Rugosa friulana

There seems to be a lot of focus in the media this week about what British people eat – and why it’s making them fat. This morning’s shocker is that BBQs make you fat – if you insist on chowing down on sausages, burgers and mayonnaise-laden potato salad.

Yesterday I read that you’d have a similar problem with your Chinese take-away if you ate nothing but Sweet & Sour Chicken Balls, Prawn Crackers and Crispy Duck.

In this second article, the commenter points out that the Chinese actually have a long history of a food culture that backs balanced meals and healthy eating. The fact that, when presented with a menu of tasty treats, British people will mostly pounce on the fattiest, sweetest and most calorie-dense foods rather than anything with vegetables in it is entirely down to us.

Which got me wondering, why is that so? Why, when we are presented with information on healthy choices at every turn, are our diets so rarely balanced? Pete spent the weekend with a collection of photographers on a photography workshop, and the food choices he was faced with at their hotel made healthy eating very difficult. He noticed that for one of the group the only meals that didn’t involve chips were breakfasts. Where Western diets are introduced to countries like China, obesity rates soar – so it’s not an entirely cultural thing.

No doubt there are many factors involved. Many people blame the constant bombardment of advertisements that encourage us to eat unhealthy foods and fail to warn of us of the dangers. Others comment on the fact that, since the end of WW2, we have become increasingly distanced from our food production, to the point where there are children who don’t know that milk comes from cows and can’t recognise a potato in its natural state. There are no doubt people from other countries that sneer that British food was pretty rubbish to begin with.

I’ve seen it in action myself. In the office where I last worked, pastries and fruit were laid on for elevenses. The pastries usually disappeared first, although there were plenty of people who snaffled fruit. Eventually doughnuts were banned – not because the workforce was getting noticeably heavier (which it was) but because the jam stained the carpet. In the early days they provided Jaffa cakes as well, but gave that up because the staff ate through an entire month’s supply in a couple of days.

I have a lovely garden that produces fruit and vegetables. The courgettes shown above (Rugosa friulana) are unusual-looking, but very tasty. I have two plants; I harvested that selection on one day. Even with this bounty, Pete and I find it harder to incorporate fresh fruit and veg into our diet that carbs and meat.

It’s not that we don’t buy the stuff – we just don’t eat it. According to Love Food Hate Waste, we throw away nearly £3 billion worth of perfectly good fruit and vegetables each year.

Why are we, as a nation, so rubbish at this?