Today's challenge - clean cuisine

“All of these diets have a kernel of truth that is spun out into some bigger fantasy, hence their huge appeal." Giles Yeo

And doesn't that bowl of soup look tempting? And clean.

Today is my Friday special meal for David who gave me the challenge of Clean Cuisine. Which I have to say is a topic I have been meaning to address for a while. But it rapidly became apparent that he didn't really mean what I understood as clean cuisine. What he really meant was just healthy food - Mediterranean diet - was one phrase he offered.

So I started out thinking, that I would look for some meat that was free-range or organic or something and add some of those trendy, healthy vegetables - some kale perhaps, and maybe some grain like barley or couscous, and maybe some kind of beans. For this was sort of my understanding of what clean meant. Chicken or fish were the obvious choices but he didn't want fish and we had chicken yesterday. I looked in my AEG steam oven cookbook thinking I might find something steamed - steamed food is 'clean' is it not?

In the supermarket I found some organic free range pork sausages that were on a special, and some beef brisket that was animal welfare credited, telling myself I would decide between them when I had perused my recipe books. But then David started going on about no fat, no sugar, so I decided to put the sausages in the freezer for another day - a casserole with beans perhaps. I do confess also that I just couldn't bring myself to pay for the truly organic beef on offer - at around $46 a kilo if I remember rightly. For as I have said many times before - organic and clean is for the wealthy.

"Among the affluent classes who already ate a healthier-than-average diet, the Instagram goddesses created a new model of dietary perfection to aim for. For the rest of the population, however, it simply placed the ideal of healthy food ever further out of reach. Behind the shiny covers of the clean-eating books, there is a harsh form of economic exclusion that says that someone who can’t afford wheatgrass or spirulina can never be truly “well”. Bee Wilson - The Guardian

I also discovered in the supermarket that Coles no longer seem to have an organic section in their fresh fruit and vegetables section. Which is interesting. So i shall just have to make do with what I have - no doubt contaminated by fertilisers and chemicals at some point in their production. But hey - they're vegetables and therefore good. To be fair to Coles, I may not have been looking properly. And I'm pretty sure Woolworths does have an organic section.

When I got home I thought I would try and find something in one of Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall's books. He's into home-grown, healthy and organic after all. He did have some tempting looking recipes but not for anything I had to hand. I was tempted by the roast brisket, but thought that David would consider this too fatty. Fearnley-Whittingstall does not mind a goodly bit of fat - indeed with respect to the roast brisket he exhorts you to keep the fat on the meat to give extra flavour and juiciness.

Jamie's Dinners was my next port of call. This is the book that was produced off the back of his attempt to get the British government to provide better, healthier school lunches after all. And there is a rather tempting recipe for a beef stew - which I think, all things considered, is what I shall use. I still wasn't convinced though and decided as a last attempt to look at my 'Mediterranean' books from Richard Olney, Claudia Roden and Elizabeth David which resulted on me pondering on Stiphado. But I've made that before, so I think I shall go for Jamie and his Andy the Gasman's stew.

It's a long way from 'clean cuisine' though. So what is clean cuisine? Well I am actually going to refer you to a long and excellent article from Bee Wilson in The Guardian called Why We Fell for Clean Eating. Do read it - it is very comprehensive, well written, well researched and very readable. I'll just pick out a few things from it.

"At first, clean eating sounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you would eat as many nutritious home-cooked substances as possible." Bee Wilson

indeed. As the picture suggests, isn't this what all we health conscious people would do anyway.? As the picture at left shows - a simple summary of healthy, responsible attitudes to food.

But it quickly became clear that “clean eating” was more than a diet; it was a belief system, which propagated the idea that the way most people eat is not simply fattening, but impure. Seemingly out of nowhere, a whole universe of coconut oil, dubious promises and spiralised courgettes has emerged. Bee Wilson - The Guardian

I suppose the theme of the Guardian article is that the Clean Food movement is actually potentially dangerous and I also suppose that it could therefore be said to be biased. If you want to read the alternative view, then go to any of the clean food gurus - the Hemsley Sisters and Ella Mills. are good places to start. Nigella by the way is enraged by it all, asking how dare they say that food was dirty. But it's a very powerful movement. One alarming statistic I saw in the article was that out of the top 20 food books on Amazon 18 of them were related to clean food. And I can sort of understand that. If you peruse the cookbook shelves in any bookshop these days, at least half of them, it seems to me, fall into this category. And then there's all those coconut products and weird things in the milk, yoghurt and drinks aisles, not to mention the aisles of gluten free stuff.

“Clean eating” was different, because it established itself as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating, and its wild popularity over the past five years has enabled it to move far beyond the fringes. Powered by social media, it has been more absolutist in its claims and more popular in its reach than any previous school of modern nutrition advice. Bee Wilson - The Guardian

Instagram, it seems, is the true culprit here. I really must do something on Instagram some day. And take note - the gurus are all shapely young women - mostly blonde.

So take the kernel of truth - eat as healthily as you can afford - low sugar, low fat, lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, with some meat and fish and you will be OK. That's what I think anyway. So David is getting a Jamie beef stew filled with animal welfare beef and as many vegetables as I can muster - even though I don't really know where they come from.

“The poison comes from the fact that they are wrapping the whole thing up in pseudoscience, If you base something on falsehoods, it empowers people to take extreme actions, and this is where the harm begins.” Giles Yeo