What foods should fill your plate

When deciding what to buy and eat, it’s important to be aware of how your food is produced. There is an abundance of foods we can eat. In fact, over 30,000 edible plants. But, thanks to our current food systems and a lack of diversity in our diets, 60% of our global calorie intake comes from rice, white flour and maize. Add sugar and soy, and that total is 75%.

There are fruits and vegetables which thrive and grow easily and cheaply in UK soil, but we just don’t eat enough of them. For instance, squashes are an enormously diverse and delicious crop, but most of us are only familiar with the butternut.

Woven into the fabric of what we eat there are many things that, day-to-day, we might not consider – from slave labour to cartels, deforestation and loss of wildlife to an impact on biodiversity and GM foods. When you look into the environmental impact of some of the food we eat, the picture is really complicated and a little overwhelming.

We are living in the age of convenience, both in terms of buying pre-prepared foods that we fancy at any time we like, but also homogeneity, that is, breeding only the strongest crops, and losing the biodiversity that is so crucial to the health of the planet. We are making our everyday lives easier but steadily destroying the planet.

Our reliance on a limited number of ‘staples’ came into sharp focus during the coronavirus pandemic when pasta, flour, eggs and other basics were in short supply. My hope is that this crisis allowed us all to be a little more

open and flexible in how we eat – if we ever needed an example of the urgent need for us to diversify the food we eat this was it. According to Bee Wilson, in the western world particularly, we have access to more foodstuffs than ever before ‘of a freshness and variety our grandparents could not have imagined’ (The Way We Eat Now,

page 19). Especially in our cities, many foods once considered exotic are now easily available and often affordable too: from asparagus tips in winter to ready-cut mango and strawberries in December. Though many of us might want to eat a peach in January, it is not going to taste as good or be affordable. Buying ingredients at their peak moment in season means their environmental impact is lowest too.

We have also become very trend-led when it comes to how we eat. When a food becomes a trend, supply pressure increases, and production processes become focused on money, speed and quantity rather than sustainability or ethics. Avocados are an obvious example. According to US website Eater, the price of a wholesale box of Mexican avocados was $84.25 in the summer of 2019, compared to $37 around the same time in the previous year. Avocados have helped to pull people out of poverty in Mexico, but have also been linked to cartels.

The ‘superfood’ quinoa is a less clear but much-publicised example of a food fad. When sourced in Peru or Bolivia, our love for this little seed – which is gluten-free, protein-rich, low in carbohydrate and contains all nine essential amino acids – was widely reported to have stripped local people of their everyday nutritious staple, but it also helped farmers grow their businesses and support their families. So, as with most things in the world of sustainability, nothing is simple.

So what foods should we fill our plate with? If we know that following trends and mass mono-cropping is, for the most part, damaging to the planet, then we need to be doing the opposite – thinking about simple, locally-grown wholefoods that are good for our bodies and treating anything imported as a treat. If you eat dairy, then buying organic and using it in small quantities as creamy, tangy or rich accents to balance or accentuate other ingredients is a good way of working. The same goes for anything imported that we use in small quantities but can make a huge difference to taste – soy sauce, harissa, preserved lemons, etc.

Variety and creativity are key to this mindset. I recommend investigating veg box schemes, as they easily tick some of these boxes and aren’t necessarily unaffordable (if veg boxes are out of the question try your supermarket and look for local or wonky veg). There are many great veg box schemes that support farmers and sustainable agriculture. It might seem daunting to be presented with unusual fruits or vegetables, especially if they appear week after week, but hopefully some of the recipes in this book will help to give you the inspiration and confidence to embrace unfamiliar ingredients.

The UK is also proving to be the ideal climate to explore growing ingredients such as quinoa more sustainably and ethically. UK growers and suppliers are doing brilliant things to make non-native foods available to us in more sustainable ways.