Scientists have recently published comprehensive research evidence that if you want to lose weight you should avoid a diet of ultra-processed food and focus on eating a diet based on cooking raw ingredients including plenty of fruit and vegetables.
Nature vs the lobbyists (and the mafia)
Which basically means they have proved what common sense has always told us. It is better for you to eat a diet that most closely resembles the food humans evolved to gather from the wild and it isn’t great for you to eat products made in a factory containing a variety of preservative and colouring chemicals, plastic particles, lots of sugar and high quantities of salt.
The fact that the study seems to have been based on a large sample and conducted with great care ought to result in it being treated with respect and being used as a basis for the development of government policies on food health. These days it guarantees instead that the results will be challenged by powerful and well-funded lobbyists who want us to believe that it is fine for us to carry on consuming excessive quantities of ready meals and mass produced takeaways.
It is not so very long since it was revealed that many supermarket chains didn’t even know whether the content of some of the products they made was horse meat or not. The sources of much of the food on their shelves can be so obscure and moved so frequently between suppliers that it is exceptionally hard to trace where it originates. Almost anything can and has found its way in there. Including contaminated meat relabelled by criminal gangs.
Mango vs gooseberry: the need for better food education
It would, however, be wrong to place all the blame for our nation’s excessive consumption of processed food on the manufacturers who have pushed it our way at the expense of our weight and health in order to make a profit. Some of it also lies with our education system.
There is a worrying lack of knowledge amongst many people in Britain about where food comes from, how it is produced, how it can be cooked, what it should taste like and how to live in line with what is seasonal. You are more likely to find a mango in the fruit aisle of your supermarket than a gooseberry grown down the road and it can even be the case that there is a glut of local apples lying on the ground and ripe blackberries in the hedgerow whilst supermarkets are selling imported apples grown using huge quantities of irrigation water.
Few secondary schools teach domestic science to all of their students and those that do risk slipping down the league tables because their students might not have learned to regurgitate the right statements in their exams but would know how to cook a cauliflower.
One of the few good things that the outgoing Conservative government did before they left office was to agree to agree to introduce a natural history GCSE to help connect young people to the environment in which they live. The idea was initially blocked by the incoming government before going ahead only after a storm of protest.
Bankrupt councils vs our allotments
Now there are signs that a much longer-standing means of connecting people with nature and with food production is at risk. Angela Rayner has announced that she thinks it is fine for councils to sell off allotments and get rid of public gardens if they are standing in the way of developments such as new housing estates.
The allotment movement started in this country over a hundred years ago and has proved its value during two world wars. It is based on the simple idea that if you give someone living in an urban community the chance to grow some fruit, a few vegetables and perhaps raise a chicken or two then they will become fitter, eat better and reduce the nation’s dependency on imported food.
Over the years it has proved an incredibly popular idea and millions of people have gained great pleasure out of learning how to grow their own food. My own allotment gives me remarkable quantities of fruit and provides a home for my bee hives that help pollinate local crops, trees and flowers and produce fantastic honey.
Food security IS national security
During both world wars the value of the allotment movement became particularly clear. When the nation found its external sources of food supply under threat or completely closed off it became invaluable to have an army of people in each locality who knew something about how to dig for victory. As climate change and political instability creates increasing threats to our food supply, we would do well to learn that lesson.
We’ve heard a lot of claims lately that we need to spend billions on our military security. That security is non-existent if we can’t feed the population. Food security is absolutely centre stage in any effort to protect our nation, yet the current government seems happy to sacrifice it to get a few extra houses built.
So please Angela rethink and reprioritise. No nation is so desperately in need of growth that it needs to sacrifice its food security to achieve it. No politician should be so desperately short of ideas on how to achieve growth that they are prepared to sacrifice a healthy activity like allotment keeping. We need to be strengthening the connection between what we eat and what is grown, not weakening it.
Or are we content to go even further down the road of injecting the population with weight loss drugs in order to deal with the consequences of being encouraged to eat too much ultra processed food?
