Cooking from scratch using inexpensive but healthy ingredients can help us cope with life’s ever-growing challenges, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tells Annabel Ross
Who can resist a pig? I find them almost impossible to ignore – their beautiful colouring and markings, floppy ears, curly tails and nonchalant attitude. Food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recently introduced me to the four ginger-coloured Tamworth sisters he keeps at River Cottage HQ in Devon and I could have stayed with them for hours, attempting to befriend them from a safe distance.
“The first two pigs I ever kept, about 20 years ago, I made the mistake of naming after two friends of mine, Tom and Charlie. It didn’t make it any easier when their time finally came,” says Hugh. “But, we are a working farm, we’re not a petting zoo, and the animals we raise here end up in our kitchen. While they are here we want to look after them and we want to make sure they have a really nice time, and then we can feel good about what we do with them when they are no longer pigs but pork.”
“A third of the food we produce is rejected before it even gets to the supermarket shelves”
WAR ON WASTE
While many of us will enjoy bacon and sausages without much thought about what happens to the rest of the pig, at River Cottage they make use of the entire animal, from nose to tail.
Hugh doesn’t like waste. In his War on Waste campaign, documented by the BBC, he tells us just how much food is unnecessarily wasted in this country, starting with the crazy statistic that a third of all the food we produce never even makes it to the store shelves. Why is it wasted? Because the bizarrely named ‘wonky’ or ‘ugly’ produce is rejected by supermarkets on a massive scale before consumers even see it. Then, more food is wasted when we throw it in the bin – it’s estimated that UK households waste 6.6 million tonnes a year, which is 16% of the food we buy. All this while food banks are experiencing a surge in demand.
Rejecting ‘wonky’ produce seems especially crazy if you consider plant hormesis – this is when stress on a plant produces beneficial results. Bristol-based nutritional therapist Sarah Bayliss explains: “What we know from nature is that if plants have to work harder to survive, because of their stressful environment, they have had to build greater defences. And if they are building greater defences and creating more antioxidants that we then feed on, then in fact, the ‘uglier’ ones may be better for us. Put simply, these plants’ phytochemicals help make us more resilient.” Sarah says choosing scarred and scabbed fruit and vegetables over their perfect cousins can help us build up our bodies’ defences.
RETURN TO WHOLEFOODS
Processed foods and takeaways are also changing our relationship with flavour, explains Sarah. “Because our food has lost a lot of its flavour in the industrialised growing process, the food industry manipulates our food to put flavour back in by using preservatives, colourings, sugar and chemicals to recreate this flavour, and so we’re losing this connection between flavour and nutrition.”
Fibre has also been removed from many processed foods, adds Sarah. “This is a problem because you now have added sugar along with refined carbohydrates – such as white flour, white rice, white sugar – and it was the fibre from the wholemeal foods that protected us from glucose reaching our bloodstream too quickly, causing insulin spikes, driving weight gain, poor mood, cravings, low energy and eventually leading to diabetes and heart disease.”
Does all of this mean that we have lost our connection with food? Would it make a difference if we all learnt to cook with confidence? “I think that’s a question we need to keep trying to answer,” says Hugh, “because if people can cook healthy food from inexpensive ingredients that they love eating then that gives them a kind of resilience in the face of whatever else life throws at us, and the world is really tough right now. If you can understand what healthy food is, what it looks like, what it’s made of, then you’re going to have at least some resilience at this really challenging time. Our first line of defence is eating good food to keep us well.”
UPSKILLING IN THE KITCHEN
Bristol’s Square Food Foundation is one of many charities around the country offering cooking lessons to everyone and anyone, from kids to caregivers to great-grandparents. It aims to “reduce hunger, improve health and bring people together through food and cooking”. During lockdown, the charity filmed simple cooking videos to reach out to its community. Today, it delivers 300 packages a week, with fresh ingredients and recipe cards, to local families.
“The anxiety around food insecurity is making people think differently,” says Square Food Foundation founder and cookery teacher Barny Haughton. “The conversations going on at Square Food Foundation are really different to the ones that were going on five or 10 years ago. The resilience is coming from within local communities, they are taking action and learning for themselves,” he adds. “Highly processed food is weakening our immune systems and then we have a debilitated health service, creating the opposite of resilience. Cooking schools around the country are getting the same message from their students: we love this, this is helping us, this is making my life easier and better. They’re learning new skills, they’re enjoying themselves and they’re proud.”
Hugh’s latest recipe book, River Cottage Good Comfort: Best-Loved Favourites Made Better For You, focuses on replacing less healthy ingredients with ones that are better for us. “It’s comfort food but with the goodness dialled up just a little bit,” Hugh explains.
“I’ve found that by tweaking the recipes with a little bit of extra veg or using more wholegrains, many of them become more delicious. Dialling down the sugar in puddings and treats often makes them much tastier and I’m beginning to think that for a long time we’ve been tolerating sugar in sweet things rather than enjoying it. There’s this assumption that we all want a massive hit of sugar every time we want a biscuit or a slice of cake. Take our Victoria sandwich; we used half the sugar, switched to wholemeal flour, added some dried apricots and you’ve got a great-tasting cake.” If we want a diet that is healthier and less wasteful, we would be a lot better off cooking for ourselves more regularly. I’m going to start with what Hugh says is the easiest recipe in the book, his oaty dunking cookies – you’ve got to start somewhere!
Join Hugh at River Cottage in our recent Plodcast, episode 167. countryfile.com/podcast
Watch!
For more on healthy lifestyles, watch Easy Ways to Live Well with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Steph McGovern, available on iPlayer
River Cottage Good Comfort by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, with photography by Simon de Courcy Wheeler (Bloomsbury, £27) is out now.