The other summer food news that won’t go away seems to have been around the perils of so-called wellness/clean diets.
Finding reasons not to eat things is catching and it seems as though it can be at your peril – especially as many of those reasons are later shown to be spurious. I’d worry about my wife but fortunately she only gives up about two things at a time and they change every couple of days so she ends up eating most things I eat – just on a different schedule.
The danger is that you end up having to eat a lot of a little when I’ve always been a believer in a little of a lot. Spreading your bets has always seemed like a good insurance policy.
Gluten free is the classic case; removing coeliacs from the equation, yes we definitely eat too much gluten, far more than we did fifty years ago, so why don’t we eat a bit less rather than cut it out altogether?
If you’re a Paltrow, Beckham or Djokovic you probably have a chef who will make sure that your bread is substituted for something beneficial like kelp pot noodles… But most of us will make as close to like-for-like substitutions as we can find, and these will almost certainly be highly processed and high in some of the not particularly nice things such as industrial fats and sweeteners.
Veganism is another case in point. If someone has a genuine abhorrence of all forms of livestock farming then foregoing all animal products is a perfectly logical option.
But, since Cowspiracy there’s been more than a hint of messiah complex and it seems to have turned into a bit of a stampede.
You could argue, as with organics, that going the whole hog will nudge the masses in the right direction but it’s an emotive subject. For the end user, going vegan isn’t to be taken lightly but making agriculture animal-free is massive and will need a lot of planning, especially if we’re also trying to depend less on the carbon heavy, Haber-Bosch process of producing nitrogen fertiliser.
So I guess what I’m saying is we’re all heading in that direction. I’d like to eat less wheat (because it’s not very good rather than because it’s particularly bad) and meat, as anything other than a sort of umani seasoning is becoming an infrequent visitor chez Ben’s. It might be that the process is being hastened by the gluten free, vegan hashtag kids on the block but I doubt it – and I doubt whether I’m the only one. It’s a fine line because there’s a bit of Trump contraryism in all of us that’s probably best kept hidden.
So, when it finally materialises, a little of a lot rather than a lot of a little will have its place in the BFS Mission Statement.