'Dirty Food'.. What's all that about then?

What exactly is “Clean Food”?

Apparently we now buy more avocados than oranges from the large supermarkets. When did that happen? Maybe it was the introduction of the so called ‘5 a day’, which as it turns out should now be eight portions of fresh fruit and veg a day.  Or it could be the huge popularity of food blenders now creating a drink from anything you happen to have in the fridge or vegetable basket. 

One of the reasons could be something to do with food diet fads. The latest one claiming that a “Clean Food” diet is the way to go. Just when did food become dirty? It’s hard to keep up.

There was a very interesting article in a national newspaper (The Guardian) recently that debunked most of the new diets and especially the “Clean Eating Diet” 

At its simplest, clean eating is about ingesting nothing but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods (whatever is meant by these deeply ambiguous terms). Some versions of clean eating have been vegan, while others include various meats (preferably wild) and something mysteriously called “bone broth” (stock, to you and me). At first, clean eating sounded modest and even homespun: rather than counting calories, you would eat as many nutritious home-cooked substances as possible.

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. Some producers are now taking the word “clean” from their labels. 

It looks as though a lot of eating is done, not to be healthy, but to avoid getting sick. Chef Nigella Lawson she expressed “disgust” at clean eating as a judgmental form of body fascism. “Food is not dirty”, Lawson wrote. 

Families who would once have eaten potato waffles are now experimenting with lower carb butternut “squaffles” (slices of butternut squash cut to resemble a waffle)

This isn’t a new phenomenon. In the 1850s, a chemist called Arthur Hill Hassall found out that the whole food supply of London was riddled with toxins and fakery. Hassall found that much of what was for sale as food and drink was not what it seemed: “coffee” made from burnt sugar and chicory; pickles dyed green with poisonous copper colourings. In 1881, he set up his own firm, The Pure Food Company, which would only use ingredients of unimpeachable quality. The Pure Food Company of 1881 sounds just like a hundred wellness food businesses today – except for the fact that it collapsed within a year due to lack of sales (social media wasn’t around). 

The article in the newspaper, written by Bee Wilson goes on to say that we are once again living in an environment where ordinary food, which should be something reliable and sustaining, has come to feel noxious. Unlike the Victorians, we do not fear that our coffee is fake so much as that our entire pattern of eating may be bad for us, in ways that we can’t fully identify. One of the things that make the new wave of wellness cookbooks so appealing is that they assure the reader that they offer a new way of eating that comes without any fear or guilt.

Clean eating, whether it is called that or not, is perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional response to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a dream of purity in a toxic world. To walk into a modern western supermarket is to be greeted by aisle upon aisle of salty, oily snacks and sugary cereals, of “bread” that has been neither proved nor fermented, of cheap, sweetened drinks and meat from animals kept in inhumane conditions. The food industry is in a bit of a copper coloured pickle at the moment and it looks as though washing the soil from vegetables might not be enough to make them “clean”

Top Vegetables in Ireland

What do we buy in the fresh fruit and veg isles?

Bananas are the most popular shop bought fruit; a large supermarket research has shown. We collectively buy more than 700 million of them a year.

Tesco localized shopping habits even more too. Bananas were the second most popular fruit and veg in Clare, Donegal, Galway, Kildare and Mayo where people favoured berries ahead of the yellow fruit.

The data was collected over a 12 month period.

Cauliflower and kale are the least popular across the country. Dublin bought into the trendy vegetables more than any other county, especially with the avocados and kale.

Sligo shoppers buy a larger proportion of chillies and fresh herbs than the rest of the country. Kerry shoppers buy the most cucumbers.

Berries, sweet potatoes and oranges are favoured by Donegal shoppers and potatoes and swedes are the most popular foods to be bought in Offaly. Cavan shoppers buy a more apples than the rest of the country.

Sligo cooks clearly enjoy adding some spice to home cooking buying a larger proportion of chillies and fresh herbs than the rest of the country, while cool Kerry shoppers buy the most cucumbers.

Donegal shoppers are displaying a sweet tooth by buying a larger proportion of berries, oranges and sweet potato.