The great British media has heard the latest research on how much fruit and veg we should all be eating for our health (if you believe the research, given the obvious difficulties of investigating the link between diet and health, such as that people might tell the researchers what they think they ought to be doing, or that levels of fruit and vegetable consumption might be associated with other lifestyle factors that also influence health). The media has heard it, and doesn't like it. Are They Having a Laugh? demands Victoria Lambert in the Torygraph, while Zoe Williams in the Grauniad seems to believe that the increase in recommended intake is a plot against the poor.
I don't think the official guidelines are being raised, or at least not according to the BBC. Somebody somewhere in Whitehall has presumably worked out that when most people are failing to meet the standard already set for them, setting an even more demanding target is likely to be counter-productive. Already I can see the eyes of many of my nearest and dearest glaze over at yet another message from the government about what we ought or ought not to be doing, to ensure that we live well into our old age to be a burden on the State.
The BBC news report did make eating five portions of fruit and vegetables in a single day look curiously difficult and off-putting. Fruit was represented by a plate containing a banana, which is an inherently ludicrous form of food as demonstrated by that disastrous photograph of David Miliband, and a giant orange, unpeeled. Vegetables were represented by a second plate of raw and apparently unrelated items, that didn't immediately suggest anything you could cook out of them, but looked like the ingredients in some bizarre cookery challenge, in which contestants had to make a meal out of a cabbage, some custard powder, a tin of baked beans, and some porridge oats. Either that, or they conjured up dispiriting visions of munching one's way through endless piles of carrot sticks.
If the BBC wanted to help the cause of the nation's diet-related health, in its role as State broadcaster, instead of carping from the sidelines like the broadsheets, maybe it could have approached the vegetable question from the other end, and shown us some food we might actually wanted to eat, before surprising us with how many vegetables it contained. All around the world, and for most of human history, people have eaten and are eating vegetables. Many of them are exclusively vegetarian, and for the others the vegetables are what makes the expensive meat go further.
For example, I don't remember the BBC's plate of veg including an onion, and yet it is practically impossible to make any sort of meat sauce or stew without starting with some onions. They are nourishing and comparatively cheap. Nor did the BBC mention that pulses are vegetables, in its let's-get-a-cheap-laugh-at-the-impossibility-of-eating-all-those-veg feature. So, take chilli con carne, you have onion, tomato, beans, put in a red pepper and you're already up to four portions of vegetables. A very basic tomato sauce, onions, tomato, celery, gets you up to three before you start doing anything with it. We had a shepherd's pie last night, onion, peas, carrots, potato. I suppose the health police have decided that potatoes don't count as vegetables because otherwise people would claim that chips and crisps counted as part of their five a day, but that's nonsense. They contain vitamins and fibre, especially if you eat the skins, and if they contain some calories, well, you need to get some of those from somewhere. Better a potato than white bread, probably.
We'll be eating up some two-for-five-pounds Waitrose ham for lunch, with salad, as it's a warm day. That's lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and I've got a box of red grapes for pudding. Purple food is good for you, it's the anthocyanins. So that's four portions of fruit and veg sorted, and I could easily have added olives, or spring onions. Later in the week we'll be having a leek and mushroom flan, that's two vegetables, plus salad, another two or three. It is really not that difficult to consume three or four of your five a day at either lunch or supper, or to have fruit of some sort at breakfast, if only dried in muesli. It would be nice if the media would stop mocking and hand wringing, and adopt a slightly more can-do attitude.
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