Eat like your Grandad - a new health trend!

Or, forget Mediteranean, Japanese or Nordic food cultures, our traditional English food culture was as healthy as the rest. Hyperbole? Sure. But hear me out.

Hey, hey, hey, listen up. We’re sitting on a gold mine of good eating yet we’ve turned our backs on it. Old-fashioned British food has the makings of a very very healthy diet, we just don’t realise it. Or we forgot. Or we don’t know what we’re looking for. Boomers and globalisation and microwaves and ready meals and climate change and sustainability and supermarkets and a restaurant scene fit to bursting and wellness gurus and everything else we’re bombarded with, have led us away from good old English food, (which was stodgy, unhealthy and boring and not worth the trouble, right?) and delivered us at the threshold of a foodie Valhalla. Right?

Wrong.

For reasons irrelevant to this particular train of thought I’ve been trying to eat more iron. Whilst researching how to achieve that I’ve been subjected to reams of drivel on diet and nutrition. Or so I thought.

In his book, referenced a few weeks ago here, Michael Pollen writes, “People who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than those of us eating a modern Western diet…” so far so mundane, before he adds, “ Any traditional diet will do.” Any diet? Pollan clarifies, “Pay attention, too, to the combination of foods in traditional cultures: in Latin America, corn is traditionally cooked with lime and eaten with beans; what would otherwise be a nutritionally deficient staple becomes the basis of a healthy balanced diet. (The beans supply amino acids lacking in corn, and the lime makes niacin available [niacin is good, and part of a badass triumvirate of treats available in Marmite, more on that later].) Cultures that took corn from Latin America without the beans of the lime wound up with serious nutritional deficiencies…” See swathes of the American diet, perhaps?

In this vein, science has also confirmed that “eating tomatoes with olive oil is good for you because the lycopene in the tomatoes is soluble in oil, making it easier for your body to absorb.” Inherent in this scientific proof is the fact that eating tomatoes with olive oil is better for you than eating them alone. Lycopene “is a powerful antioxidant with many health benefits, including sun protection, improved heart health and a lower risk of certain types of cancer,” so better absorbing it every time you eat a tomato (or other red fruit such as watermelon, grapefruit, mango, persimmon and papaya, or things like red cabbage and asparagus too.)

When all of the above is combined with Pollan’s advice to have a glass (or two, but never three) of red wine with dinner, the evidence of its positivity being irrefutable scientifically or anecdotally, one starts to see that listening to tradition, wisdom and old wives tales woven into cooks and kitchens across generations is pretty good science too.

Here’s where my personal voyage of discovery started. Iron occurs in two forms in the food we eat, technically known as heme and non-heme, the stuff that comes from meat and fish is relatively easily absorbed into our bloodstream, and the stuff from cereals, rice, oats, dark leafy veg, dried fruits and beans or lentils is less easily absorbed unless you combine it with some heme iron, or with some vitamin C and/or beta-carotene. This all starts to sound overwhelming, scientific and uninspiring after a while. Enough almost to put one off their dinner.

That is until you realise the dinner this opens up for you. My father is an only child. His childhood diet leant towards pampered, opulent and faintly ridiculous. Each night he was served a starter of smoked fish on brown bread or melon and prosciutto, followed by steak or fish served with spinach and carrots, or something equally plain. His parents, my grandparents, ate a boiled egg, omelette or poached egg on brown toast almost every morning, often with grapefruit or a fruit salad alongside. In fact, omelettes with spinach were pressed into service at all times of the day. Most Sunday nights Engish muffins, crumpets or again brown bread were topped with marmite and cheese and popped under the grill for supper. Marmite or Bovril in hot water was a catch-all as a restorative. Kippers and mackerel and prawns and smoked salmon were present lots of the time, always with a round of buttered brown bread and a wedge of lemon. Fruit salads of peeled grapes, citrus segments, melon balls and peeled apples followed meals more often than not. A bottle of wine was opened for most evening meals, although my grandparents barely ever drank more than a glass. In winter months. pies and stews, or more likely actually stews which then became pies a day or two later, always tended to include some organ or offal as part of the bargain, kidneys and liver the two most commonly insinuated into the mix. Of course, relaying this jumbled menu now many of the constituent parts sound old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy. And convincing a kid to eat the grapefruit or the stinky smoked fish or the boring greens or the soft carrots or the little hidden lurkers of liver and kidney that would inspire a puckered ‘yuk’ and be spat out in disgust; all of that is a nuisance. So my parents barely bothered with the prescribed traditional menu, not in its complete design anyway. Ready brek and cocoa pops and pop tarts and sliced ham and Babybels and boxes of raisins and pies made from tins of soup poured over bits of unchallenging meat, were all much more of an easy sell. My family were not alone. Eating in friends’ houses over the years the food was almost exactly the same. Save for special occasions, we rarely had to contend with the traditional business above.

Much like Pollan’s example above though of corn, beans and lime, the traditional English foods we were served were often without the constituent part that might make them the healthy choice they had been for my grandparents. Steak pie without kidneys and served with mashed potato and boiled veg that was pushed to the side of the plate and ignored, is an easier sell to a child, but does not round out the meal in the way that our ancestors instinctively knew was beneficial. Swapping out brown bread because no one ate it and it went mouldy in the bread bin meant that any omelettes or boiled eggs or smoked salmon sandwiches we did eat didn’t have the crucial magnesium present in brown or seeded bread to help metabolise the vitamin D in the oily fish or egg yolks. Similarly, serving fish pie with sweet little peas instead of the dark leafy spinach of my grandparents means the benefits of the fish are not so readily felt.

We have the whole world to draw on for culinary inspiration nowadays, so the quaint and limited diet of my grandparents perhaps offers less appeal than it did then. And yet it does start to make more sense when the nutritional benefits of its food combinations are seen in a new light.

As I touched on earlier this year, in ‘A new manifesto for Breakfast’, eggs, oily fish and some citrus or at least fresh fruit (rather than juice) is a better way to start the day (nutritionally and mentally) than most breakfasts we’ve been talked into by modern food media. Restoring an almost Italianate simplicity to bigger meals would benefit us hugely too. A piece of simply treated meat or fish served alongside steamed or wilted greens and a good squeeze of lemon could be Greek or French or Italian and be celebrated for its restraint and simplicity, but I saw it served a few times a week in my grandparents suburban Surrey and that version deserves recognition too. I would hazard that our consumption of prepared fresh fruit has diminished in direct correlation with the increase in production and consumption of very bloody delicious baked goods and pastries from coffee shops, supermarkets and independent bakeries on every well-to-do high street. I don’t necessarily want to reduce my consumption of flaky, buttery, pimped, preened, glazed, and stuffed pastries, but I might have to in the context of my grandad’s diet. He ate a lot of prunes and apricots with yoghurt and honey, another sound combination of flavour and nutritional sense, so I might just have to reduce my consumption of almonds croissants and reintroduce a little more of that.

But hey-ho, we take the roughage with the smooth.

And anyway, as Michael Pollan is quick to point out, it is crucial to ‘Break the rules every once in a while.’ Our body thanks us for that too.