Swallow This Read Free Page B

own grain and mill it into flour; although I know some inspiring people who do, and very much admire their commitment. I am a purchaser of bread, not a baker. I might, in a flush of enthusiasm for a new recipe, make some egg pasta from scratch, but usually, I’ll buy it in a packet. I don’t lie awake at night worrying about what effect canning might have on my anchovies or pilchards. I often grind my spices for a special dish because they are fresher and more aromatic that way, but pre-ground spices also sit usefully in my larder alongside other processed foods such as tomato paste, soy sauce, sesame oil, rosewater, olives, gherkins, oatcakes, mustard. When my mother no longer has any of her homemade marmalade or jam to give me, I’ll gladly buy some. My salads contain seeds that have been sprouted by someone other than me. Although I am intellectually enthused by the fashion for fermentation, I remain a more likely candidate for buying sauerkraut than making it. While I fully appreciate that it is possible to cure your own bacon, I’m just too lazy to try it.
    In short, I have absolutely no intention of becoming a food neurotic, or living in splendid isolation as a Trappist monk. Like most of us, I am not always in control of what I eat, so I have to settle for the best option in the circumstances. Sometimes, I might be organised enough to bring my own food on a long journey, knowing that in quality terms, it will be streets ahead of anything I can buy, not to mention cheaper. But other times I still have to pick up lunch from a takeaway, trust my local delicatessen to make a reasonable quiche or sandwich, or politely eat a meal that I would never choose. I am also a restaurant critic, reviewing everything from chains to fine dining establishments on a weekly basis. Doing this job would be impossible if I was a purist, someone who took the attitude that my body is a temple that can never be sullied by processed food in any shape or form. I do not beat myself up if I can’t meet my highest aspirations for eating good food on a daily basis. I am a pragmatist. Food is my love, not my enemy. I will not allow my professional knowledge of how it is produced to spoil my appetite for it.
    Yet what I choose to eat and drink starts from the over-arching principle that natural ingredients in their least processed forms have an inbuilt, effortless integrity that make them the best basis for a body and soul-sustaining life. Natural foods are brilliantly conceived and intricate little packages wherein every nutrient works in a companionable ‘one for all, and all for one’ synergy. When we prepare and eat natural foods, their wise completeness translates into palpable health benefits. Nutritionally speaking, the whole apple does much more for us than the apple juice, or the apple crumble, or the apple and oat breakfast bar, or the apple-flavoured gum, and it’s hard to overeat whole apples. Manufactured foods, by contrast, are put together by people who, although indisputably smart and capable, do not have Nature’s all-embracing, all-seeing intelligence. This is why so many of the products manufacturers create share the capacity to shorten our lifespans.
    I honestly didn’t set out to put you off eating anything that comes in a bottle, jar, packet, tin, tube, carton or polystyrene container, but when you read about certain practices and procedures used to make some of our most popular foods, this might somewhat dull your appetite for a few products. My message is not the comfortable one that the UK Department of Health wants to convey with its ‘eatwell plate’, which conspicuously promotes many popular processed foods and drinks – sweets, biscuits, cake, cornflakes, baked beans, flavoured yoghurts, sliced white bread, even a can of cola, and crisps – as part of a ‘balanced diet’. Nor are the sentiments that run through this book in tune with the ‘Don’t Cook, Just Eat!’ campaign so loudly promoted by purveyors