like an algebraic formula, then don’t buy any food product containing it. Every item you see listed on an ingredient label should be readily understandable and familiar. If it isn’t, avoid it like the plague.
Be sceptical about nutrition advice from ‘experts’
The dietetic establishment has led us to believe that food is merely fuel and healthy eating is just a straightforward matter of calculating the number of calories we need for our body weight and activity level. Grub in, energy out. That’s all there is to it. This mechanical approach plays right into the hands of the food industry. Following this nutritional script, it doesn’t matter whether we eat technofood or natural food because everything comes down to a simple arithmetical calculation. Common sense alone dictates that there is more to food and eating than that.
Don’t hold your breath for learned, silvery-haired nutritionists to spell out the universal magic formula for healthy eating. Research into what constitutes optimum nutrition is best thought of as a work in progress, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is being simplistic and misleading. So instead, use your common sense. Base your diet on tried and tested unprocessed foods, studiously ignoring fads and showing healthy scepticism towards everything from top-down government health orthodoxy to the latest trendy diet.
These days, many foods come with an abundance of nutrition labels and supposedly helpful logos to help you assess the healthiness or otherwise of their contents. Mostly this is a confusing waste of time. Sometimes it is a deliberate red herring used by the manufacturers to bamboozle you and make you think a low-grade processed food is better than it might otherwise seem. Ignore nutrition labels and logos, and cut to the chase by looking at the ingredients label. Basically, the more ingredients listed, the more suspect the product is.
Don’t dismiss traditional food knowledge
Certain foods – beetroot, celery, raw milk, ginger, suet, garlic, yogurt, cabbage and carrots, for instance – figure in traditional medicine systems around the world as having beneficial medicinal and nutritional properties. It is currently fashionable to dismiss any such collective wisdom on the grounds that it isn’t ‘evidence-based’ – in the narrow, western, medical sense – and so little better than superstition. This is blinkered thinking. There is much to be said for the quasi-medical, nutritional knowledge that has been built up by different cultures and tested out and observed informally in human populations over time. When your grandmother told you that a hot honey and lemon drink would do you more good than any cough medicine, she wasn’t making it up. She was simply passing on the accumulated wisdom and experience of the generations that came before her. That knowledge is like gold dust.
Practise vegetable-centric eating
Of course, it doesn’t make sense to shut your ears entirely to ongoing discussions of nutrition, and there is some overlapping middle ground where otherwise diverse researchers and would-be authorities can agree. There is, for instance, no argument that vegetables are brilliant for you. It’s not just all the vitamins, minerals and soluble fibre that are beneficial; research is gradually identifying a number of phytochemicals, or natural compounds in vegetables, that are both health-enhancing and protective against disease. The early twentieth-century view, that vegetables were relatively unimportant in the diet because they consist mainly of water, has been radically revised. Currently, putting vegetables more at the core of your diet seems to be a key strategy for being healthy. Think in terms of vegetable-centric eating, where protein, fat and carbohydrate-based ingredients play second fiddle to vegetables, not the other way round.
Eat some protein
Realistically, you aren’t going to live solely on vegetables. A bit of protein still has its place, whether it’s from fish, meat, eggs, dairy foods or from vegan sources, such as pulses. Protein is emerging in research as the macronutrient most capable of satisfying hunger. As your grandmother might have put it: ‘It keeps you going.’ If you do eat protein in the form of meat, poultry, milk and eggs, try to make sure that it comes from free-range animals that have been fed on grass and other natural pasture foods. It will be better for you.
Rethink what you have been told about fat and cholesterol
That big bad dietary bogeyman – saturated fat – is being rehabilitated. Contrary to what we have been led to believe, there is an absence of evidence to support the nutritional mantra that fat is bad for health, or even to back the assumption that the naturally occurring fat that you find in whole foods is intrinsically fattening. Increasingly, the health benefits of natural saturated fat are being acknowledged. Saturated fats are key components of cell membranes and essential for the production of certain hormones. They act as carriers for important vitamins, and are needed for mineral absorption and lots of other biological processes. The ‘saturated fat is bad for you’ gospel is likely to melt away in coming years. This is one to watch.
Likewise, while we were once told authoritatively that foods that naturally contain cholesterol, such as eggs and whole, full-fat milk, were bad for the heart, this nutritional script is being hastily rewritten to concede that the cholesterol we eat in food does not lead to heart disease, and acknowledge that some dietary cholesterol is actually essential for maintaining health. Cholesterol is a vital element in our cell membranes. It’s no accident that human breast milk is very rich in the substance. Is it likely that nature would design a baby’s first food that was a killer?
Saturated fat and cholesterol found in natural foods such as butter and meat have a place in an aware diet. Man-made fats manufactured from artificially hardened, hydrogenated polyunsaturated oils, on the other hand, which were once recommended as the healthy alternative, have now been shown to be pretty lethal. This just goes to show how the nutrition establishment cannot be relied on for sound eating advice.
Cut back on sugar, sweeteners and refined carbohydrates
All nutritionists whose salaries aren’t paid by the sugar industry agree that sugar is a nutritional disaster. The main problem with sugar is that in its refined form we can consume huge quantities of it, in products such as drinks and sweetened fromage frais, almost without noticing. Unlike honey or treacle, refined sugar has no redeeming nutritional features. It’s difficult, because many foods that contain sugar are enticing, but there’s a strong case for keeping your consumption to a minimum.
A body of research suggests that high-fructose corn syrup, also known as corn sugar and glucose fructose syrup, a very modern ingredient now found in many soft drinks and a growing number of both savoury and sweet processed foods, is even more damaging to health than refined cane or beet sugar. Deeply implicated in the rise in obesity in the US, it is best avoided absolutely.
Don’t imagine that artificial sweeteners are better because they contain fewer calories. There is already research that suggests that these novel chemical concoctions actively encourage, not discourage weight gain. It looks likely that they will turn out to be very bad for us indeed, even worse than standard table sugar. Why give them the benefit of the doubt?
Fresh fruits contain a lot of natural sugar, but they also contain a number of phytochemicals, similar to those found in vegetables, that are thought to be extremely beneficial. So the sugar in fruit is not something to get worried about, unless you eat vast quantities, or are trying to control your weight.
All carbohydrate foods have the capacity to disrupt blood sugar levels. In their whole, unprocessed forms they at least contain some useful amounts of vitamins. But over-consumption of refined carbohydrates, such as white pasta, flour, rice, couscous and sugary drinks, is increasingly coming into the frame as being more fattening than fat, another probable cause of the obesity epidemic that is sweeping through affluent countries.
Make time to sit down at a table and eat meals
Satisfying your appetite is not just about what you eat, but also about how you eat. Sometimes the pace and pressures of modern life make us overlook this. If you bolt down food on the hoof, on your lap, upright in the kitchen, in bed or at your desk, your stomach may feel satisfied, but your brain and your emotions most certainly will not. If you make time – even just fifteen minutes – to sit down and eat a meal at a table, taking long enough to appreciate what’s on your plate, then your brain has the time to register that your stomach is full. Rushing food inevitably leaves you feeling psychologically unsatisfied by what you have consumed. In this state, you will be much more tempted to eat the next thing that comes into view and graze your way to obesity.
In all food cultures and over thousands of years, a certain ceremony and ritual has grown up around the whole business of eating. This is no accident. The act of eating is about more than simply filling the stomach. Meals have the capacity to make us feel nurtured, to nourish us emotionally and promote a sense of contentment that goes beyond any purely physical measure of wellbeing. If you can share meals with family and friends, then the pleasure of eating is further enhanced. But if you can’t, treat yourself like a worthwhile member of the human race anyway, and sit down to eat a meal at a table.
Boycott factory-farmed meat, poultry, eggs and dairy
Factory-farmed meat comes from livestock kept indoors in cramped, insanitary circumstances that create huge animal suffering. Factory farms are also incubators for diseases that affect animals and which can, in certain circumstances, spread to humans.
Factory-farmed animals are fed on vast quantities of cereals. These feedstuffs could be used more efficiently and less wastefully to feed humans directly. The planet simply cannot continue to produce meat, milk and eggs by rearing livestock in this way.
The availability of cheap, factory-farmed meat has encouraged many people to eat much more meat, poultry and dairy products than is good for health and to see large daily amounts as some sort of democratic entitlement. An overabundance of animal-derived foods in the diet isn’t healthy and, unless you are prepared to pay a small fortune, insisting on such quantities will necessarily mean that you end up eating cheap, inhumanely and unsustainably produced foods from miserable factory-farmed animals.
If you want to eat meat, poultry, eggs and dairy foods, buy less of them but maintain your spend by trading up to buy higher welfare, more extensively farmed, free-range, grass-fed products.
Adopt a ‘closest to home’ buying policy
It makes sense to favour food produced close to home. Of course, just because a food is locally produced doesn’t mean it’s good. A local chicken can be factory-farmed. The local baker can make lousy bread. But all other things being equal – the product tastes good and it has been humanely and ethically produced – then your food will automatically be fresher and more seasonal, and considerably less trauma will be inflicted on the environment in its transportation. The shorter the distance that food travels, the less energy is used. Transport relies heavily on oil, which is a rapidly depleting, non-renewable resource. A reduction in transport also helps bring down carbon emissions. By eating more local food, you can substantially reduce your carbon ‘foodprint’.
The money you spend on local food will support and encourage our native food producers, which strengthens communities and the economy and helps build our self-sufficiency in food. At the moment, we produce only 58 per cent of the food we eat, not a great situation to be in when we face a future where there will be more competition for globally sourced food resources and the energy costs of bringing imported foods to our shores will become greater and greater.
The supermarkets’ policy of treating the planet like one big global shopping basket has created a bizarre situation where many of us eat little or no local or regional food, and surprisingly small quantities of nationally produced food, even though we live in a rich and productive land and ought to be more or less self-sufficient. With the world’s population set to grow by 50 per cent by 2050, and global warming and a shortage of oil putting pressure on the world’s ability to feed itself, this dependency on imported food looks increasingly reckless. There is something fundamentally unsound about relying on faceless producers in faraway places to keep us fed, people who owe us nothing. Instead we need to make the country more resilient by buying more food that’s grown here, not flown or shipped here. What on earth are we doing eating Brazilian chicken, Dutch carrots, Danish pork or New Zealand onions? Are we crazy?
Another bonus of buying local food is that the production process – everything from the welfare of animals to the treatment of workers – will be much more transparent than that of foods that have travelled thousands of miles through the multiple links in an opaque supply chain. Let’s face it, shining a light into the dark highways and byways of industrial farming and food production is hard enough even within these shores. Suffice it to say that factory farms and food-manufacturing plants here don’t go out of their way to welcome us in for ‘Doors Open’ days. So what chance do we have of knowing what’s really going on in similar operations thousands of miles away?
Of course, we have been eating imported foods for centuries, and only the most pleasure-denying, hair-shirt-wearing eco-fanatic would seriously suggest that imported foods have no place on the plate. No chocolate? Or lemons? Unthinkable. Obviously, there is a list of foreign ingredients that few of us would like to live without, such as spices, olive oil, avocados, citrus fruits, cocoa, bananas and rice. We can’t produce them, and they enliven our diet immensely. These foods are not usually air-freighted, but generally shipped or trucked. There is no need to forgo them. Even those that are transported by air – Indian mangoes or lychees from Mauritius for instance – can have a small place in the diet as an occasional, exotic indulgence.
But then there are foods that we are perfectly able to grow or farm here, at least for some part of the year, but which are routinely brought in from all over the globe via a convoluted cold chain: fruits and vegetables such as green beans, blueberries, asparagus; and meat and dairy products such as lamb, pork, chicken and yogurt. There’s no need to have such foods supplied from abroad and their air-freighting, shipping and trucking, with its energy-intensive cold chain, is undeniably environmentally destructive. They almost invariably taste inferior to the native equivalent too.
Companies involved in the importation of fresh produce argue that the air-freighted trade in premium fruit and vegetables gives producers a much needed source of income, but any jobs created are precarious ones, based on a trade that is utterly fickle. Foreign workers can, and do, lose their jobs in a split second, at the whim of a supermarket buyer who decides to cancel a contract, or because transport costs make it cheaper to source food elsewhere. And in many places, crops are being grown for export at the expense of local people. In Peru, for instance, the production of asparagus is depleting the water resources on which local people depend. From Bolivia, there are reports that local people can’t afford to eat quinoa, their staple grain, because foreign demand has sent the price shooting up. What’s more, the dividends from such trade are more likely to end up in the pockets of wealthy elites than to stay with the people who do the work.
So rather than buying into the supermarkets’ ‘the food world’s your oyster’ proposition, apply a ‘closest to home’ buying policy. Make locally and regionally produced food your first choice, English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish your second, European and Middle Eastern your third and world your last.
When you do buy foreign foods, favour those with a Fairtrade label. It guarantees that producers get a more equitable, reliable price for what they grow and also means that their working conditions are better than most. Fairtrade allows us to build better relationships with foreign food producers, relationships that aren’t mired in exploitation and neo-colonialism. Fairtrade products aren’t prohibitively priced. You’re talking pence, not pounds, to support this more progressive type of world trade.
If you can, buy organic products too. The use of pesticides is less regulated outside the European Union and many workers have to apply them in risky conditions that would not be allowed here. They have to work and live in an environment contaminated with toxins to provide us with food. When you choose the organic alternative, you will know that the workers in distant places didn’t have to damage their health to produce it.
Get your food variety over the year, not in a week
Supermarkets have encouraged us to think that true variety is being able to buy every agricultural product on the planet 365 days of the year. This expectation is not environmentally sustainable. To add insult to injury, it is also extremely monotonous because the selection of food on offer doesn’t ever seem to change.
A more refreshing approach is to get your food variety over the course of the year, and let it be dictated by the seasons. This is how people used to eat. You feast on a glut of one thing when it is in season and eat it until it is coming out of your ears. Just when you are beginning to think enough is enough, it will disappear again to be replaced by some other food that feels refreshingly ‘new’ and this will often invigorate your cooking ideas. And so the cycle continues. This way, your diet is constantly changing and you will be eating food that suits the time of year and the weather: clementines at Christmas, asparagus in spring, berries in summer and sweet root vegetables in autumn and winter.
Don’t eat crops that trash the planet
Precious natural habitats all over the world are being cut down at an alarming rate to make way for large, intensively farmed plantations of soya and palm oil. Soya is used to provide the protein element in the feed of factory-farmed livestock. Both soya and palm oil are ubiquitous ingredients in thousands of common processed foods that we eat every day.
From the rainforest of Amazonia, through the Cerrado grassland savanna of central Brazil to the swampy tropical forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, these crops are powering massive habitat destruction. The impact on wildlife has been devastating. Magnificent species, such as the Borneo orang-utan and the Sumatran tiger, are now endangered because the habitat that sustains them is rapidly disappearing. These habitats are rich in biodiversity, not only in the form of animal and bird species, but also in plants. Such biodiversity is already alarmingly rare. We cannot afford to lose any more of it.
These vital habitats also act as massive carbon sinks, absorbing and storing potentially damaging carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When these habitats are dug up to plant soya and oil palm, this carbon is released into the atmosphere, accelerating the pace of global warming.
Many people feel appalled by the destruction of our natural world, but feel powerless to do anything about it. One contribution is to stop buying products that contain soya and palm oil. Environmental groups have tried to set up systems to identify more sustainably grown soya and palm oil, but these have been hijacked by powerful companies active in these industries. For the time being, there’s good reason to strike both soya and palm oil off your shopping list.
Understand the benefits of organic food
Don’t fall for the line that organic food is just a trendy lifestyle choice for the neurotic rich. There’s nothing new or modish about organics. Until 1950, all the food we ate was organically produced. It is organic food that should be considered as ‘normal’ not the Johnny-come-lately, factory-farmed, industrial equivalent.
These days, there are many compelling reasons for buying organic food. It will almost never contain the residues of pesticides that are commonly found in food grown with the aid of agrichemicals. Just six pesticides are approved for organic farming and these can only be used in extremely limited circumstances. Conventional farmers have over 300 at their disposal and use them routinely. The powers-that-be parrot the food industry line that we should not be the slightest bit alarmed that our food regularly contains residues of toxic pesticides because they are all below ‘safe limits’. But pesticides are poisons. They are designed to kill things. Surely the only truly safe limit would be zero? Why eat toxins if you don’t have to?
The list of additives that can be used in organic food is small – just 32 of the 290 additives permitted in Europe. Only additives derived from natural sources such as lecithin and citric acid are allowed and no artificial preservatives, colourings or flavourings are acceptable. Among the additives banned are those that have been linked to health problems. So if you are buying processed foods, the organic sort won’t contain any dodgy ones.
GM (genetic modification) is not allowed in organic food production and organically reared livestock cannot be fed on GM feed. Evidence is emerging to suggest that GM crops increase the use of pesticides, produce super-weeds and super-pests and compromise animal and, possibly, human health. When you choose organic food, you have a cast-iron guarantee that your food is GM-free.
As well as missing out on the bad stuff, you may be getting more of the good stuff when you buy organic food. Some research suggests that organic foods, such as milk and strawberries, have higher levels of vitamins, minerals and other healthy micronutrients.
Organic standards for raising livestock are the most humane, animal-friendly sort around. Organic farming methods encourage and protect wildlife. Chemical-dependent agriculture, on the other hand, has been shown to harm and deplete it. For all these reasons, there is a lot to be said for eating organic food when you can.
You don’t have to get hung up on eating 100 per cent organic though. There are many high-quality, wholesome foods around that do not come with organic certification – such as grass-reared meat, game, wild fish and hand-made cheeses.
Organic food is cheapest when bought direct from a farmer or producer, either via a box scheme, or at markets and farm shops. This sort of organic food will often cost less than the non-organic equivalent. But because most organic food costs more to produce and doesn’t come direct from the producer, it will tend to be more expensive than the basic non-organic equivalent. That said, it may sometimes cost less than premium non-organic products, so don’t always assume that organic will automatically be more expensive. Every now and then, compare like with like. You may get a pleasant surprise.
If you have to watch what you spend, and would like to buy more organic food but can’t see how to afford it, then you can prioritize your purchases. There are stronger arguments for some organic foods than others. It is more important to spend money on organic pork or chicken, for instance, than it is to buy organic lamb or beef.
The extra you will have to pay for some organic products is more manageable than for others. Items such as organic flour, milk, bread and butter can be quite affordable, as can fresh seasonal products, such as salad leaves and herbs. If you do compare prices, you may actually find that many organic brands are cheaper than their conventional equivalents and are often on special offer. Throughout this book, the foods that you might want to prioritize for organic purchases are flagged up.
Support small-scale producers and independent shops and food outlets
Supermarket chains’ commitment to small-scale foods and producers is skin-deep. At a structural level, these dinosaurs of food retailing are locked into bulk buying, globalized sourcing and centralized distribution, which favour the large supplier every time. Supermarkets just aren’t equipped to respond to fleeting availability or to handle foods that are produced in small numbers, even if they truly wanted to. What this means is that if everyone keeps shopping only in supermarkets, many of our smaller-scale foods will disappear because supermarkets do not deem them reliable, consistent or significant enough in turnover terms to merit stocking them.
If you love interesting foods, and want to ensure that you will always have real diversity in your shopping basket – items such as rare-breed meat, traditional fruits, distinctive local specialities with a sense of place, more unusual varieties of fruits and vegetables that keep precious biodiversity alive, artisan farmhouse cheese and naturally grown produce that haven’t been groomed to fit the big chains’ body fascist cosmetic grading requirements – then make a conscious effort to do some of your shopping in alternative outlets like markets, farm shops and independent shops. By shopping this way, you lend your valuable support to producers who are maintaining our food traditions and heritage and people who are offering something refreshingly different to the cloned supermarket offer. You also help keep your locality alive and more vibrant with shopping outlets that offer an alternative to the homogeneity and sameness of the over-dominant retail chains.
Recalibrate your attitude towards the cost of food
There’s lots of ‘cheap’ food on offer. Well, cheap that is, as long as you ignore its less obvious costs, such as its impact on your health, the misery of farm animals, the poor pay and conditions endured by workers in the global food industry, and environmental damage. Like clocking up debits on an out-of-control credit card, cheap food is stacking up a debt that we will have to pay at some future point.
Many people would like to buy something better, but feel that cheap, mass-produced food is the only type they can afford. More wholesomely and ethically produced food has a reputation for being expensive food, even though it usually represents much better value for money.
But there are a number of strategies that you can employ to keep down your overall spend, yet still eat higher-quality, more ethical food, simply by readjusting and rethinking certain strands in your diet. If, for instance, you cut out expensive, ready-made food, such as lunchtime sandwiches, pricey ready meals and pre-washed vegetables, you can free up a surprising amount of money to spend on something else: a free-range or organic chicken, say, instead of a factory-farmed one. By reducing the amount of meat you eat, choosing the less expensive, but arguably more delicious cuts, and bumping up the proportion of vegetables in your diet, you can afford to eat better meat and still be quids in. If you plan your meals in advance, you will almost certainly waste less and the money saved can go towards buying better ingredients. And of course, if you cut out sweet drinks, squashes, sodas and bottled water, and make tap water your default thirst-quencher, then you will instantly be awash with money that allows you to trade up on something else you regularly eat: a nicer hand-made cheese, some Fairtrade bananas, a special olive oil for salads. Throughout this book, ways to improve the quality of what you eat without spending more money overall are flagged up.
Save money outside the supermarket
Never assume that supermarkets are the cheapest place to shop. They most certainly are if what you want is processed food, say a bumper pack of crisps or a two-for-one offer on fizzy drinks. No corner shop or indie outlet can beat them on that stuff. They also offer bargain-basement prices on the handful of ‘known value items’ – such as bananas, milk and white bread. They price these products at an unrealistically low level to surround everything else they sell with a halo of value and convince us that they are cheaper than their competitors. But there’s one very important thing to understand about supermarkets: they aren’t cheaper places to shop for fresh, unprocessed foods. You will routinely pay more for fish, meat, fruit and vegetables in supermarkets than you will at the fishmonger’s, the butcher’s or the greengrocer’s. On some products, the mark-ups charged by supermarkets are astronomical. Try comparing supermarket spice prices with those in your average Asian grocery store. Or check out the cost of supermarket lemongrass, spring onions or fish sauce against the Chinese supermarket. Supermarkets routinely charge eye-popping premiums on any food that isn’t mass-market or industrialized. If you are looking for real fresh food, then take your business elsewhere.
Don’t become an ideological eater
A number of different considerations now influence us when we are deciding what we eat. This is a positive trend. What’s clever about swallowing mystery food without giving any thought to what it may be doing to you, food producers and the planet? But while some understanding of these concerns can undoubtedly inform and influence your choice of food, it is important not to become over-cerebral and to remember that, first and foremost, food should be a life-enhancing pleasure.
There’s no need, for instance, to cut out meat from your diet entirely just because you are worried about the depletion of the rainforest or the conditions of farm animals. Many species of fish are below safe biological limits, but don’t draw the conclusion that there is no fish left in the sea that you can eat. Nor is there any necessity to commit to eating only politically correct, right-on food. People who seriously suggest this are driven by ideological goals and you can’t assume that they have any inherent love for, or great understanding of, food. Similarly, it’s spirit-crushing and life-denying to sign up for an extremely limiting diet of 100 per cent healthy food. It’s only human, every now and then, to eat things you know aren’t that great, just because you like them.
It’s good to be a thoughtful eater, but if you are excessively ideological in choosing what you eat, it’s too easy to become neurotic and end up with a rapidly diminishing list of food you are prepared to eat. Instead, just try to head in the right general direction, but don’t make a fetish of it. Be led by the stomach as well as the head. Eating well can seem complicated, but, actually, it’s simple.
10 ways
to save money on
food without compromising
your principles
As your till receipts will testify, the cost of food has climbed alarmingly of late. And it looks as if higher food bills are here to stay, not just for years, but for decades. A series of global factors – climate change, a growing world population, shortage of oil, market speculation and a weak pound – are combining to drive up the price of food. The underlying trend is that food prices will continue to rise in real terms for the next 30 years. So we have moved into a period when food will become a much more significant item in the household budget.
It’s wearing having to worry constantly about the bottom line, but when money is tight there’s no need to abandon your ethical and progressive instincts and buy the cheapest (and potentially nastiest) food on offer, or fill up on stodge. Instead, look on rising prices as an opportunity to hone your ‘domestic economy’ skills – yet still eat well – by employing these strategies:
Waste nothing – use up every last bit of food you buy
Cut out waste by shopping as frequently as possible, and try to buy only what you need for the next couple of days. Never bin food that could have a further use. For instance, sour milk makes great pancakes and scones, old bread gets a new lease of life when made into breadcrumbs, salads and puddings. Eggs that are past their ‘use by’ date can be safely eaten in recipes where they will be well cooked, such as a cake or fritatta. Don’t throw away fat from meat or poultry roasts – use it for frying. Make old fruit into crumbles and compotes and tired vegetables into soups and purées. Save the leathery ends of Parmesan wedges to flavour soups and sauces.
Be super-suspicious of supermarket promotional offers
Three-for-two deals, buy-one-get-one-free, multisavers and more of that ilk need to be treated with deep scepticism. Their whole purpose is to get you to buy more food than you might otherwise do. With non-perishable foods, they might possibly represent a chance to stock up on products that you’ll get through in the fullness of time, although, if you’re controlling your weekly budget carefully, it might be better to buy only what you need, as and when you need it, rather than stockpiling potentially useful foods. But apparently good deals on fresh food rarely save you money. They not only coax more money than you had intended out of your pocket, they also encourage you to overbuy. Chances are that some of what you pick up will be wasted because it was more than you really needed. A promotional deal isn’t a bargain if it ends up in the bin.
Check out cheaper sources for foods you buy regularly
If you tend to shop for food on auto-pilot in the same place, compare prices in other outlets once in a while. For example, fruit and vegetables generally cost much less in greengrocers and markets than in supermarkets; certain products, like Parmesan, are often significantly cheaper in foreign discount chains; spices are much better value in Asian shops; nuts often cost less when bought in larger quantities in Chinese supermarkets; organic vegetables and eggs from a farmers’ market or box scheme may well be cheaper than the equivalent in supermarkets.
Stick with meat from free-range animals rather than switching to factory-farmed, but consider reducing the quantity you eat
In a typical stew or curry recipe, for instance, cut the quantity of meat specified by a half to a third, and make up the difference with vegetables or pulses. Bone up on how to cook cheaper, but delicious, cuts of meat such as beef shin, pork cheeks, neck of lamb and duck legs and make a little go a long way. Choose cuts of meat with some bone and fat. They may not look as neat and tidy, but they often have more flavour and richness than so-called ‘prime’ cuts, and cost much less.
Go for cheaper, less well-known types of fish
Forget the pricy premier league species like cod, tuna and halibut and concentrate on second division species like megrim, rockfish, coley, herring and mackerel. They taste good but sell for less largely because people are less familiar with them.
Cook more food from scratch and keep processed convenience foods to the bare minimum
Unless you’re prepared to live on bargain-basement, poor value, low grade processed food, then buying convenience foods, like ready meals, is an extremely expensive, not to mention unsatisfactory, way to eat. By doing most of your own cooking you will not only improve the flavour and freshness of what you eat, but also save a mint. Ready-prepared foods constitute rotten value for money. Most of what you’re paying for is packaging and marketing.
Take lunch to work
Buying your lunch from takeaways eats into your finances in an insidious way. A drink, a sandwich and a sweet bite easily clocks up £5 a day, usually for something that’s deeply inferior to what you’d make at home. For the price of a floppy sarnie filled with rubbery cheese, you could make an infinitely superior home-made one, using decent bread and your pick of the country’s finest artisan cheese. If it’s the planning that defeats you, just scale up what you cook the night before to make sure that there’s enough left for lunch the next day. Last night’s leftovers, however random and variable, often taste even better at lunchtime.
Drink tap water
Bottled water costs anything from 500–900 per cent more than tap. Quench your thirst with this and it’s as much of a drain on your financial resources as paying up a car loan, or signing up for a private club. Give up that pricy habit and you’ll feel flush in no time. If you don’t like the taste of tap water, drink it with ice and lemon, leave it to sit in the fridge so that the chlorine evaporates, use a jug filter, or make a one-off investment in a plumbed-in water filter.
Grow any food you can and make the most of cheap, seasonal, UK-grown produce
Even if it’s just a snipping of herbs from a pot on the window sill, or some cut-and-come-again salads grown in a container on the balcony, a bit of home-grown food can not only transform your meals, it can also save you a surprising amount of money. Buy fresh, UK-grown fruits and vegetables at the height of their season when they are cheapest, and at their nutritional peak.
Forage enthusiastically whenever you get the chance
Both in rural and urban settings, there is a free larder of interesting foods at your disposal. Sniff out wild garlic leaves in city parks in spring, pick blackberries from roadside thickets in late summer, and scour the woods for wild mushrooms in autumn. Get your revenge on the ground elder in your garden by eating it.


Asparagus
If ever there was a vegetable made for indulgence, it’s asparagus. It has the thrill of luxury – no other vegetable has that Cadillac alley, platinum status. There’s no need to get too fancy with asparagus or dream up inventive ways to cook it when the old favourites have such perennial charm.
Some European countries, such as France and Germany, favour blanched white asparagus with its characteristic violet shading and yellow tips, which is grown by mounding up earth around the emerging spears to protect them from light. This type of asparagus has a taste not unlike that of salsify. The British, in company with the Spanish, prefer their asparagus green and grown in full light that gives it a flavour rather like peas. Purple and red asparagus are also popular with keen gardeners. They tend to turn green when cooked, so are better used ultra-tender and fresh, thinly sliced in salads. All shades of asparagus taste special in their own way.
Asparagus ranges in size from the young, slender ‘sprue’ to the thicker ‘kitchen’ and jumbo grades that have a more developed flavour.
Asparagus is one of those vegetables, like corn on the cob, that deteriorates rapidly after cutting. The older asparagus is, the more it dries out and develops a bitter, tinny taste. Wizened, greying lower stalks of asparagus are a dead give-away. Tender fresh asparagus should have tight, firm tips and the stalk, when pressed lightly with your nail, should still feel moist and sappy within. If you put pressure on a spear it should ‘snap’ and look moist inside. It should never be pliable and woody. Fresh-cut British asparagus easily upstages the imported stuff that has come to us over long distances by road and sea or air. This is partly because it is fresher: from a taste point of view, jet-lagged imports from thousands of miles away just can’t compare. But there is also a school of thought that because it grows more slowly in our cooler climate, it develops a fuller flavour.
Things to do with asparagus
• You can’t put a foot wrong if you roast or griddle asparagus – rubbed in olive oil and cooked for just a matter of minutes, until tender – then anoint with good extra virgin olive oil and liberal shavings of Parmesan.
• One of the best and simplest dishes to celebrate asparagus is to dunk the lightly cooked spears into soft-boiled, freshly laid eggs, then dip the eggy spears into breadcrumbs fried in butter.
• If you have been feasting on a glut and have exhausted the familiar treatments, it might be time to go for a more gutsy approach and serve your asparagus with a salsa verde (see Things to do with herbs), punchy with anchovies and mint.
• Use thin sprue asparagus, lightly cooked, in a salad, with crispy lardons of bacon, soft-boiled egg and fried croutons.
• Thick and medium spears, simply steamed, deserve the effort of an hollandaise or beurre blanc sauce.
• A quick, weekday asparagus risotto feels like a weekend treat and is a good way to use cheaper, less regularly shaped spears and stems.
• Delicate pale green asparagus soup, made with stems and topped with a drizzle of cream and a couple of tender tips, is one of the classiest soups. You’ll want to sieve it if your stems are a bit woody.
Is asparagus good for me?
Asparagus is packed with beneficial micronutrients. It is rich in beta-carotene, which is needed for healthy skin and good vision; folate, which protects against birth defects; soluble fibre, which slows down the rate at which sugar is released into the bloodstream; and potassium, which helps moderate blood pressure. It is also one of the best sources of rutin, which, along with vitamin C, helps protect the body from infections. A mild diuretic (it makes you pee), it has been recommended traditionally for ailments associated with sluggish digestion and fluid retention. Don’t be alarmed if your urine has an unusually strong smell after eating asparagus; this is quite normal and harmless. Asparagus contains certain sulphur-based compounds and their breakdown products in digestion are thought to be responsible.
How is asparagus grown?
The plants or ‘crowns’ that produce asparagus spears take about three years to become established and longer still to become fully productive. They do best in a well-drained rich loam – the most prized type of agricultural land. Some growers cover the asparagus mounds with polythene to warm up the soil and encourage the spears to grow earlier. The delicate spears have to be harvested by hand; mechanization is out. White asparagus is particularly time-consuming to harvest because only the very tip of the spear peeps out from the soil, so it takes an experienced eye to spot it.
Although we eat some Spanish asparagus that precedes our native crop by a couple of weeks, most of the out-of-season asparagus we eat in Britain comes from Peru. Peru has cornered the world market for this vegetable because the US decided to subsidize its fledgling asparagus industry in order to encourage alternatives to the cultivation of coca, the raw material for cocaine. So Peru’s asparagus exports have grown rapidly over the past decade, but by several accounts the benefits have not filtered down to the asparagus workers or improved their lives. A number of charities have reported that asparagus workers operate in sub-standard conditions and poverty and that child malnutrition is increasing. In the arid Ica region where Peruvian asparagus production is concentrated, this thirsty export vegetable is also depleting the water resources on which local people depend.
Is asparagus a green choice?
The carbon ‘foodprint’ of air-freighted asparagus is very heavy indeed. It is not necessary to have such foods supplied from abroad and their air- freighting, shipping and trucking, with its energy-intensive, fuel-guzzling cold chain, is undeniably environmentally destructive. Binge on asparagus when the British crop is in season, then forget about it for the rest of the year.
Where and when should I buy asparagus?
Throughout mainland Europe, no vegetable stirs the same excitement as asparagus. Its appearance in mid-April on market stalls and on special restaurant tasting menus heralds the arrival of early summer. In the UK, our asparagus season is short and sweet, six to eight fresh, green, sappy weeks from the third week of April onwards, depending on the weather. Harvested after the ‘hungry gap’ of March and early April when British and Irish vegetable production is at its lowest ebb, asparagus provides a welcome splurge of fleeting, green vegetable after the sturdy roots and brassicas of winter months and before the tender salads of summer. British asparagus has become very sought after in recent years and there is more of it around as growers now increasingly see it as a worthwhile crop to cultivate.
THE MOST EAGERLY AWAITED SPRING FOOD
Before imported foreign spears became a fixture on supermarket shelves, asparagus, which had traditionally been an eagerly awaited spring food, most strongly associated with the Vale of Evesham, but also East Anglia and Cambridgeshire, was regarded as a gourmet food, rubbing shoulders with caviar, truffles and oysters. In 1931 an Asparagus Society was set up at Cambridge University’s Trinity Hall to savour the new season’s crop. The customary start date of the British asparagus season was 1 May.
Until the 1980s, most people’s experience of asparagus – unless they had the good fortune to live in one of our traditional asparagus-growing areas such as the Vale of Evesham – was tinned. Tinned or bottled asparagus is a far cry from fresh, but it is one of the more successful tinned vegetables. Then imported asparagus spears began to appear in swanky, fine-dining establishments. In recent years, however, asparagus has become a fixture in our restaurants, shops and supermarkets. No longer a precious, seasonal crop, a steady flow of air-freighted imported spears has made asparagus available all year round. Is this progress? Most definitely not. Familiarity breeds contempt. It’s hard to get worked up about the 365-day supply of jaded, imported asparagus, but the arrival of our fantastic native crop never fails to thrill.
Will asparagus break the bank?
You always pay quite a lot for good asparagus. Weight for weight, it can cost as much as meat or fish. But the compensation is that even a few spears can elevate a dish based on otherwise unremarkable ingredients and make it seem rather luxurious.
Never waste the bottom part of an asparagus spear. Once peeled, the tender inside can be chopped and added to soups, quiches, pastas and risottos. Thicker, less tender stems are good liquidized in soup along with cheaper green vegetables, such as leeks and peas.
Aubergine
There is something miraculous about the way that raw aubergine can be transformed from a bland, spongy vegetable, with a taste and texture about as interesting as blotting paper, into luscious, yielding flesh, impregnated with sultry flavours. To get the best from this languorous vegetable, observe two principles. First, aubergine eats lots of oil. Yes, it does go against the grain to keep on adding it, but if you are not prepared to give aubergine the oil it needs, then eat something else instead. Or at least don’t stint on the oil but then drain off any surplus after cooking. Second, water — and other liquid ingredients such as tomato pulp and wine — is a potential enemy of aubergine. If you add liquid before the aubergine has absorbed enough oil and softened thoroughly, then the skin will stay squeaky-tight and tough and the skin and flesh will remain firm in the mouth and won’t absorb as well the flavours of other ingredients.
Aubergine has a slightly bitter taste, which is part of its charm. This characteristic is most evident in recipes where you keep the skin on and slightly char it. It is often recommended that you slice or chop aubergine before cooking and leave it sprinkled with salt for half an hour or so to reduce this bitterness. Most of the aubergines we buy are not particularly bitter to start with, so this isn’t really necessary. However, salting does have the advantage of drawing out water from the aubergine, which is helpful because, as a result of the way they are grown, most aubergines we cook with in Britain and Ireland are more watery than those grown outdoors in hot countries. Salting also enhances the flavour (even if you rinse the salt off thoroughly) and firms up the flesh, which means that it absorbs less oil.
The aubergines on sale in Britain and Ireland tend to be much of a muchness. The dark purple, pear-drop-shaped aubergine of uniform size and dimensions rules the roost. Middle Eastern and Asian shops often sell more varied types, with different shapes, sizes and skin tones from white through violet to purple-black. These can have subtly different flavours, being more and less bitter, and a smoother texture when cooked. Whatever sort of aubergine you go for, choose fresh ones. These should look smooth-skinned and firm and feel heavy for their size.
Things to do with aubergine
• Using a ridged, cast-iron grill pan or under a grill, char whole aubergines until the skin is stiff and papery and the interior is completely soft. Skin, then finely chop or liquidize the flesh with light tahini (sesame) paste, garlic and a little olive oil to make a dish in the style of the Lebanese moutabal, or pan-Middle Eastern baba ganoush.
• In Sicilian caponata, aubergines provide an almost meaty bulk in a sour-sweet partnership with celery, tomatoes, capers and vinegar.
• Aubergines love lamb, and flatter it immensely, in a Greek moussaka perhaps, or by adding melting texture that thickens a curry.
• Aubergines hit it off well with Thai flavours, basking happily in a hot, fragrant coconut broth.
• For lighter, more unusual lamb meatballs, use half-and-half cooked, chopped aubergine and meat.
• Tomatoes and garlic are best friends with aubergines. Cook them together in olive oil over a very low heat for hours in a shallow frying pan without a lid until they collapse into a delicious sludge. A stick of cinnamon will nudge the dish in a Middle Eastern direction. Season with salt and pepper and serve warm as a vegetable accompaniment or at room temperature as a starter, with bread or crudités, or sprinkled with parsley and salty white cheese.
Are aubergines good for me?
Even though they don’t have the showy colours that we take as markers flagging up the healthiest vegetables, aubergines have much to commend them. They provide a lot of soluble fibre, which slows down the rate at which sugar is released into the bloodstream, are a good source of B vitamins, which aid brain and nervous system function, and folate, which helps prevent birth defects. Aubergines are particularly rich in useful minerals, especially potassium, manganese, copper and magnesium. Research into the aubergine suggests that it contains very beneficial phytochemicals, such as phenols and terpenes and sterols, which may help protect the body against cancer, microbial infections and viruses, and promote heart health.
How are aubergines grown?
Most of the aubergines we buy are grown either in the UK or Holland in glasshouses in the same way as peppers (see PEPPERs/How are peppers grown?).
Are aubergines a green choice?
Glasshouse production of aubergines raises the same issues as for tomatoes (see TOMATOES/Are tomatoes a green choice?).
Where and when should I buy aubergines?
Standard glasshouse aubergines are available all year round. Most come from Holland, some from Spain, and UK-grown ones are on sale from March until November. For more varied types of aubergine, check out Asian stores and supermarkets and Middle Eastern grocers. Italian food shops sometimes import outdoor-grown aubergines from Italy.
Will aubergines break the bank?
Aubergines aren’t an expensive purchase and can provide cheap bulk in many dishes. Their meaty fleshiness makes them a good, inexpensive vegetarian substitute for meat in lots of recipes. The hidden cost with any aubergine dish is the oil required to cook it.
Aubergines keep well when refrigerated. Older aubergines may begin to sag in their skins and have golden-brown patches that indicate that they are rotting. When you cut into them, their internal pips will look darker and more obvious. If you end up with aubergines like this, there is no need to chuck them out. Just cut off the bad bits and then use as normal.
Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and other brassicas
(Brussels sprouts, kale, cavolo nero, bok choy and pak choy, romanesco, kohlrabi, radishes, Chinese leaves, spring greens)
For decades, brassicas were greeted with indifference, or worse, and seen as the least sexy, most unappealing of all our vegetables. Now, in a welcome reversal of status, they have been rediscovered as some of the most chic, interesting and useful vegetables we have to hand. The whiff of overcooked, school dinner cabbage and waterlogged hotel cauliflower no longer hangs over the land. Inspired by foreign cuisines and a new guard of progressive chefs more focused on home-grown vegetables, we have learned new ways with brassicas, be they eaten raw, al dente or cooked to melting softness.
Vegetables in this family don’t show their age as much as lettuce, but with the exception of hard white and red cabbage, which store beautifully, they deteriorate surprisingly quickly, both in appearance and taste. So don’t see brassicas as something to keep in the fridge for future use; eat them as soon as you buy them. UK- or Ireland-grown brassicas will naturally be fresher than the imported (usually Spanish) equivalent.
In cabbage and Brussels sprouts look for good, firm hearts and perky, tight outer leaves. For cauliflower and its pale green relative, romanesco, a compact, hard head is a must. Avoid any that are bendy or yielding. Brassicas such as radishes and kohlrabi should feel hard to the touch. When buying leafy brassicas such as bok or pak choy, or cavolo nero (black cabbage), look for leaves that stand up to attention and are vibrantly green. Don’t buy any that are floppy or dull-looking. You can tell whether purple sprouting broccoli is fresh by testing it with your nail: it should sink into the stalk, which should not be woody or fibrous. You can also use the nail test for the more common chunky, dark green type of broccoli (calabrese). If your nail doesn’t sink in, but the florets are tight and firm, don’t discard it, simply pare off the hard exterior of the stalk with a knife until you come to a softer centre. Cut out the fibrous stalks from kale and use just the frilly green leaves.
When cooking brassicas, timing is critical. Cooking should be either short and sweet, or long and slow, as in cabbage soup, or braised red cabbage. Nothing in between will do. Over-boiled brassicas release sulphurous odours and turn to unappetizing mush. The best way to capture the fresh flavour of brassicas is to use as little water as possible. Either stir-fry, sauté or steam them, or use the half-boil/half-steam ‘conservative’ method. This involves putting the vegetables in a wide, shallow pot with only a little boiling water, so that they are not covered, and then cooking them briefly and furiously with the lid on.
Things to do with brassicas
• Peppery brassicas such as radishes and kohlrabi make excellent salads when shredded, or crudités when cut into batons. Along with hard types of cabbage, commonly eaten raw in coleslaw, they offer that attractive crunch.
• Nutty-tasting brassicas such as cauliflower and romanesco work in raw salads too, as long as they are broken down into tiny florets and generously anointed with a punchy dressing.
• Raw, shredded or torn, tender new inner leaves of cavolo nero and de-ribbed kale add vigour to a green salad.
• Cauliflower is good roasted. Blanch florets in boiling water for two minutes, slice thickly and roast with oil, ground or cracked coriander seed and sea salt.
• Kale and Chinese broccoli (kailan), in common with crisp, juicy pak and bok choy and other Chinese greens, are great steamed for a couple of minutes then finished off with soy sauce and a drop of sesame oil.
• Sauté stems of calabrese broccoli in a mixture of butter and oil, flavoured with chilli flakes and chopped anchovies in a lidded pan until soft, adding the florets two minutes before the end of cooking. You can do the same with purple-sprouting or tenderstem broccoli, but cook both stem and florets simultaneously.
• Cavolo nero lends dark green colour and adds its interesting iron-tinged flavour to hearty winter broths with root vegetables and pulses, such as Scotch broth and white bean soup.
• Thinly sliced Brussels sprouts make a less predictable winter gratin when baked in a white sauce with fried bacon lardons and chunks of blue cheese.
• Sauerkraut (sour, fermented cabbage), bought in a jar, can sharpen and jazz up otherwise plain meals involving cooked ham or sausage, along the lines of the celebrated Alsatian choucroute garni.
Are brassicas good for me?
Brassicas offer a truly impressive package of health benefits. The nutritional profile varies from one to the other. Red cabbage, for instance, has much higher vitamin C levels than white cabbage, but collectively these vegetables share many positive nutritional attributes.
They are loaded with vitamin C, which is protective against many diseases and supports the immune system; vitamin K, which is important for blood clotting and bone health; soluble fibre, which slows down the rate at which sugar is released into the bloodstream; and folate, which helps prevent birth defects. In addition to all this, brassicas contain a collection of useful minerals and phytochemicals, such as sulforaphane and indoles, which are thought to have a strong anti-cancer action, and have an anti-inflammatory effect, which is believed to help reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke.
If you want to lessen your exposure to pesticide residues, choose organic brassicas. If this isn’t an option, discard more of the outer leaves than you usually would as they are more likely to trap residues from spraying.
How are brassicas grown?
Brassicas are grown all over the UK and particularly thrive in coastal areas. Most production is centred on Lincolnshire, Cornwall, Lancashire, Kent and the east of Scotland. The robust, hardy brassicas – cabbage, cauliflower, romanesco, kale, broccoli and Brussels sprouts – are usually grown in open fields, although they can be started off in an open, unheated polytunnel then transplanted for an early crop. More tender, leafy brassicas, such as pak choy, are commonly grown in greenhouses or polytunnels. Some brassica growers specializing in indoor production are now using hydroponic methods, where the vegetables are grown, not in earth, but in a soil substitute and nourished with water and nutrients.
Are brassicas a green choice?
Since brassicas grow well in the UK, there is never any need to eat the imported sort. These come from further afield, using up lots of oil in transport, so they leave a heavier carbon ‘foodprint’ than home-grown. Most imported brassicas come from dryer countries such as Spain where water usage in crop production has put further pressure on already depleted water resources.
Brassicas are very susceptible to insects, pests and diseases, so unless they are organically grown, they are likely to have been given repeated pesticide treatments. These can pollute soil and water and have a negative impact on wildlife. Non-organic British brassica growers are trying to reduce their dependency on pesticides, not least because several products they relied on are being phased out or restricted by the European Union. They are using various techniques to minimize spraying as well as regular crop rotations (not growing the same crop in the same place for too long) to prevent any pest build-up in the soil. That said, many conventional brassica growers still use several controversial pesticides that most consumers would probably prefer were not used to grow their food.
Polytunnel and glasshouse production of brassicas can raise a number of environmental issues too (see TOMATOES/Are tomatoes a green choice?).
Where and when should I buy brassicas?
British-grown brassicas are either in season or available from store as below. If you see these vegetables at other times, they are likely to be either imported or grown in heated glasshouses.
Cabbage: all year
Cauliflower: all year, best in summer
Spring greens: March to June
Brussels sprouts: October to March
Broccoli (calabrese), romanesco: June to October
Purple sprouting broccoli: January to April
Chinese greens: March to December
Kale: September to March
Kohlrabi: July to February
Radishes: March to August
THE SMELL OF SCHOOL DINNERS
Although cabbage and cauliflower have long featured in the British diet, unlike other cultures, we rarely celebrate them. Indeed, many people have an antipathy to them. Koreans go mad for pickled fermented cabbage, kimchee. Eastern and central Europeans celebrate sauerkraut. Say cabbage or cauliflower to British people, and you are more likely to hear remarks about the sulphurous school dinner smell of over-boiled vegetables.
In recent years broccoli, which was rarely eaten in the UK until the 1980s, has become the country’s favourite brassica and a whole range of leafy vegetables once seen as oriental, and only available in Chinese supermarkets, is now being cultivated in the UK. As sales of these newer vegetables have boomed, production of the more traditional cabbages and cauliflower has declined. The area in the UK now planted with these crops has shrunk substantially, partly as a reflection of reduced demand, and also as a consequence of supermarkets paying growers unsustainably low prices for crops, which they then sell with a very healthy profit margin. This is a great pity, because, thoughtfully cooked, these are vegetables any nation should be proud of. Recently both cauliflower and cabbage (the latter often reinvented as ‘seasonal greens’) have earned the patronage of top chefs. Combined with the growing interest in local food, the fortunes of these two familiar vegetables may yet revive.
Will brassicas break the bank?
Since vegetables such as purple sprouting broccoli, spring greens and cavolo nero have become fashionable and calabrese has been hailed as a ‘superfood’, their price in supermarkets has increased noticeably. But in markets, farm shops and independent greengrocers, you can usually buy them for less, with a price tag that more accurately reflects the current wholesale price.
Probably because fewer people can think of something to do with them, radishes, kale and kohlrabi are notably cheap, so they are particularly good buys.
Hard white and red cabbages keep really well in the fridge, so ignore use-by dates that suggest otherwise. Although other brassicas are best eaten nice and fresh, there are ways to rescue those that haven’t yet started to yellow, but are nevertheless past their prime. You can strip off and discard the floppier outer leaves of loose-headed cabbages and sprouts and use just the heart. Few people will notice that cauliflower isn’t as fresh as it might be when it’s cooked in a curry. Cut out any hard ribs and stems on brassicas that are green and leafy, such as spring greens and kale, wilt them in salted, boiling water, then drain them and dress with olive (or nut) oil and lemon juice or a splash of vinegar, in the style of that Greek staple, horta vrasta.

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